Why Chief Justice John Roberts Should Be Removed

Christopher Armitage, author of “The Existentialist Republic” blog on Substack is filing a complaint against Chief Justice John Roberts for failing to disclose his family income and failing to acknowledge his very significant conflicts of interest. He wants us to do the same. We knew that Justices Thomas and Alito failed to disclose gifts and income. Add Justice Roberts to the list.

Armitage wrote:

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. 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.

That’s the lowest bar, and it’s the easiest to satisfy. The next two are more specific and even more difficult to evade.

Subsection (b)(4) says a judge shall disqualify himself where “he or his spouse, or a minor child residing in his household, has a financial interest in the subject matter in controversy or in a party to the proceeding, or any other interest that could be substantially affected by the outcome.” The language is broad on purpose. Congress wanted the net to catch exactly the kind of arrangement at issue here.

Subsection (b)(5)(iii) adds that a judge shall disqualify where a spouse “is known by the judge to have an interest that could be substantially affected by the outcome of the proceeding.” That subsection covers situations where the financial interest runs through the spouse rather than through the judge directly.

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 No. 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.

The recusal obligation is not discretionary under § 455. The statute uses the word “shall.” Roberts’s defense would have to argue either that his wife’s commission income doesn’t constitute a financial interest in firms paying the commissions, which is a strained reading, or that the interest isn’t substantially affected by his rulings, which is also strained because firms that win at the Court get more business and firms that lose get less.

The whistleblower is Kendal Price, a former managing director at Major, Lindsey and Africa, the legal recruiting firm where Jane Sullivan Roberts worked from 2007 to 2014. Price filed a federal complaint in December 2022 with the House and Senate Judiciary Committees and the Department of Justice. He attached internal company spreadsheets, his own sworn affidavit, Jane Roberts’s 2015 arbitration testimony, and Gershman’s supporting legal memorandum.

An important note. This information was released because of a whistleblower, and some would say that means it is possible there is considerably greater corruption that just hasn’t been brought to the public. Some might say that it’s likely the tip of the corrupt iceberg. Few people would be willing to gather evidence on their employers activities, bring those to Congress, and risk attracting the enmity of the leader of the highest court in the land. Fewer will follow in that person’s footsteps if they see zero consequences follow from the whistleblowers disclosure.

The spreadsheets showed Jane Roberts earned $10,323,842.70 in commissions over those seven years on $13,309,433 in attributed firm revenue. An MLA partner described her in sworn testimony as the highest earning recruiter in the entire company by a wide margin.

The documented placements include former Interior Secretary Ken Salazar to WilmerHale, Washington attorney Robert Bennett to Hogan Lovells, former United States Attorney Neil MacBride to Davis Polk, and New York Federal Reserve general counsel Michael Held to WilmerHale. Jane Roberts testified under oath that she placed senior government lawyers at starting partner salaries up to three million dollars. Successful people, she said, have successful friends. Mark Jungers, a former MLA managing partner, told Politico the firm hired her hoping to benefit from her being the Chief Justice’s wife.

The scope of Roberts’s corruption is not measured in individual cases. It is measured across the entire docket of the Supreme Court over two decades. WilmerHale alone, one of Jane Roberts’s documented client firms, had 18 cases at the Supreme Court in the single term of 2016, and Seth Waxman of WilmerHale has argued more than 85 Supreme Court cases across his career. Hogan Lovells, another documented client firm, argued 8 Supreme Court cases in 2024 alone and has represented nearly 10 percent of the Court’s entire docket in recent terms. Across Roberts’s two decades on the Court, the law firms paying his household in commissions have argued more than five hundred cases before him. He recused from none of them on spousal income grounds.
In 2019 she moved to Macrae and opened the firm’s Washington office, and her earnings from 2015 forward have never surfaced in public reporting.

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.

In 2023, after Business Insider published the whistleblower documents, Roberts quietly corrected the entry. His 2022 disclosure report, which the Administrative Office released that June, described Jane Roberts’s compensation as base salary and commission. The same report, for the first time, disclosed an equity stake in Macrae valued between $100,001 and $250,000. She had acquired it in 2019, and Roberts had omitted it from three prior annual filings and attributed the omission to inadvertence.

