WaPo reports:

Conservative judicial activist Leonard Leo arranged for the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas to be paid tens of thousands of dollars for consulting work just over a decade ago, specifying that her name be left off billing paperwork, according to documents reviewed by The Washington Post.

In January 2012, Leo instructed the GOP pollster Kellyanne Conway to bill a nonprofit group he advises and use that money to pay Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, the documents show. The same year, the nonprofit, the Judicial Education Project, filed a brief to the Supreme Court in a landmark voting rights case.

That case was Shelby County (here’s the brief).  I’m pretty skeptical that any brief had much of an impact on Justice Thomas’s inclination in Shelby County; if the Judicial Education Project was seeking to buy a vote in that case, Justice Thomas’s vote was already about as guaranteed as it gets. 

Still, it’s not a great look for a group with frequent business before the court to set up a back-channel payment to a Justice’s spouse while understanding that it’s a sufficiently not-great look to take care that the spouse in question isn’t mentioned on the paperwork. And it’s not hard to imagine howls if you replace the names of these particular parties with others.