‘I Stand With Justice Thomas’: DeSantis Claims ‘Scurrilous’ Attacks on Supreme Court Are By Design

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) said he stood with Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas in the face of negative media coverage and accusations of improperly receiving gifts in a speech he delivered before the Faith and Freedom Coalition Conference in Washington, D.C. on Friday.

In April, ProPublica published an article accusing Justice Thomas of improperly accepting free trips from billionaire donor Harlan Crow. Then earlier this week, Justice Alito preempted a similar article about his relationship with billionaire Paul Singer with one of his own in the Wall Street Journal, a rare step for a member of the Court. Critics noted Crow and Singer both later had connections to cases before the Supreme Court that neither judge recused themselves from.

Thomas and Alito are considered by most to be the most reliably conservative justices, and DeSantis has in the past compared them favorably to former President Donald Trump’s nominees to the Court, Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett.

“None of those three are at the same level of Justices Thomas and Justice Alito,” said DeSantis about Trump’s trio of nominees earlier this month.

In his remarks on Friday, DeSantis addressed the corruption allegations against Thomas and Alito:

As president I will appoint and nominate justices to the Supreme Court in the mold of Justices Clarence Thomas and Justice Samuel Alito. We will also stand and defend them against scurrilous attacks that you’re seeing in the media and by left-wing groups. The left knows that they have lost control of the Court and they don’t like it.

If they’re able to sweep in ’24, they’re gonna pack the U.S. Supreme Court with liberal justices. You may have 13 people on the Supreme Court after they get done with it and they will install a liberal majority. So they’re hard at this effort of trying to lay the groundwork for that by delegitimizing our great conservative justices. And let me just say, I stand with Justice Thomas, I stand with Justice Alito in the face of these attacks: They are wrong.

Watch above via C-SPAN.