Title 5, Section 13106 of the United States Code requires the Judicial Conference to refer any judge it has reasonable cause to believe willfully filed false disclosures to the Attorney General. Civil penalties reach fifty thousand dollars per violation. Title 18, Section 1001 makes it a federal crime to knowingly and willfully falsify a material fact on a document submitted to the federal government, punishable by up to five years in prison. The statutes carve out no exception for the Chief Justice.

Congress impeached and removed Federal District Judge Thomas Porteous in 2010 on a record that included false disclosure forms. Congress did the work the statute imagines, and no one has ever brought a referral or prosecution against a sitting Supreme Court justice for the same conduct.

After ProPublica broke the Clarence Thomas and Harlan Crow story in April 2023, Senate Judiciary Chairman Dick Durbin wrote to Roberts inviting him to testify. Roberts declined in a one-page letter on April 25, citing separation of powers concerns. All nine justices signed an attached statement affirming that individual justices, not the Court, decide recusal questions. The self-policing rule remained in place.

In November 2023 the Court issued its first formal Code of Conduct. The document ran fourteen pages, and its preamble conceded that the absence of a written code had produced the misunderstanding that justices considered themselves unrestricted by ethics rules. The code contained no enforcement mechanism. It designated no body to receive complaints, empowered no body to investigate, and gave no body authority to impose sanctions. The Congressional Research Service confirmed the absence of enforcement in a formal report. The Brennan Center for Justice called the code designed to fail. Kathleen Clark, a legal ethics scholar at Washington University, said nothing in the statement suggested the Court even understood what the problem was.

The Dobbs investigation followed the same pattern. After the draft opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization leaked in May 2022, the Court’s marshal interviewed ninety-seven employees. Every employee signed an affidavit under penalty of perjury. The justices did not. The marshal’s January 2023 report said she had spoken with each justice, several on multiple occasions, but under a different standard than the one that applied to the staff.

The report concluded that she could not identify the source by a preponderance of the evidence, and the investigation closed.

Roberts is a primary architect of the ethics crisis that has broken the Court. He is a willing participant in the destruction of one of the three pillars of American checks and balances.

John Roberts is not a Trump lackey or a spineless rube. He is a builder of the world we are now living in. He is selling our future. He was appointed to the Supreme Court because of his belief that Republicans should be above the law and that the Presidency should be all-powerful so long as it’s run by a Republican. He might be an ideologue and a true believer, but not in regards to Christianity or Originalism. He is a true believer in the almighty dollar, and he sold his judicial soul to the highest bidder. May consequences someday visit him.

Five mechanisms exist to hold a federal judge accountable for the conduct documented here. Each of them is available. Each of them is being refused.

The law exists. 5 U.S.C. § 13106 makes willful false disclosure a civil violation with penalties up to $50,000. 18 U.S.C. § 1001 makes knowing false statements to the federal government a felony punishable by five years. 28 U.S.C. § 455 mandates recusal. These are laws Congress wrote. They apply to the Chief Justice.

Impeachment exists. Article II, Section 4 provides for removal of judges for high crimes and misdemeanors. Porteous in 2010. Claiborne in 1986. Hastings in 1989. Congress has the power and has used it on federal judges.

The Judicial Conference has a statutory referral obligation under § 13106. It exists. It just hasn’t been used against a justice.

The DC Bar has disciplinary jurisdiction over its members. It exists. It just carves out judicial capacity by policy.

The Supreme Court Bar has a complaint mechanism. It exists. It just answers to the Court.
The mechanisms exist. The political will of the people who control them does not. The Judicial Conference won’t refer. The DC Bar declines on intake. The Senate won’t impeach. DOJ won’t prosecute. Each institution points at another institution and says not my jurisdiction, not my moment, not my responsibility.

In the United Kingdom, a party who believes a judge should step aside can file a challenge, and a different judge decides. In Canada, the Judicial Council accepts complaints from any member of the public and can recommend a judge’s removal.

In Germany, the other members of a Federal Constitutional Court panel vote on whether a colleague must recuse, and the judge in question does not vote on their own case. In Australia, a statutory code requires federal judges to disclose spousal income in full rather than by category label. At the European Court of Human Rights, the plenary court has authority to remove a judge who fails to recuse where the law requires it.

What every one of these systems shares, and what the American system lacks, is an external body with the authority to receive a complaint, investigate it, and impose consequences. The self-policing rule is the American anomaly.

