Congress Has Known About John Roberts’s Wife’s Shady Financial Dealings for Months

Jane Roberts, the wife of Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, has allegedly been paid more than $10 million by an array of high-class law firms; at least one of these firms argued a case before her husband in the Supreme Court, after paying her hundreds of thousands of dollars. And the cherry on top is that Congress has known about these allegations for months.

The Senate Judiciary Committee has come under immense pressure to do something, anything, in the face of numerous revelations of how crooked America’s Supreme Court is. Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch have both been reported to have participated in shady dealings; frustration mounted as Roberts has refused to cooperate with the Senate Judiciary Committee in responding to the troubling allegations.

And now it’s becoming more and more clear why: It’s a small club, and Roberts has no problem being part of it.

Business Insider reports that two years after Roberts ascended to lead the court in 2005, his wife, Jane, pivoted from an illustrious career as a lawyer to become a legal recruiter, matching lawyers up to elite corporations and firms. Between 2007 and 2014, Jane Roberts cashed in $10.3 million in commissions in her newfound career. And the complaint pressing forward the revelations was filed in December; reporting on Jane Roberts’s ethically questionable career vis-à-vis her husband’s position had been published even back in January.

The allegations come from Jane Roberts’s old colleague Kendal B. Price, who worked at the same recruiting firm she did. In Price’s complaint, he explains that a partner at the firm told him Jane Roberts was “the highest earning recruiter in the entire company ‘by a wide margin.’” While she surely may be highly qualified, the eye-popping numbers cause even more concern around the question of how Supreme Court justices and their families enrich themselves—particularly at the expense of judicial responsibility, given that some of the firms Jane Roberts profited from would then appear in front of the court led by her husband.

“She restructured her career to benefit from his [John Roberts’s] position,” Price wrote in an affidavit. “I believe that at least some of her remarkable success as a recruiter has come because of her spouse’s position.”

The details of exactly how much Jane Roberts has made follows the stream of revelations related to other conservative justices on the court. Justice Thomas has received secret and lavish gifts for decades from Nazi memorabilia–collecting billionaire and GOP donor Harlan Crow, including luxurious island-hopping excursions on superyachts and even a secret deal in which Crow bought Thomas family property and proceeded to upgrade it while Thomas’s mother still lived in it.

Last week, it was revealed that Justice Neil Gorsuch successfully sold a 40-acre property that he had been trying to sell for two years to an undisclosed buyer; the buyer of the nearly $2 million Colorado ranch was the CEO of a law firm that has since had 22 cases with business before the court.

Amid all this, Senate Judiciary Committee Dick Durbin has continued to remain under fire. He has spent weeks now kindly passing the buck to Justice Roberts to lead reform on ethical standards for the court; he has seemingly done so while knowing that Roberts himself is implicated in potential ethics violations. Meanwhile Durbin has refused to eliminate a blue slip rule that has prevented Democrats from confirming more judges—especially while Senator Dianne Feinstein remains absent.

In the face of corruption, elected officials can either respond appropriately or maintain false hope in the system that created such corruption in the first place. The more Durbin and his colleagues continue to do the latter, the more they actively allow and even encourage further corruption.

Republicans are calling for more and more guns, and scrambling to ban abortion every place they can. It’s as if someone gave them a shovel and they’re trying to dig to the other side of the earth. Their policies are bad on principle, but they’re not looking too hot electorally either. Consider the latest Fox poll:

An astonishingly large number of people in this country want basic gun safety reform: background checks, increasing the legal age to buy guns to 21, enforcing (not repealing) existing gun laws. But the latest Fox poll shows 80 percent—80 percent—of people wanting to outright ban assault weapons.

Washington became the tenth state to do just that this week, by the way. “These weapons of war, assault weapons, have no reason other than mass murder,” Governor Jay Inslee said while signing the bills. “Their only purpose is to kill humans as rapidly as possible in large numbers.” It seems that most Americans tend to agree.

The numbers make it clear it’s not just blue states interested in gun control. Take a look at Tennessee, where thousands of people have taken to the streets demanding action against gun violence in the wake of a harrowing school shooting that left three children and three adults dead.

