Judges Get Removed From The Bench For Doing What John Roberts and His Wife Have Been Doing For 16 Years

Mother Jones illustration; Win McNamee/Getty

I’ll put this in plain English, because the people who profit from the arrangement would rather you got lost in the legalese.

Federal judges have been removed from the bench for doing what John Roberts has been doing for sixteen years.

None of what follows is secret, and I did not personally uncover any of it. It sits in the public record. Whistleblower filings sent to Congress, sworn testimony, internal company spreadsheets, federal disclosure forms, and reporting by mainstream outlets going back years. I did not find anything new. I read what was already there, put the facts in order, and asked why the Chief Justice of the United States is held to a lower standard than any other federal judge.

In 2007, two years after her husband became Chief Justice of the United States, Jane Roberts left the practice of law and became a legal recruiter. She turned out to be an extraordinary one. Internal company spreadsheets, filed with Congress by a whistleblower and first reported by Business Insider, show that over a seven year period she earned $10,323,842.70 in commissions on $13.3 million in attributed firm revenue.

A partner at her firm, Major, Lindsey and Africa, described her under oath as the highest earning recruiter in the entire company by a wide margin. Not the best that year. Not near the top. The highest of anyone, by a wide margin, in a firm full of professional recruiters who did nothing but place lawyers all day. From the start, she out-earned people who had done the job for decades. She out-earned people with bigger networks and longer track records. So ask the plain question. Why would one recruiter be paid so much more than every colleague doing the exact same work? The one thing she had that none of them had was a husband who is the Chief Justice of the United States.

Here is how that pay worked. A recruiter like Jane Roberts gets a cut of the compensation of the lawyer she places. Place more lawyers, place bigger lawyers at bigger salaries, and the checks get larger. Her pay rose and fell with her performance, which is the ordinary way commission works and the opposite of how salary works.

Now look at who wrote those checks. Her clients included WilmerHale and Hogan Lovells, two of the busiest appellate firms in the country, the kind of firms that send a lawyer to argue at the Supreme Court term after term. Her husband is the Chief Justice of that Court. Across his two decades there, the firms paying his household in commissions have argued before him repeatedly, term after term. He recused from none of them on the ground that his wife was being paid by the firm arguing the case. There is a reason justices are required to report a spouse’s income on their disclosure forms. The phrase household income matters when your job requires impartiality.

You might be thinking: she helps companies hire lawyers, people do that every day, what is wrong with it? Nothing, when an ordinary recruiter does it. A recruiter placing lawyers for a paycheck is a normal job, and on its own it raises no question at all. Change one fact and the whole thing changes. The recruiter is married to the Chief Justice of the United States, and her clients are the firms that argue in his courtroom. Now the same paycheck means something different. A firm hiring an ordinary recruiter is buying recruiting. A firm hiring the Chief Justice’s wife, and paying her substantially more than anyone else doing that job, is buying recruiting plus something extra, and the something extra is a financial relationship with the family of the judge who will decide their cases.

Let me say it plainly. The firms paying his household were the firms arguing in his courtroom. Hiring his wife was worth more to them than her work alone, because it bought them something no other recruiter could offer, a paid relationship with the family of the most powerful judge in the country. They paid for access. They paid to have the wife of the Chief Justice on their payroll, to be in the room with her, to earn the goodwill that comes with signing her checks, and quite possibly to meet the man himself along the way. And then those same firms walked into his courtroom and argued their cases, and he ruled. So the picture is uncomplicated. The firms that argue in front of him were paying his wife far more than they paid anyone else who did her job, and then they stood at his bench and he ruled on their cases.

So now let me ask an important question. He is not a confused man. The Federalist Society and his admirers on the right call him one of the sharpest legal minds in the country, and he understands conflict of interest law better than almost anyone alive. He also knew exactly what his wife was paid, and he knew it was an amount that made no sense for the work alone. No recruiter earns that far above every colleague doing the same job unless something else is attached to the number, and the only thing she had that the others did not was him. He knew that. So should he have recused? Maybe that was never really the fix. The honest answer is simpler and came earlier. One of two people in that marriage should have picked a different job. She could have stopped selling access to the firms in his courtroom. He could have left the bench’s most conflicted seat to someone whose household was not being paid by the lawyers in front of him. Neither of them did, and he kept ruling.

And here is the part that should settle the question of whether any of this was knowable. The people around John and Jane knew. One even risked his career to say so. Kendal Price worked alongside Jane Roberts at the firm. He had no marriage to the Chief Justice, no seat on the Court, no special access. He looked at what she was being paid and by whom, understood right away that it was wrong, and took the personal risk of bringing the documents to Congress in December 2022. If a coworker with far less reason to notice could see the problem clearly enough to risk his career over it, the idea that it somehow escaped the most sophisticated judge in the country does not track.

The earlier pieces in this series covered the recusals and the ethics code the Court wrote for itself, which contains no enforcement mechanism. Set all of that aside. This piece asks something simpler. Look only at the money and at one word on one form.

Every year, the Chief Justice signs a federal financial disclosure form that every Article III judge has to file under the Ethics in Government Act. The form asks about household income. For sixteen years, Roberts described his wife’s compensation with a single word: salary. It was not salary. It was commission, paid by the deal, a cut of business with specific client firms. That difference is significant. Salary is a flat number from one employer, and if you call it salary you name the employer and stop. Commission traces back to the clients who generated it, and naming it honestly would have meant pointing at the firms that paid, which were the firms arguing in his courtroom. The word salary is what kept their names off the form. He chose the word that hid the source, and he chose it for sixteen years.

