What A Day - Supremely Sus

Episode Date: April 26, 2023

There are growing calls for the Supreme Court to adopt stronger ethics rules. It follows revelations earlier this month that Justice Clarence Thomas failed to disclose gifts and lavish vacations paid by a major Republican donor, along with a new report from Politico involving a real estate deal between Justice Neil Gorsuch and a law firm that had business before the high court. Jay Willis, editor-in-chief of Balls & Strikes, joins us to discuss what’s being done to address the allegations.And in headlines: a Washington D.C. jury is deliberating seditious conspiracy charges against five members of the Proud Boys, the maker of Bud Light placed two executives on leave following backlash from its collaboration with a transgender influencer, and Ben of Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream has started a new cannabis venture.Show Notes:Balls & Strikes – https://ballsandstrikes.org/POLITICO: Law firm head bought Gorsuch-owned property – https://tinyurl.com/mwtnm5xhWhat A Day – YouTube – https://www.youtube.com/@whatadaypodcastCrooked Coffee is officially here. Our first blend, What A Morning, is available in medium and dark roasts. Wake up with your own bag at crooked.com/coffeeFollow us on Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/crookedmedia/For a transcript of this episode, please visit crooked.com/whataday

It's Wednesday, April 26th. I'm Priyanka Arabindi. And I'm Josie Duffy Rice. And this is What A Day, where as long as we avoid seeing the new trailer for Timothy Chalamet's Wonka, we can still pretend it isn't happening. Yeah, out of sight, out of mind, where I hope it stays forever. Yeah, it's the same way we avoid processing his relationship with you-know-who. We're not saying the name.

On today's show, the company that makes Bud Light suspended at least two executives amid anti-trans backlash over a recent collaboration. Plus, Ben from Ben & Jerry's has launched a line of cannabis products. The most predictable. Truly a natural next step. Yeah, truly the most predictable next step I've ever heard. But first, Politico reported Tuesday that days after being confirmed to the Supreme Court in 2017,

Justice Neil Gorsuch sold a 40-acre piece of property to the CEO of a law firm called Greenberg Trarig. That law firm has been involved in 22 cases before the court in the years since. Though Gorsuch did disclose the investment income, he did not identify the buyer, nor did he disclose the income as a real estate sale. Okay, double hmm. Yeah. We're not liking the sounds of this. It's not sounding great.

And this news comes on the heels of recent reporting about Justice Clarence Thomas' failure to disclose lavish vacations on private jets and yachts paid for by Harlan Crowe, a major Republican donor. Aren't enough hmms in the world for that. There are not enough. It's true. These reports have renewed calls for stronger disclosure requirements for Supreme Court justices, as well as calls for an investigation into any possible conflicts of interest that these justices or any others may not have revealed. On Tuesday, Senator Ed Markey became the first senator to call for Thomas' resignation, stating his reputation is unsalvageable.

Fact. Yeah. Here to talk to us more about this is Jay Willis, editor-in-chief of Balls and Strikes, a website that covers the Supreme Court. Welcome, Jay. Thank you so much for having me. I love to find new things to get upset about, and the Supreme Court is supplying more of those. Yeah.

So on that note, there's obviously been a lot of news about the Supreme Court justices crossing what we may have thought were ethical boundaries. But let's start with Justice Clarence Thomas. Can you kind of give us a quick summary of the issues he's faced lately in terms of disclosure? So there's been a lot of reporting the last couple weeks, mostly from ProPublica, about Clarence Thomas's relationship with Harlan Crowe. He's this right-wing mega-donor, real estate billionaire, most knock-off Batman villain name imaginable. And it turns out he's been flying Clarence Thomas around the world on private jets and for super yacht vacations for the better part of 20 years. Supreme Court ethics rules

require disclosures of gifts. These gifts were not disclosed. Clance Thomas has had like paperwork issues before. There was an incident maybe 10 years ago where he had to go back and correct some of his disclosures because he hadn't mentioned that his wife, Ginny Thomas, was paid six figures by the Heritage Foundation. Classic oopsie. Yeah. Who among us hasn't forgotten six figures of income, you know? It just slips through the cracks. There's also news of Justice Neil Gorsuch potentially violating some ethical boundaries. Can you detail what is happening there? Because now this is not only one justice, but there's another. So Neil Gorsuch is in the news for selling a $1.8 million fishing lodge in Colorado to the CEO of a giant law firm whose lawyers practice regularly before

the court. Timing details matter here. The house went under contract about a week after Gorsuch was confirmed in 2017 and after the house had been sitting on the market for two years. So the timing, like I'm going to be generous here, is weird. And the question of can they do that kind of gets tricky with Supreme Court justices, because the next question you have to ask is according to whom? So they're not subject to a binding ethics code. They are subject to disclosure laws, but they're pretty bare bones and they're pretty opaque. For example, technically, Neil Gorsuch owns this property with his friends through what's called an LLC, a limited liability company, which is the party that actually sold the cabin, the house. So