Michigan, meanwhile, which Trump won by the skin of his teeth in 2016, has swung to now be host to a Democratic trifecta that voted for Biden in 2020. Two weeks ago, in the aftermath of a deadly mass shooting at Michigan State University, Governor Gretchen Whitmer signed a slate of gun-related public safety bills, including universal background checks and safe storage laws.

On Friday, Colorado signed its own array of gun safety laws five months after a mass shooting left five people dead and another 25 injured at a gay nightclub. The measures include raising the buying age for guns to 21, establishing a three-day waiting period on purchases, strengthening red flag laws, and rolling back legal protections the gun industry has from being held liable for gun violence.

While Democrats have pursued and delivered on the outright will for more gun regulation, Republicans have spent their time tripping over themselves to bend their knees to the NRA and pledging: “We’re not gonna fix” mass shootings.

Beyond guns, abortion is proving to be just as motivating for voters to vote against Republicans.

In Wisconsin, another Trump-to-Biden state, voters recently flipped the state Supreme Court to liberal control for the first time in 15 years, in anticipation of protecting abortion rights and ameliorating the state’s absurdly gerrymandered districts.

In 2022, all six states with abortion on the ballot voted to affirm abortion rights: California, Vermont, Michigan, Montana, Kentucky, and Kansas.

On Thursday, proposed abortion bans in both Nebraska and South Carolina narrowly failed, as a small group of Republicans dissented, perhaps in awareness of how electorally noxious the bans are (if not perhaps even voting with their morals).

From red states to blue states, the politics of abortion and guns are simply not in Republicans’ favor; which is to say, fewer and fewer states may continue staying as red as they once were, and more and more states may trend bluer and bluer.

It’s been a week since Tucker Carlson hosted his last show on Fox News, and the aftermath has been pretty ugly.

Viewership of Carlson’s coveted prime-time slot has dropped precipitously since Fox announced Monday that they were parting ways with the anchor. Carlson was the network’s most popular star, bringing in millions of viewers, including among younger adults. Since his departure, viewers of his 8 p.m. time slot have dropped by half.

And the fast-waning number of viewers is affecting all of Fox News. Shows including Hannity and The Ingraham Angle have lost at least a third of viewers since Carlson left, according to Media Matters. Instead many people are switching to ultraconservative rival Newsmax.

It looks like Carlson’s unceremonious firing hasn’t been good for anyone. Carlson himself returned to social media Wednesday night with a weird, vague, and vaguely threatening video that looks like it was filmed in a sauna. As for Fox, it’s not confirmed why they let Carlson go, but no doubt there were some hopes that doing so would create more stability at the network, not less.

Fox is facing a host of legal cases. Having just settled with Dominion Voting Systems, the network is now dealing with a lawsuit from Smartmatic, which has said it will demand an on-air apology and retraction of the false claims that its electronic voting machines were used to rig the 2020 election.

Former Fox producer Abby Grossberg is also suing the network, alleging she was coerced into lying during the Dominion lawsuit, accusing the company and Carlson’s show in particular of having an openly sexist, toxic work environment.

Multiple advertisers fled Carlson’s show in recent years over his incendiary commentary. If Fox had been hoping to coax them back after his departure, their case for a return is weakening just as fast as their viewers leave. As Media Matters points out, this is incredibly dangerous. It’s anybody’s guess what Fox will do to try and win back viewers that apparently thrive on the kind of rhetoric and conspiracy theories Carlson pushed.

Ron DeSantis is showing an increasingly poor ability to handle the spotlight.

The Florida governor, who is expected to announce a presidential campaign, served as a lawyer at the notorious Guantánamo Bay prison in 2006. During a press conference Thursday at the Museum of Tolerance in Jerusalem, a reporter asked him about claims by a former detainee that DeSantis had attended his force-feeding session. DeSantis snapped immediately.

“No, no, all that’s BS,” DeSantis said. “No, totally, totally BS.”

“How would they know me?” he demanded, his voice rising. “Do you honestly believe that’s credible?”

DeSantis arrived at Guantánamo in the midst of mass hunger strikes among detainees protesting their treatment at the prison. DeSantis arrived as part of a team of military lawyers to help solve the situation.

