Scandal-plagued Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas isn’t doing himself any favors. Starting next term, one of his four new law clerks will be Crystal Clanton, a recently-minted law school graduate who was pushed out of a conservative youth organization in 2017 after a reporter uncovered virulently racist texts she sent to another employee.

The Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University, from which Clanton graduated in 2022 and which has cultivated extensive ties with the Supreme Court’s conservative justices, announced the hire on Friday.

The racist comments stem from Clanton’s work for the conservative youth organization Turning Point USA, where she served as national field director until the summer of 2017. At the end of that year, New Yorker investigative reporter Jane Mayer unearthed a text from Clanton to another TPUSA employee in which Clanton wrote, “I HATE BLACK PEOPLE. Like fuck them all . . . I hate blacks. End of story.” (At the time, Clanton told the magazine that she had “no recollection of these messages and they do not reflect what I believe or who I am and the same was true when I was a teenager.” Clanton would have been 20 when the texts were sent.)

Mayer also reported that, on one Martin Luther King Jr. Day during her tenure, Clanton fired a woman who claimed to be the organization’s only Black employee. On this year’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day, it’s worth noting, Turning Point founder and CEO Charlie Kirk, who has been cozying up to white nationalists of late, announced a campaign to discredit the “mythical sainthood” of MLK.

Clanton resigned from the organization—Kirk told Mayer that TPUSA “assessed the situation and took decisive action within 72 hours of being made aware of the issue”—but she soon found new work assisting Thomas’s wife, Ginni Thomas, a conservative activist who would later play an essential behind-the-scenes role in the attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

Vanity Fair’s Caleb Ecarma, who reported on Clanton’s hire at the time for Mediaite, also uncovered additional racist remarks Clanton had made to TPUSA staffers, which included one Snapchat photo of a man who appeared to be Arab with the caption, “Just thinking about ways to do another 9/11.”

Clanton’s closeness to the Thomas family received additional scrutiny after she was hired to clerk for Judge William H. Pryor Jr., a conservative judge who frequently sends clerks to the Supreme Court and was once on Donald Trump’s shortlist of SCOTUS picks. In response, seven members of Congress demanded an investigation into Clanton’s hiring, writing that her clerkship threatened “to undermine the public’s faith in the judiciary seriously” and called into question Pryor’s ability to rule impartially “in cases where race, religion or national origin plays a role.” 

The federal appeals court appointed to look into the matter ultimately cleared Pryor—and a lower court judge for whom Clanton also clerked—of wrongdoing, after Pryor claimed he’d learned that Clanton had been the victim of a smear campaign. In its ruling, the court said it did not need to consider “whether the information the [judges] elicited and received regarding their hiring decisions was accurate.”

That prompted a rebuke from then-House Judiciary Chair Jerrold Nadler, who penned a letter arguing that the decision ignored a well-documented record of Clanton’s bigotry and that the court’s refusal to investigate the substance of the allegations went against “the judicial misconduct statute’s core purposes of uncovering the truth.”

The appeals court’s investigation did, however, reveal some new details about Clanton’s relationship with the Thomases, courtesy of a letter Thomas submitted to the court that a reporter for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution uncovered. According to Thomas, Clanton lived with the couple “for almost a year” after “her controversial and public departure from Turning Point USA.” His wife, Thomas wrote, “informed me of the horrible way in which she had been treated” at the conservative organization.

According to the letter, Thomas wrote a law school recommendation for Clanton. He also recommended her to Pryor for the clerkship, telling the judge that the allegations in Mayer’s reporting were “grossly out of character and unfounded.”

“I know Crystal Clanton, and I know bigotry,” Thomas wrote. “Bigotry is antithetical to her nature and character.”

Thomas concluded the letter by declaring his “intention to consider her for a clerkship should she perform as I expect and excel in her clerkships.”

“I had high expectations for her on the Eleventh Circuit,” Judge Pryor said, according to Scalia Law’s announcement of Clanton’s new clerkship. “And she exceeded those expectations. Crystal is an outstanding law clerk.”