As usual, Lat puts it very well in his "Original Jurisdiction" Substack newsletter (I've paid for a subscription, and highly recommend it):
Last fall, [Chief Judge Pryor] was widely criticized for hiring an allegedly racist law clerk—specifically, Crystal Clanton, now a 3L at George Mason aka Scalia Law. According to a 2017 New Yorker article, Clanton once texted a co-worker at Turning Point USA, the conservative nonprofit where she worked before law school, "I HATE BLACK PEOPLE. Like f**k them all…. I hate blacks. End of story."
At the time, I did not jump on the Pryor-bashing bandwagon. After noting that he's (1) a smart person who knows how to run a Google search and (2) a highly regarded Supreme Court feeder judge, I argued that Chief Judge Pryor "wouldn't want to 'waste' a clerkship on someone who would be radioactive to the justices." So I speculated that there must be more to this story—and that perhaps Justice Clarence Thomas, the nation's highest-ranking and most famous Black jurist, had vouched for Clanton to Pryor. (Clanton worked for Justice Thomas's wife, Ginni Thomas, after getting fired from Turning Point, and Chief Judge Pryor is a leading feeder judge to Justice Thomas.)
It turns out that there was more to the story. After seven members of Congress called for an investigation into Pryor's hiring of Clanton, the Eleventh Circuit referred the complaint to the Second Circuit. Chief Judge Debra Ann Livingston of that court conducted an investigation and wrote up her findings, as reported by Bill Rankin of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:
In her ruling, Livingston cited one of the Turning Point USA's executives who said Clanton treated everyone with "kindness, respect and fairness." This person also said "the media reports are not accurate," Livingston wrote.
The Turning Point executive "had determined that the source of the allegations against (Clanton) was a group of former employees," Livingston wrote. "One of these employees was fired after the organization learned that this person had created fake text messages to be used against co-workers, to make it appear that those co-workers had engaged in misconduct when they had not."
Pryor and Maze knew about the allegations against Clanton when they interviewed and hired her. And both determined the allegations of racist behavior by Clanton were untrue and found she was highly qualified to serve as a clerk for them, Livingston wrote.