This is not recent drift. In December 2000, Roberts flew to Tallahassee at his own expense and met privately with Governor Jeb Bush to advise on the governor’s role in assigning Florida’s electors to George W. Bush. Nobody disclosed the meeting during his 2005 confirmation hearings. A December 2000 email from Bush to Roberts, which surfaced a decade later through the governor’s gubernatorial correspondence, thanked him for his input in this unique and historic situation. The advice concerned scenarios in which the Republican-controlled legislature could assign electors directly, bypassing the popular vote and the ongoing recount.

The Reagan-era paper trail at the National Archives contains memos in which Roberts argued against heightened constitutional scrutiny for sex discrimination, recommended that Reagan distance himself from the Centers for Disease Control’s conclusion that AIDS could not be transmitted by casual contact, described comparable-worth pay equity as staggeringly pernicious, and wrote that an effects test in the Voting Rights Act would amount to a quota system for electoral politics. Twenty-seven years later he wrote the majority opinion in Shelby County v. Holder gutting the same statute.

For twenty years the ethics conversation around the Supreme Court has run on a curve composed entirely of Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito. Roberts has played the institutional grown-up, the last one who cared about the Court as an institution, the one trying to hold the line. The line he held was the one that protected his own household. Thomas took gifts from Harlan Crow. Alito took flights from Paul Singer. Roberts took law firm money through his wife’s commission checks and mislabeled it on a federal form.

The DC Bar accepts disciplinary complaints from any member of the public against any of its admitted attorneys. John G. Roberts Jr. is admitted to the DC Bar, and I am filing a complaint against him today, after this article goes live. The complaint alleges that Roberts violated DC Rule of Professional Conduct 8.4(c) across sixteen annual federal financial disclosure filings from 2007 through 2022, by mischaracterizing at least $10,323,842.70 in documented commission income from law firms appearing before the Court as salary, with unreported commission income across an additional eight annual filings from 2015 through 2022 estimated at a floor of $11.8 million based on the documented seven-year mean, and with the actual figure likely substantially higher given Macrae’s reported revenue growth during that period. The complaint further alleges that Roberts omitted a material equity interest in his wife’s employer from three consecutive annual filings between 2019 and 2021. The complaint cites 5 U.S.C. § 13106 and 18 U.S.C. § 1001 as the underlying statutory predicates.

The men and women running this system built their careers on the assumption that nobody was paying attention. That the forms would go unread. That the recusals would go uncounted. That the statutes would sit on the shelf. That the institutions would cover for each other and no one outside would notice the arrangement.
We noticed.

We see the ten million dollars documented and the eleven million more estimated. The millions more likely unseen. We see the sixteen years of false characterizations. We see the hidden equity stake. We see the stock trades and the missed recusals and the Code of Conduct written to fail and the justices who signed affidavits for no one. We see the Judicial Conference that won’t refer and the Senate that won’t impeach and the Attorney General who won’t prosecute. We see every institution pointing at every other institution and shrugging.

Here is what you can do.

One. Share this article. Every person who reads it is one more person who knows, and the thing they built their careers on is the assumption that nobody knows. Post it. Send it. Forward it. Break the quiet.

Two. Send a letter to the DC Bar Office of Disciplinary Counsel at 515 Fifth Street NW, Building A, Room 117, Washington DC 20001. Write it in your own words. The facts to include are that Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. mischaracterized his wife’s commission income as salary on sixteen years of federal financial disclosure forms, omitted a material equity interest for three consecutive years, and did not recuse from more than five hundred cases argued by law firms paying his household in commissions. The relevant statutes are 28 U.S.C. § 455, 5 U.S.C. § 13106, and 18 U.S.C. § 1001, and the rule to cite is DC Rule of Professional Conduct 8.4(c). It takes about ten minutes.

All of this movement creates pressure. Pressure creates heat. Enough heat and things will change. Be the heat, be the pressure, and the system will bend. That’s how we take our damn country back.

We need 10 subscribers per article. Yesterday, despite hundreds of thousands of daily readers, we fell short of that number for the first time in nearly a month. If you want this all to continue, for everyone, then we need you!

Don’t let this be the reason you miss rent or skip a meal. For everyone else, you can be one of the ten today and make sure the articles, books, legislation, and training keep coming for everyone.