'Major national impact': Dozens of federal judges didn’t disclose free luxury trips

01 May 2024

In recent years, Supreme Court Associate Justice Clarence Thomas has been in hot water over his failure to disclose luxury junkets paid for by far-right billionaire donors. But a new report shows that federal judges across the country are effectively doing the same thing, with little to no accountability.

A Wednesday report by National Public Radio (NPR) found that dozens of federal district and circuit court judges — appointed by both Democratic and Republican presidents — are routinely failing to file timely financial disclosure reports as required by law. Ethics experts say that the timely filing of financial disclosure reports is important for plaintiffs and civil defendants, who may want to request a judge recuse themselves if they see that judge attended an event paid for by a special interest group with a case before the court. Those disclosure forms are then posted to every federal court's website.

"It also matters to the public, even if someone never shows up in a courtroom, to believe in the integrity of our judiciary and to trust in the decisions that are issued by judges," University of Houston Law Center professor Renee Knake Jefferson told NPR. "Having disclosures of judicial financial interests goes directly to the public having confidence in the outcomes of the decisions — that they are free of any bias or influence."

"The public has a right to know whether or not its top legal officials have any potential conflicts going into hearing cases," said Gabe Roth of the nonprofit group Fix the Court. "Sometimes they're small bore, but a lot of the times they have major national impact."

NPR's Tom Dreisbach and Carrie Johnson reported that despite judges being expected to file a public report disclosing any events they attended in which their costs of participation were covered by an outside entity, many jurists have failed to do so for months or even years.

"That information loses most of its value if it's a year and a half later," said Kedric Payne, who is the senior director of ethics at the anti-corruption watchdog group Campaign Legal Center. "It's just too distant from the potential conflict of interest."

One of the more notable members of the federal judiciary who failed to file timely disclosure reports is U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon of the Southern District of Florida, whom former President Donald Trump appointed to the bench in 2020. Cannon — who is overseeing Department of Justice special counsel Jack Smith's prosecution of Trump in the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case — attended several seminars at a luxury resort in Montana, but didn't post her disclosure forms online until NPR's inquiry. Clerk Angela Noble attributed the late disclosure to "technical issues."

"Any omissions to the website are completely inadvertent," Noble said.

Many of the seminars judges attend are funded by well-heeled far-right groups with extreme ideological agendas. NPR reported that "dozens" of federal judges attended a 2022 event at George Mason University's Antonin Scalia Law School — named for the Ronald Reagan-appointed Supreme Court justice — featuring a speech by European Parliament member Gunnar Beck. Beck is with the anti-immigrant Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany, or AfD) party, which has called for the mass deportation of migrants and refugees.

Millions of Germans have been protesting AfD for months, criticizing the party as a rebirth of the Nazi movement. NPR noted that Beck posted photos of Black families in a social media post he has since deleted, condemning the "Afrikanisierung" ("Africanization") of Germany. He also lamented that Germany's welcoming of immigrants means the country "has no future as an industrial and cultural nation, but it does have a future as a welfare office."

Click here to read NPR's full report.

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