Gorsuch's disclosures do show that he sold his interest in the LLC, but that sort of obfuscates what's actually happening to anyone without like a terminal case of lawyer brain, which is that he's selling a house to like a big shot at a law firm. I'll also note here that like, this is the reason people use LLCs to mask the actual parties and interests in big transactions like this. So it seems like what you're saying is that there are technical ethical guidelines, but there are also kind of general moral guidelines that like we would expect them to follow and that there may be technically not doing something wrong, but all of us would have liked to know that this guy sort of been good information to have. That's right. Like defenses of Thomas and Gorsuch

typically come from conservative law professors or notably other big law partners. And they zero in on the technical reasons that maybe possibly a specific non-disclosure wasn't a violation of the relevant disclosure rules. But I think it's really important to take a step back and look at the big picture. We have a system in which very rich people keep finding ways to spend time with and give money to like-minded Supreme Court justices. And the details are only made public years later by journalists. Controversial opinion, the system is bad. Like there's a question of like, is Neil Gorsuch corrupt? I don't know, but I don't know because he has not been forthcoming about the information that I would need to make that judgment. Whether you blame him for hiding

the ball or the existing rules for allowing him to do so, the problem for me and for everybody else who's trying to decide if their Supreme Court is on the up and up, the problem is the same. You don't actually have to believe that Neil Gorsuch is like literally accepting six-figure bribes to understand that a quote-unquote disclosure system that doesn't actually reveal to the public relevant information like this, it's broken. It doesn't work. Even if nothing shady happened in this transaction, this system is a bribe waiting to happen. It is cartoonishly easy to buy access to a Supreme Court justice, and it's a pretty safe bet that if you cross your T's and dot your I's, no one's going to find out about it. So just to clarify for everybody,

are there existing guidelines for Supreme Court justices and are they enforced at all? Yeah. So they do have to make annual mandatory financial disclosures. But as you can see from this Gorsuch example, there are ways to sort of gloss over the details if it benefits you. For Clarence Thomas, he said afterwards that he had consulted with folks and determined that he didn't have to disclose those particular gifts. I'm very curious to hear who offered him that advice. Yeah, right. And what they left off their disclosures that prompted them to give him that advice. Also, to your point, it's like you should want to disclose.

You should find that to be part of your duty. Sure. Why not? If there is nothing to hide, there should also be no problem with disclosure. Now we're at kind of a crossroads. There's kind of like a talk about trying to hold these Supreme Court justices accountable. And now people are wondering, what does that look like? Is there anything the Senate Judiciary Committee can do? What are the options here in terms of holding justices accountable on the congressional side? Yeah, so the chair of the Judiciary Committee, Dick Durbin,

he has invited John Roberts to testify about this. And you might be asking, why not invite Clarence Thomas? He seems like the person with maybe the most relevant information to share about all of Clarence Thomas's corruption. But Durbin said last week that he didn't ask Thomas because he assumed Thomas would ignore the invitation, that he wouldn't show up. I just fundamentally don't understand that. In my view, if Clarence Thomas refuses to leave his billionaire buddy's yacht for long enough to testify before the Senate about Supreme Court corruptions, that is the story. Like, I don't know why we are preemptively rewarding Thomas for his presumed lawlessness. So we've heard Democrats

calling for Chief Justice John Roberts himself to launch an investigation into Justice Thomas. I think you, in particular, have had some strong feelings about that. Do you want to talk to us a little bit about who's calling for that and what that looks like? So Chief Justice Roberts also famously, you know, called for the investigation into the Supreme Court leak last year, which yielded like a 20 page report that is like the jurisprudential equivalent of like a shrug emoji. I don't have a whole lot of confidence in the Supreme Court's ability to or interest in ferreting out its own corruption. Now coming from outside of the court, there are always calls for more stringent ethics rules for Supreme Court justices. And there are bills that have been introduced in this session of Congress about that.

But even if we don't think that those are going to get passed as a practical matter, I really think Democrats have an opportunity here. Every week, there's a new headline about another Supreme Court justice who is like flailing around in a billionaire cash cube. You should be holding as many hearings on this as the calendar will allow.

