It’s time for an update on Above the Law’s favorite famous-for-the-wrong-reasons attorney: Crystal Clanton!
Clanton is, on paper, exactly the kind of young lawyer who is supposed to represent the best of the profession. She landed a series of extraordinarily prestigious clerkships: first with Judge Corey Maze of the Northern District of Alabama, then with Eleventh Circuit Judge William Pryor, and ultimately with Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. That’s a golden ticket path most law students would kill for.
The only problem is, Clanton was very famously fired from the far-right Turning Point USA when a racist text she sent coworkers became public.
That’s right, Clanton used to work at conservative student group Turning Point USA. But in 2017, reports surfaced that she texted coworkers, “I HATE BLACK PEOPLE. Like fuck them all . . . I hate blacks. End of story.” Despite this notoriety, this was far from the end of Clanton’s story. She bounced back with a job with Ginni Thomas (Clarence’s wife), even moving in with the Thomases for a time. She then was admitted to George Mason University’s ASS Law, then onto those clerkships (and, of course, the formal investigation for hiring someone with such a questionable reputation, which ultimately found there was no misconduct on the part of the judges who hired Clanton).
Now that Clanton’s Supreme Court clerkship with Justice Thomas has wrapped up, curiosity has turned to the obvious question: where does someone like this land next?
David Lat found the answer, and it is exactly what you’d expect.
Crystal Clanton is now an attorney at the America First Legal Foundation (AFL), the aggressively partisan conservative nonprofit law firm co-founded in 2021 by Gene Hamilton and Stephen Miller shortly after the end of the first Trump administration. Hamilton is back at AFL after a six-month White House stint and serves as its president. Miller, meanwhile, has returned to the White House (at least for now), where he continues his specialty of turning President Trump’s worst impulses into reality.
AFL prides itself on being combative, provocative, and unapologetically ideological. As Lat noted, it’s an organization that “delights in triggering or trolling the left.” And one of the cases that Clanton has already appeared in on behalf of AFL is an anti-trans rights case, because of course.
The trajectory here is depressingly coherent. Fired for offensive texts. Rehired into the Thomas orbit. Ushered through elite clerkships. Landed at an outfit built by the architects of some of the most punitive immigration and civil rights rollbacks of the Trump era.
Clanton’s career is a reminder that, in some corners of the conservative legal movement, far from being a dealbreaker, a racist scandal can actually be a résumé enhancer.
Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, host of The Jabot podcast, and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter @Kathryn1 or Mastodon @Kathryn1@mastodon.social.
The post Attorney Infamous For Texting ‘I HATE BLACK PEOPLE’ Lands At Stephen Miller–Linked Law Shop, Because Of Course She Did appeared first on Above the Law.