Maybe that still sounds like a technicality to you. Performance based, salary, who cares what you call it. The experts in this field care, and they have said so out loud. Bennett Gershman, a legal ethics professor at Pace, reviewed the arrangement and wrote that calling the commissions salary is not just factually wrong but wrong as a matter of law. Richard Painter, the Republican ethics lawyer who prepped Roberts for his own confirmation hearings, said the Chief Justice fudged the details and misleadingly described his wife’s earnings as salary. That is a conservative defending a conservative institution, choosing the gentlest word he could find, and even his gentlest word meant lying. When Business Insider published the spreadsheets in 2023, Roberts quietly fixed the entry to read base salary and commission, and disclosed for the first time an equity stake in his wife’s firm that he had left off three previous filings.

The whistleblower complaint went where it was supposed to go. The House and Senate Judiciary committees received it. The Justice Department received it. It even appeared in the news cycle and drew a few days of coverage, and then the institutions that could have acted declined to act and the story faded. Nothing happened.

My opinion on why nothing happened is this. None of them want the grift to end. It is against the law and it has been punished before, and they would rather that era of accountability quietly die than be the ones who enforce it against the man at the top.

So here is the conduct, stated plainly. A person in a position of public trust profits from money tied to that position, and then writes something false about the money on an official form, signs it, and does it again every year. Keep that in mind, because someone else did exactly this, and we know what happened to him.

Thomas Porteous was a federal district judge in Louisiana. In 2010, Congress impeached him and removed him from office on a record that included false statements on his financial disclosure forms. Congress did the thing the law provides for. It examined a sitting federal judge who lied on his paperwork and took his job, and the vote was not close. That is precedent. A federal judge, false statements on his disclosures, removed.

Now hold Porteous next to John Roberts. Porteous was a trial judge in Louisiana. Roberts is the Chief Justice of the United States. Porteous lied on his disclosure forms and lost his job. Roberts described commission income as salary for sixteen years on the same kind of form, signed it with his own name each time, and fixed it only when a whistleblower forced the documents into public view. One of them was removed. The other sits today as Chief Justice, license intact, still on the bench, with no referral, no prosecution, and no discipline.

There is only one thing that separates the two cases, and it is not the conduct. It is the position. Roberts sits higher, so he is held to a lower standard. The trial judge who did it got impeached. The Chief Justice who did it gets nothing, because the higher a person sits, the less anyone with the power to act wants to be the one who acts. The people who control these processes have decided that the man at the top of the system is the one person the system will not touch. Not because the rules say so. Because nobody wants to go first. They currently have more to lose by picking a fight with someone powerful than by looking the other way and the only way that changes is through We The People.

Here is what you might be thinking right about now. This is horrible, but it can’t be the whole story, because if it were, the New York Times would have it on the front page. The silence seems like an answer. If the serious people are not alarmed, how bad can it really be.

I understand why you would think that, so let’s explore that question. Silence is not a fact-check. A newsroom declining to run a story tells you something about the newsroom, not about the story. And this did not come from nowhere. A named person who worked alongside her, Kendal Price, looked at the documents, knew the arrangement was wrong, and took the personal risk of bringing them to Congress. That is what a whistleblower is. That is the opposite of a rumor. The spreadsheets say what they say whether or not a Supreme Court correspondent writes them up. The disclosure forms say salary for sixteen years whether or not anyone with a press badge calls it what it is.

The facts are the facts. Federal judges have been removed for misleading on disclosure forms, particularly when the “form fudging” is directly tied to substantial dubious household income tied to clients appearing before the court. The only difference is Roberts’s position. I cannot tell you why the press has stayed quiet. But I can tell you the precedent is real, and what Roberts did is on the record, signed by his own hand and corrected by his own hand once he was caught. So do not accept that it must be nothing because no anchor said it was something. Put the Porteous record and the Roberts forms next to each other, and the only difference left is the chair Roberts sits in.

I wrote this down. I put the facts in order and filed a disbarment complaint, and the original piece has been read by millions of people. The mainstream press, the outlets with the lawyers and the budgets and the Supreme Court correspondents who could verify every line of this in an afternoon, have mostly stayed quiet. Why won’t they cover a documented corruption story about the most powerful judge in the country, when every fact is already sitting in the public record they themselves built?

Ask them yourselves.

Besides contacting the press, if you want to do something about all this, I would encourage you to contact your two U.S. senators and your one U.S. representative, and ask each of them to publicly call for the impeachment of Chief Justice John Roberts. You can find all three and their direct contact information at house.gov/representatives/find-your-representative and senate.gov/senators/senators-contact.htm, or reach any of their offices through the Capitol switchboard at (202) 224-3121.

When you reach them, keep it simple. Tell them you are a constituent who has read the documented record on Chief Justice Roberts and his wife’s income from the firms that argue before the Court, and that you want them to publicly call for his impeachment. Give your name, tell them where you live, and put it in your own words. A phone call takes about three minutes and an email takes even less, and if they will not act, you can at least make clear to them that their inaction is being watched.

We are the heat. We are the pressure. That is how we take our country back.

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