‘You Really Have to Wonder’: Jake Tapper Concerned Some Reporters’ ‘Close Relationships’ with Justices Mean They’re Not Doing Their Jobs

Jake Tapper questioned whether some Supreme Court beat reporters are too close to the justices they cover.

His comments came on Friday’s edition of The Lead in a segment about the latest revelation about Justice Clarence Thomas. On Thursday, the Washington Post reported that conservative legal activist Leonard Leo used Kellyanne Conway’s polling company in 2011 and 2012 to funnel at least $80,000 to a firm run by Ginni Thomas, the justice’s wife.

It was just the latest report calling into question Thomas’s ethics and transparency. Reporting from ProPublica in recent weeks has shown to have received luxury travel from billionaire Republican megadonor Harlan Crow, whose private jet Thomas used to take expensive vacations abroad for years. Crow also paid some of the tuition for Thomas’s grandnephew to attend boarding school.

The aforementioned reporting came courtesy of investigative journalists with backgrounds in a wide variety of subjects – as opposed to Supreme Court beat reporters who typically focus on just the court or the federal judiciary at large.

There have long been questions about whether “access journalists” who closely cover government officials are in fact too close to their subjects the kinds of stories that have broken about the court in recent weeks. That includes reports that Justices Neil Gorsuch and Sonia Sotomayor failed to recuse themselves in a case that involved their book publisher.

Tapper echoed this concern about access journalism on Friday, citing NPR Legal Affairs Correspondent Nina Totenberg, who developed a close relationship with the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, which she cataloged in a book called Dinners with Ruth.

“Nina Totenberg, who is very well-respected, longtime Supreme Court reporter from NPR – she was criticized by NPR’s public editor in 2020 for not disclosing her decades-long relationship with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg,” Tapper said to CNN legal analyst Joan Biskupic. “And this might suggest that one of the problems here is a lot of the journalists who have been covering the Supreme Court – again, not you and not a bunch of other really excellent Supreme Court reporters like Jan Crawford and others. But some on the right and the left have formed such close relationships, that you really have to wonder about their journalism sometimes.”

“Yeah, it is a pretty intimate group of people,” Biskupic replied. “I always kid that justices are appointed for life. Journalists are appointed for life too. We come to this beat and we don’t leave it. But like anything else, you want to be friendly with the people you cover, but you don’t want to be deep friends. And if you have deep friendships, then you try to be careful with your coverage on that. And I do think that there has been an insularity that we fight against and it’s been important to always be able to scrutinize these justices in various ways, which frankly I think many of us have.”

Watch above via CNN.