People don't trust the Supreme Court right now because of what it's doing. It's issuing these radical right-wing rulings. Its approval rating is at its lowest spot in years. In my view, if the public learns that the justices are also taking a bunch of money from their right-wing pals, that's not going to help matters. I think this is a winning issue, but Democrats have to have the courage to call the court what it is, which is the most important source of Republican power in this country and an opponent they have to defeat, not like a colleague they should be negotiating with. On this topic, what are these justices themselves saying? How have they been responding to this?

Have they expressed any remorse in any way? No, to the best of my knowledge. And like, as a practical matter, like, why would they, right? They have life tenure. They can't be removed. They have this job for as long as they feel like it. I think one Supreme Court justice in history has been impeached and that person was not removed from office. And we're talking like well over a century and a half ago, their job security is very strong. Unless and until Democrats like take seriously Supreme Court expansion as a fix to both the imbalance on the court and the outsized amount of power it wields over democracy, not a lot's going to happen to them. Jay, thank you so much for joining us. It's always so great to have you on WOD. We really appreciate you coming back. Thank you so much. Looking

forward to next time. Okay, we will circle back on this topic when Clarence Thomas gets kicked off the Supreme Court. I wouldn't hold your breath for that, though. Definitely not holding my breath. We will, I'm sure we'll have more to say about this very soon, but that is the latest for now. Let's get to some headlines. Jury deliberations are underway in the seditious conspiracy case against five members of the Proud Boys, including their leader Enrique Tarrio. At issue is whether or not Tarrio and the four others are guilty of plotting the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol. The trial, which has been going on for more than three months, wrapped up closing

arguments this week. Prosecutors showed the jury messages at the Proud Boys exchange in the weeks and months leading up to the attack, some of which showed the group pushing Trump's claim that the 2020 election had been stolen. In his closing argument, Prosecutor Conor Mulroh said, quote, these defendants saw themselves as Donald Trump's army, fighting to keep their preferred leader in power no matter what the law or the courts had to say about it. Meanwhile, defense attorneys claim that there was no plan or conspiracy in the January 6th attack and have said that the Justice Department is using Tarrio as a scapegoat for former President Donald Trump. If convicted of seditious conspiracy, Tarrio and the four Proud Boys members could face up to 20 years in prison. Anheuser-Busch, the maker of Bud Light, has placed at least two executives on leave after the beer was promoted by a transgender influencer.

The move impacts Alyssa Heinerscheid, the vice president of marketing for Bud Light, and her boss, Daniel Blake. The decision comes after the company partnered with Dylan Mulvaney, a trans advocate and social media influencer, to promote the brand. That quickly led to calls from the right to boycott the beer, or like Kid Rock,

buying Bud Light just to post videos of themselves shooting the cans. That is so crazy and so like, so violent. What the hell? Very, very cool. If you can't make music anymore, I guess you just do this. The quote unquote controversy has led to a decline in sales in recent weeks, both because of the boycott itself and the company's tepid response to the anti-transfo outrage, including targeted harassment against Heinerscheid. In a statement, Anheuser-Busch said, We have made some adjustments to streamline the structure of our marketing function

to reduce layers so that our most senior marketers are more closely connected to every aspect of our brand's activities. These steps will help us maintain focus on the things we do best, brewing great beer for all consumers, while always making a positive impact in our communities and on our country. I have several thoughts about that. Doesn't mean anything. One, yeah, that's a lot of words to say absolutely nothing. Yeah.

Two, brewing great beer? Yeah. This is Anheuser-Busch. Yeah. What are you talking about? Just show me a great beer. I'd love to see one. If we're trying to, like, fix the marketing problem, let's start with taste. Harry Belafonte, a civil rights activist and pioneering

black entertainer, died Tuesday morning of congestive heart failure in his New York home. He was 96 years old. Belafonte rose to fame in a segregated 1950s America where he pushed past racial barriers with his activism, music, and films, becoming the first black man to win a Tony, an Emmy, and the first solo artist to sell more than 1 million copies of his album. You might remember him from his hit song, Deo, the Banana Boat Song, from the 1956 album, Calypso, that reached the top Billboard album charts and stayed in the number one spot for 31 weeks. Belafonte was also a lifelong activist who participated in and helped organize

protest marches and benefit concerts. He was also a close friend and supporter of Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and helped organize the historic 1963 March on Washington. Among his other accolades, Belafonte was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 1994 and received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2000. He is survived by his wife, children, stepchildren, and grandchildren.

