(Feb. 25) The New York Times Magazine just slandered a young judicial clerk without acknowledging she was cleared by an official judicial inquiry.
The smear of Crystal Clanton came in the course of a long hit piece the magazine did in the past week against Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife, Virginia. In the course of the article, the Times repeated a debunked report from the New Yorker that Clanton once wrote in a text: “I HATE BLACK PEOPLE. Like [expletive] them all. … I hate blacks. End of story.”
Only within parenthesis did the Times report that Justice Thomas “called the allegations under Clanton unfounded, helped her get a federal clerkship and wrote in a letter of support that he would consider her for a Supreme Court clerkship.” The impression was that Thomas had weirdly embraced a raging racist. The Times report outrageously left out the judicial inquiry that completely exonerated her. A news story by Bill Rankin of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, hardly an obscure source, tells the tale.
Several Democratic congressmen had demanded an investigation of 11th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Bill Pryor for hiring Clanton as a clerk, alleging in effect that Pryor grossly violated his judicial duty by hiring without due diligence a law clerk “with a history of nakedly racist and hateful conduct.” The congressmen’s complaint was referred for official review to Judge Debra Ann Livingston of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. Both Livingston and, later, that circuit’s unanimous judicial panel, absolved Pryor — and by obvious extension, absolved Clanton as well….
…. Clanton had not written the over-the-top racist message in question. Rather, she had been the victim of somebody trying to frame her. The executives at Turning Point USA confirmed this, with one of them vouching that Clanton treated everyone with “kindness, respect and fairness.”…. [The full column is here.]
