Over sixteen years of federal financial disclosure forms, Chief Justice John Roberts mischaracterized more than twenty million dollars in household income from law firms appearing before the Supreme Court. He concealed his wife’s equity stake in her employer for three consecutive years. He failed to recuse from more than five hundred cases argued at the Supreme Court by law firms that had paid his household millions in commissions, and from at least three additional cases in which he personally held stock in a party. He architected the Court’s first ethics code and designed it to be unenforceable. This is a course of conduct stretching across two decades, connected by a single through-line: the belief that the rules that apply to every other federal judge do not apply to him.

The governing standard is 28 U.S.C. § 455, which applies to every federal judge including Supreme Court justices. Three of its subsections matter here, and a judge only needs one of them to trigger the recusal obligation. Roberts triggers all three.

Subsection (a) says a judge “shall disqualify himself in any proceeding in which his impartiality might reasonably be questioned.” This is the appearance standard, and it does not require actual bias. It requires only that a reasonable person knowing the facts would question the judge’s impartiality.

Bennett Gershman, a legal ethics professor at Pace Law School, reviewed the Roberts household arrangement in 2022 at the request of a whistleblower. His analysis applies all three. A law firm that paid the judge’s household hundreds of thousands of dollars in commission has an ongoing commercial relationship with the spouse, and that spouse has an interest, whether measured as past compensation, ongoing business relationship, or future commissions, that could be substantially affected by the judge’s rulings in cases the firm argues. Even under the narrowest reading of “financial interest,” a reasonable person knowing that a law firm had paid Jane Roberts hundreds of thousands of dollars in commissions would question John Roberts’s impartiality in a case the firm argued before him.

Roberts’s defenders have a single counter, and they cite it often. The Judicial Conference’s 2009 Advisory Opinion №107 says recusal is not automatically required merely because a spouse worked as a recruiter for a firm with business before the court. But the same opinion says recusal may be required where the relationship is “substantial and ongoing.” $10.3 million in documented commissions over seven years, with clients including multiple firms that appear before the Court multiple times per term, meets any reasonable definition of substantial and ongoing…

Each year the Chief Justice signs a federal financial disclosure form required of every Article III judge under the Ethics in Government Act, and each year for more than a decade, the form described his wife’s compensation as salary. The characterization was false. Jane Roberts earns commission, paid per placement, originating with the law firms that hire her candidates, and commission income and salary income are different categories of earnings governed by different tax treatment and different disclosure rules.

Gershman’s memorandum addresses this directly. Characterizing Mrs. Roberts’s commissions as salary, he wrote, is not merely factually incorrect. It is incorrect as a matter of law. Richard Painter, chief White House ethics lawyer under George W. Bush and the man who prepared Roberts for his confirmation hearings, put it more bluntly. The Chief Justice “fudged the details,” Painter wrote in 2023, “misleadingly describing his wife’s earnings as salary.” Even that is generous. Painter is a Republican ethics lawyer protecting a Republican institution. “Fudged” is what you say when you don’t want to say “lied.” Roberts has been knowingly lying on federal forms for more than a decade to profit from his position on the Supreme Court.

The throbbing tell here is the author citing Richard Painter, who has a long Ethics Alarms dossier. He is the same supposedly conservative ethics expert who advocated impeaching Donald Trump before he took the oath of office in 2017. He killed the best legal ethics site on the web by swamping it in his anti-Trump rants.

The headline of this thing is, “The Chief Justice and His Wife Took $20 Million From Firms He Rules On. I’m Filing for His Disbarment Today.” That reads like a typical Axis deceitful headline; no wonder PBS and NPR like Armitage.

The “whistleblowers” allege that Roberts’ wife has a “financial interest” in the law firms she does business with which Roberts failed to disclose.  A “financial interest” is an ownership interest in an entity. Being paid by a law firm for services rendered…as I am, frequently…does not give me an ownership interest, or, as a consequence, a financial interest. But teh claim against Roberts is even more strained: the essay holds that what Roberts’ wife is paid for her work constitutes the Chief Justice’s financial interest.

Moreover, Judicial Opinion No. 107 addresses “Disqualification Based on Spouse’s Business Relationships,” and says “As a general proposition, the fact that the spouse or the spouse’s business has a business relationship with an entity that appears in an unrelated proceeding before the judge usually does not require the judge’s recusal.” Among the examples cited, it adds,

“The Committee has also advised that a judge whose spouse owned and operated a legal or executive recruitment business need not recuse merely because a law firm appearing before the judge engaged the judge’s spouse, either currently or in the past, to recruit an additional lawyer, or because the spouse made preliminary overtures to recruit attorneys but no contract or employment negotiations resulted.” 

Even the legal ethics association membership (that includes me), which I would say is at least 80% progressive/Democrat and 50% Trump Deranged, found this attack on Roberts to be balderdash.