If Obese, Bribe Taking Black Clarence Thomas Wasn't a Supreme Court Justice He Would Have Already Been Charged With Felony Tax Fraud in Virginia.

If Clarence Thomas Wasn't a Supreme Court Justice He Would Have Already 
Been Charged With Felony Tax Fraud in Virginia.
Sufficient evidence exists in the public record.
Christopher Armitage
May 23, 2026

A note before we begin. Below you will find three things: an article laying 
out the case, a daily call to action built so your two minutes actually 
land, and a list of free resources from the Existentialist Republic team. 
Read the first, act on the second, take what is useful from the third.

For years, Clarence Thomas has been showered with gifts. Flights on a 
billionaire's private jet, lavish vacations cruising on his superyacht, 
summer stays at his Adirondacks compound, tuition for a child Thomas was 
raising, a quarter-million-dollar motorhome a wealthy friend paid for. A 
reasonable person could look at all of it and wonder whether a justice on 
that kind of receiving end might be inclined to side with the wealthy, 
powerful, and conservative interests that keep appearing before his Court.

At a certain point those items start looking less like "gifts" and more 
like items of value exchanged from powerful people aiming to pay for access 
and influence, which would count as income rather than gifts, and income 
belongs on a tax return. Thomas treated them as nothing, and no public 
record shows he ever reported a dollar of it. Under Virginia law, leaving 
income that size off a return, if it was done to cheat the state, is a 
felony. The evidence is already public, and he could be charged on Monday. 
First, the charge itself.

I ran this past attorneys I trust, and off the record their read matched 
the one that follows. The tax count is the one a serious lawyer wouldn't 
dismiss. Conviction is not the reason. The reason is that the threshold 
question, whether a chargeable case exists, is genuinely arguable. The 
elements are all present. Clarence Thomas lives in Fairfax County, 
Virginia, and files a Virginia resident income tax return every year. His 
salary clears the filing threshold many times over. And the gifts that 
should have appeared as income on those returns sit documented in the 
donor's own records, the ones Harlan Crow turned over only when the Senate 
subpoenaed him, rather than in anyone's speculation.

Virginia law makes it a felony to file a state income tax return with a 
false statement on it, made with intent to defraud the Commonwealth. The 
statute is Virginia Code section 58.1-348, it carries up to five years in 
prison per count, and the clock has not run out on the returns Thomas filed 
for tax years 2020 through 2024. That is the whole case, and unlike 
everything else, it is a case a county prosecutor in Virginia has the plain 
authority to bring.

Here is how it works. Federal tax law lets you receive a true gift without 
paying tax on it, but the Supreme Court itself decided in 1960, in a case 
called Commissioner v. Duberstein, that a transfer counts as a tax-free 
gift only when it springs from what the Court called detached and 
disinterested generosity. A politically active billionaire, whose business 
and ideological interests ride on what the Court decides, who entered 
Thomas's life only after Thomas reached the Court, and who kept the 
benefits flowing year after year for two decades, is a hard fit for 
detached and disinterested. A jury gets to decide that, not a defense 
lawyer and not a press release. And if even one private jet trip or one 
week at the Adirondacks compound in 2021 or 2022 fails that test, its value 
was taxable income, it belonged on the federal return, and through the way 
Virginia ties its tax code to the federal one, it belonged on the Virginia 
return too. Leaving it off, if a prosecutor can show he did it to defraud 
the Commonwealth, is the felony.

The intent, the hardest piece to prove, is the easiest to see in the 
record. Thomas disclosed a Crow flight once, in 1997, then stopped 
disclosing them for the next twenty years while he kept taking them, and 
when reporters caught individual trips he amended his forms only for the 
trips they had already proven and left the rest alone.

This is not a paperwork problem. The last time a sitting federal judge was 
caught filing false tax returns, the House impeached him for it by a vote 
of four hundred six to nothing. Harry Claiborne was convicted in 1984, sent 
to prison, and removed from the bench in 1986, and the members who voted to 
remove him, every single one of them, understood that a judge who lies on 
his tax returns has forfeited the trust the office requires. Nobody is 
going to impeach Clarence Thomas in this Senate, and that is exactly why 
the Virginia charge matters. The conduct already meets the bar that once 
cost a federal judge his seat. What is missing is not the seriousness. It 
is the will to treat him like the last judge who did it.

So why hasn't anyone charged him? Because the people with the power to do 
it watched what happens to prosecutors who go after the powerful. Fani 
Willis brought a case against Donald Trump in Georgia, and his allies spent 
eighteen months turning her personal life into the story, hauling her into 
hearings over a consensual relationship until an appeals court removed her 
and her entire office and the case collapsed. Georgia then passed a law, 
written with that case in mind, that lets defendants recover their legal 
costs whenever they get a prosecutor disqualified, which puts a bounty on 
exactly that kind of dig.

