Some Supreme Court justices have “used a loophole” to avoid financial disclosures “that could be important to litigants trying to assess whether a justice has a conflict of interest,” according to Joyce Vance, the former U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Alabama.
Vance made the claim on her Substack blog, in which she questioned the lack of an outside ethics body for the Supreme Court comparable with the Office of Congressional Ethics.
On June 7 financial disclosures for eight of the nine Supreme Court justices, with Justice Samuel Alito excluded, over the past year were made public. Justice Clarence Thomas used the document to disclose two trips funded by a conservative billionaire from 2019—to Bali in Indonesia and a private club in California—which were revealed by a ProPublica investigation. Thomas insisted these trips had been “inadvertently admitted” from his 2019 financial declaration.