Here is a brief excerpt from an article by Jane Mayer and published in The New Yorker (February 29, 2024). To read the complete article, check out others, and obtain subscription information, please click here.

Credit: Philip Montgomery

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Crystal Clanton became notorious for sending outlandishly racist texts. Now she’s been hired to work for the Justice—and a dubious new story has surfaced to clear her name.

Last week, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas shocked the legal community when the news broke that one of his new law clerks will be Crystal Clanton—who became notorious in 2015 for apparently sending texts that said, “I HATE BLACK PEOPLE. Like fuck them all . . . I hate blacks. End of story.” For most young lawyers, sending such a text would indeed have been the “end of story.” Instead, Clanton is on the cusp of clinching one of the most coveted prizes in the American legal system. In the past several years, as Clanton has risen through the ranks of conservative legal circles, the story of her alleged racist outburst has been curiously transformed into a tale of victimhood. The new narrative is that Clanton was somehow framed by an unnamed enemy who—for motives that remain unclear—fabricated the racist texts to defame her.

This new account has been greeted with suspicion by many. If the revised story is a lie, then it threatens to implicate not just Justice Thomas, who has endorsed it, but several lower-court federal judges and the leader of a major political group aligned with former President Donald Trump. Indeed, the whole affair may prove one of the most shopworn axioms of political reporting—that the coverup is worse than the crime.

When the vile texts were sent, Clanton was the second-in-command and field director of the hard-right youth group Turning Point USA. The organization, a nonprofit advocacy group closely allied with Donald Trump’s Presidential aspirations in 2024, is well known for poisonous rhetoric: its leader, Charlie Kirk, has recently denigrated Martin Luther King, Jr., as “awful,” questioned whether Black pilots are capable of flying planes, and argued that televised public executions, perhaps by guillotine, should be held in America, with young people watching. Yet, even within Turning Point, colleagues were so shocked by the bluntness of Clanton’s alleged texts that they preserved screenshots of the messages, which were shared in 2017 with The New Yorker. At the time, multiple Turning Point employees told me that Clanton was the author of the messages.

In 2017, Clanton told me, via e-mail, that she didn’t recall sending the texts, and that they seemed out of character. But when she was asked directly if she denied sending them she declined to answer. The screenshots of the messages bore her cell-phone number. Another former Turning Point employee, John Ryan O’Rourke, who was the recipient of the texts, said at the time that he preferred not to discuss them. Several other Turning Point colleagues had also seen and circulated the screenshots. And there was more evidence. In addition to the racist comments, the screenshots show Clanton asking, “Can I come to Starbucks in 5?”; she showed up at one, on cue, a few minutes later. (In 2018, the online platform Mediaite revealed another offensive statement by Clanton, sent on Snapchat. The post featured a photograph of a man who appeared to be Arab, accompanied by a caption that she had added: “Just thinking about ways to do another 9/11.”)

In 2017, Clanton told me that she had resigned from Turning Point. Kirk, her boss at the time, made her departure sound less voluntary. In an e-mail, he told me that, after he learned of the texts, “Turning Point assessed the situation and took decisive action within 72 hours.” Four years later, a spokesman for Turning Point, Andrew Kolvet, confirmed the same set of facts to Ruth Marcus, a columnist for the Washington Post, telling her that Clanton was “terminated from Turning Point after the discovery of problematic texts.”

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Here is a direct link to the complete article.

Jane Mayer has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1995. The magazine’s chief Washington correspondent, she covers politics, culture, and national security. Previously, she worked at the Wall Street Journal, where she covered the bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, the Gulf War, and the fall of the Berlin Wall. In 1984, she became the paper’s first female White House correspondent. She is the author of four best-selling books, including “Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right,” which the Times named as one of the ten best books of 2016, and which began as a 2010 New Yorker piece about the Koch brothers’ deep influence on American politics. She also wrote the 2008 Times best-seller “The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals,” a finalist for the National Book Award, which was based on her New Yorker articles and was named one of the top ten works of journalism of the decade by N.Y.U.’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, and one of the ten best books of the year by the Times. She is a co-author, with Jill Abramson, of “Strange Justice,” also a finalist for the National Book Award, and, with Doyle McManus, of “Landslide: The Unmaking of the President, 1984-1988.”

In 2009, Mayer was chosen as Princeton University’s Ferris Professor of Journalism. Her numerous honors include the George Polk Award, the John Chancellor Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Goldsmith Book Prize, the Edward Weintal Prize, the Ridenhour Prize, two Helen Bernstein Book Awards for Excellence in Journalism, the J. Anthony Lukas Prize, the Hillman Prize, the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, the James Aronson Award for social-justice journalism, the Toner Prize for political reporting, the I. F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence, the Frances Perkins Intelligence and Courage Award, the Nellie Bly Award for Investigative Reporting, the Mirror Award for the “single best article” on the media in 2020, and, most recently, the First Amendment Award from the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.

Mayer has served as a visiting fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy. In 2022, she was inducted into the Society of Professional Journalists’ Hall of Fame. She is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.