Letitia James got indicted in Virginia over a mortgage technicality worth 
nineteen thousand dollars, a case so thin that two separate grand juries 
refused to bring it, and she still has to keep showing up to defend 
herself. A prosecutor looking at Clarence Thomas sees all of that. They see 
a wealthy, connected target who will spend whatever it takes to make the 
prosecutor the subject instead of the crime, and they weigh the years of 
public money it would burn, the chance their own career ends, and the real 
possibility of losing a rigged fight anyway. Then they make the rational, 
lawyerly choice to spend their limited resources elsewhere.

So why Monday? Because there is nothing special about Monday. It is the 
next day the courthouse opens, the next day a prosecutor could walk this to 
a grand jury, the same as they could have on any working day for the last 
several years. For anyone else, this case would already be filed. A person 
who took an undisclosed quarter-million-dollar windfall and left it off 
their returns does not get years of patience; they get charged, and the 
date it happens is just whatever Monday comes next. The only thing standing 
between Clarence Thomas and that ordinary Monday is the seat he holds. And 
a seat on the Supreme Court is supposed to raise the standard a person is 
held to, not hand them an exemption from it. The barrier here was never 
legal. It is a decision to treat him differently, and that decision can be 
unmade on a Monday.

There are many good reasons not to pursue Trump, Thomas, and the people 
like them. The reasons are legitimate and the concerns reasonable. We need 
to do it anyway, because the alternative is a country with a class of 
people the law cannot touch, and those people now run it.

That a charge would be hard to win is a separate thing from whether it can 
be brought, and bringing it has a logic of its own. We show probable cause 
from the visible conduct, then argue that the visible conduct is itself 
evidence that compelled discovery will yield more. The donor admitted the 
gifts only when the Senate subpoenaed him. The trips surfaced years apart 
as reporters dug. Thomas amended his disclosures only for what 
investigators had already caught. Each fact, on its own, would mean little. 
Together they support a reasonable inference that what sits in public view 
understates what a grand jury would find.

We do not yet know what Thomas actually reported on his Virginia returns, 
because those returns are not public, and that gap is the point rather than 
a weakness. The public record alone establishes probable cause, and it 
represents only what journalists and a Senate committee could pry loose 
without subpoena power. Nobody has shaken the tree with the tools a real 
investigation provides, and we have solid reason to believe more falls out 
when someone does.

So this lands in one place, and it is not Washington D. C. It lands in 
Fairfax County, Virginia, where Thomas signs and files his return, and 
where elected officials hold the power to act on it. Three officials can 
move on this, and they can each do something different, so we ask each one 
for what they actually have the power to do.

Steve Descano, the Fairfax County Commonwealth's Attorney, holds the 
charging power. He can open the investigation, convene a grand jury, and 
bring the counts, and he happens to be a former federal prosecutor who 
spent six years in the Justice Department's Criminal Tax Division, which 
means the case would reach someone who already knows exactly how to read 
it. Governor Abigail Spanberger holds a different lever. Under Virginia 
Code section 2.2-511 she can formally request that the Attorney General 
take the case up, the request that unlocks state involvement beyond the 
county. Attorney General Jay Jones can act on that request if it comes, and 
short of that he can receive a referral and add the weight of his office to 
the call.

You can contact all three. Ask Descano to open the case before the clock on 
the 2020 return runs out this spring. Ask Spanberger to make the section 
2.2-511 request. Ask Jones to stand ready to take it up. Not one of them 
answers to the federal apparatus that has shielded Clarence Thomas for 
thirty years. There is no legal reason this cannot begin on Monday. There 
is only the decision to treat him like everyone else.

Here is where to reach them, by phone or by email. Steve Descano, Fairfax 
County Commonwealth's Attorney: phone 703-246-2776, email through the 
office contact form at fairfaxcounty. gov/commonwealthattorney, mailing 
address 4110 Chain Bridge Road, Suite 114, Fairfax, VA 22030. Governor 
Abigail Spanberger: phone 804-786-2211, email through the contact form at 
governor. virginia. gov/contact, mailing address P. O. Box 1475, Richmond, 
VA 23218. Attorney General Jay Jones: phone 804-786-2071, email 
mailoag@oag. state. va. us, mailing address 202 North Ninth Street, 
Richmond, VA 23219.

A call or an email takes two minutes, and you do not have to live in 
Virginia to send one. If you are a Virginia resident, say so, because a 
constituent's voice carries the most weight. Everyone else has every reason 
to write or call as someone who believes the law should apply to all. You 
can say or write something close to this: "My name is [name]. I'm asking 
the Commonwealth's Attorney to open a criminal investigation into whether 
Justice Clarence Thomas filed false Virginia income tax returns by failing 
to report years of income that he claimed as gifts. The evidence is public, 
the conduct falls within the five-year statute of limitations, and no one, 
however powerful, should be exempt from a law the rest of us have to 
follow. I'd like my message recorded as supporting that investigation. " 
For the Governor's office, swap in a request that she ask the Attorney 
General to take the case up under section 2.2-511. For the Attorney 
General's office, ask that he be ready to act if that request comes. Be 
brief and be polite. If you are a Virginian, give your town.

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