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Comment by kyrra | Hacker News Reader

> Vasisht’s Venmo account ... show that he received seven payments in November and December 2019 from lawyers who previously served as Thomas legal clerks. The amount of the payments is not disclosed, but the purpose of each payment is listed as either “Christmas party”, “Thomas Christmas Party”, “CT Christmas Party” or “CT Xmas party”, in an apparent reference to the justice’s initials.

So it more seems to be that he invited former clerks to a Christmas party. It's also not clear if Thomas ever saw any of the money.

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The US government has fallen so far from the days of Jimmy Carter selling his peanut farm to avoid any conflict of interest to people being okay with aids to supreme court justices being given envelopes full of money.

Decades of partisan politics really does have cool effects on a nation state

People don't pay to attend someone's private Christmas party if the access doesn't have monetary value.

Or they just want to compromise him.

Or they're space aliens whose language just happens to look like this but means something totally different. Or or or. Signals of corruption/fraud/crime should lead to proper investigation, not immediate conviction, but proper investigation nonetheless which then could lead to conviction. But this game of "or it could be just a joke bro" is absurd. It could be, but also it usually isn't.

There's nothing to convict him of. There's no law against the Supreme Court members taking gifts from people with business before the court. There probably ought to be, but there isn't.

They are required to file forms for the gifts they get, and Thomas might be convicted of failing to do that. The punishment is a small fine. Which could well be paid for him via Venmo.(And it would likely be settled out of court.)

Trial in the court of public opinion is really the only trial this will ever get. That's not how I would run things, but then, if I were running things, we wouldn't have gotten into this position.

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