The Florida governor himself admitted in a 2018 interview that he was one of the people who suggested force-feeding prisoners, something that many human rights organizations have decried as torture. DeSantis was also sent to Guantánamo the same year that three inmates died, the worst loss of life in the prison’s history. The official report was that the three men died by suicide, but many people, including a former Guantánamo guard, dispute that finding.

Two former detainees have called out DeSantis specifically for his role in the unbearable situation at Guantánamo. One, Abu Sarrah Ahmed Abdel Aziz, told The Washington Post he is “100 percent” certain he spoke to DeSantis multiple times. Abdel Aziz spoke fluent English and was trying to report mistreatment claims to JAG officers.

Abdel Aziz said he didn’t know DeSantis’s name at the time, but the then JAG promised to look into the complaints. But conditions got worse instead.

Another former inmate, Mansoor Adayfi, said he saw a photo of DeSantis on Twitter in 2021 and recognized the governor immediately. “It was a face I could never forget. I had seen that face for the first time in Guantanamo, in 2006—one of the camp’s darkest years when the authorities started violently breaking hunger strikes and three of my brothers were found dead in their cages,” Adayfi wrote in an essay for Al Jazeera.

Adayfi said he shared a photo of DeSantis with several other former inmates, and they all recognized him from Guantánamo. Adayfi vividly remembers DeSantis watching from behind a fence as he was force-fed, “smiling and laughing with other officers as I screamed in pain.”

DeSantis has largely avoided talking about his time at Guantánamo, but now that the national spotlight is on him, it’s going to keep coming up. And so far, it looks like he can’t handle that scrutiny.

Strict abortion bans died in the South Carolina and Nebraska state legislatures, a rare bit of good news in the Republican-led assault on reproductive rights. And in both states, Republican dissenters doomed the abortion bans.

The two bills would have banned abortion after six weeks, before many people even know they are pregnant, with few exceptions. Both measures failed to overcome a filibuster in the state Senates. Abortion is now still legal in South Carolina and Nebraska until 22 weeks, although both states have multiple restrictions, such as a mandatory 24-hour waiting period and biased counseling aimed at running out the clock.

In South Carolina, the only female senators—three Republicans, one Democrat, and one independent—led the filibuster. “Abortion laws have always been, each and every one of them, about control,” said Republican Sandy Senn. “And in the Senate, the males all have control. We the women have not asked for … nor do we want your protection. We don’t need it.”

She said the abortion ban “insulted” women, adding, “The only thing that we can do when you all, you men in the chamber, metaphorically keep slapping women by raising abortion again and again and again, is for us to slap you back with our words.”

The chamber ultimately voted 22–21 on Thursday to delay the bill until next year. The measure is unlikely to make it back to the floor: There are not enough days in the current legislative session for the House to re-pass it, and the Senate’s Republican majority leader has indicated they are unlikely to try and pass the bill again when it’s clear they don’t have the support.

The South Carolina measure was similar to a six-week trigger ban that went into effect after Roe v. Wade was overturned. The state Supreme Court blocked that law in January, and the new bill was an attempt to circumvent the ruling.

The Nebraska Senate also failed to overcome a filibuster on Thursday, with senators voting 32–15 to end debate on the bill—just one vote short. Two senators, Republican Merv Riepe and Democrat Justin Wayne, voted “present.” The two are considered swing votes should this bill be revived, as both say they are “pro-life.”

Wayne did not explain his vote, but Riepe, a former hospital administrator, had said he would only support the bill if it was amended to ban abortion at 12 weeks. He said the six-week window was too short, citing arguments from doctors he has known for decades, and warned that the measure was too extreme to be popular among voters.

Riepe is one of the few Republicans who is actually (sort of) paying attention to current abortion events. About two-thirds of Americans think abortion should be legal in all or most cases, according to the Pew Research Center. A new study from the center also shows that 43 percent of people who live in states where abortion is restricted think it should be easier for someone to access the procedure in the area where they live, compared to just 31 percent in 2019.

Abortion rights win elections. Every time an abortion-related issue has been on the ballot, the people vote in favor of protecting reproductive rights, not taking them away. It seems like at least a handful of Republicans are finally taking heed.