And finally, a story about the most wholesome of pipe dreams. The titular Ben of Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream has announced a new cannabis venture with products set to launch in Vermont cannabis stores sometime next month. Ben Cohen's new nonprofit marijuana line is called Ben's Best Blends, Blends spelled B-L-N-Z, or B3. That's the other name for it. Their certified organic line of cannabis products will include pre-rolls, vapes, and flour, all in service of a higher mission. According to B3's website, 80% of the brand's profits will go to grants for black cannabis

entrepreneurs, while the rest will be divided equally between the Vermont Racial Justice Alliance and the Last Prisoner Project, which works to free people incarcerated for cannabis offenses across the U.S. As their mission statement says, despite using pot at the same rate, black people are four times more likely to be arrested than white consumers. So for all you 420-friendly Vermonters out there, remember, when they go low, we get high. Something tells us supporting this cause will only make that pint of Ben and Jerry's fish food in your freezer taste even better than usual. Yeah, love this for Ben. Love it for Ben. Wonder what Jerry's up to. I feel like maybe he feels a little left out.

Maybe they're just taking some time apart. And those are the headlines. We'll be back after some ads to bring you our investigative reporting about what Miley Cyrus may or may not have been up to lately. It's Wednesday, WOD Squad, and for today's Temp Check, we are going to ask you to put on your conspiracy wigs for a hot sec. A mysterious LP that dropped the same day as Miley Cyrus' post-divorce album Endless Summer Vacation has fans wondering if the pop star has pulled a reverse Hannah Montana. The album in question, Down With Me, by an artist named Clara Pierce, quietly appeared on music streaming platforms on March 10th

and features 12 tracks with vocals distinctly similar to Miley Cyrus. Even weirder, all of the songs have been attributed to a soul songwriter named Willian Cordiero. Just so you know what we're talking about, here is a bit of Clara Pierce's song, Hands of Time. Okay, I hear the Miley, but I also am like, I don't know, I might have doubts. Yesterday, after Rolling Stone published an article about the theory, the album was swiftly taken down from Spotify. And while fans have found several references to Miley's work within the songs, some are also wondering if the music was potentially AI generated using Cyrus's songs as a starting point. So far, there has been no word from Miley's camp, which is, I think, kind of crazy.

But I have to ask you, Josie, is Clara Pierce actually Miley's Sasha Pierce? Or is this Balenciaga Popegate all over again? And have we been duped by AI? Now I'm 100% convinced it's AI. Me too, right? Even though I don't want it to be AI. Yeah, Iuped by AI. Now I'm 100% convinced it's AI. Me too, right? Even though I don't want it to be AI. Yeah, I think it's AI. I hear the Miley. I hear a little Miley. It's giving AI a little bit.

Also, what the fuck was that album art? I know you guys can't see it. I know this is a podcast, but that was like, and I don't even know if that's a real album art or just like something someone put on YouTube. It was so ugly. It was really bad. So cutesy in a way where I'm like, Miley Cyrus would be disgusted by that. It was really bad. So cutesy in a way where I'm like,

Miley Cyrus would be disgusted by that. It was really bad. Miley Cyrus is cool. She would not like that. She is cool. I do feel like this could have been a cool PR thing, but I don't think that she would take it down if it were really her. Yes. And something about the voice just sounds like something about the accent sounds like a little weird. A little off. So I'm like, this is AI. I'm not even a Miley Cyrus connoisseur, I'd say. And I think it sounds a little off. Me neither. It just feels a little off.

And I am truly bummed that this is where we are. Watch her release a statement being like, that was me in my most treasured, beautiful work. I know. Whoops. Me and my truest self. Okay. All love to you, Miley. And and just like that we have checked our temps they're a little lukewarm we don't like the AI but they're robotic yeah

that is all for today if you like the show make sure you subscribe leave a review figure out your dream pint rotation and tell your friends to listen and if you're into reading and not just conspiracy theories that have nothing to do with the fate of democracy, like me, What A Day is also a nightly newsletter. Check it out and subscribe at Cricut.com slash subscribe. I'm Josie Duffy Rice. I'm Priyanka Arabindi. And reveal yourself, Clara. Yeah, we got to know.

We said our names. Yeah. Come out with your real one. It's true. We got to know. It's your turn. Yeah, your computer serial number. That's the name. You can tell us. We will not tell Miley or the cops. No, certainly not the cops. I certainly won't tell the cops. But I mean, if Miley comes up to me and asks, like,

I'm not gonna say no. Yeah. What a Day is a production of Crooked Media. It's recorded and mixed by Bill Lance. Our show's producer is Itzy Quintanilla, and Raven Yamamoto is our associate producer. Jossie Kaufman is our head writer, and our senior producer is Lita Martinez. Our theme music is by Colin Gilliard and Kashaka.