Mike (Short-Sale) Lee smears a witness to defend Clarence Thomas

Mark L. Wolf has spent his career fighting against corruption and for the rule of law — as a public corruption prosecutor, as a federal judge, as a crusader against international kleptocracy. For that, at a hearing on judicial ethics this week, he was rewarded with some of the most shameful treatment in memory by a pair of Republican senators seemingly more intent on smearing the messenger and defending Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas than on exercising their constitutional oversight responsibilities.

The episode says far more about the reflexively partisan nature of the current Congress and the character of the senators — John Neely Kennedy of Louisiana and Mike Lee of Utah — than it does about Wolf.

As a young lawyer during the Ford administration, Wolf served as special assistant to two iconic figures, both Republicans — then-Deputy Attorney General Laurence Silberman, later a federal appeals court judge, and Attorney General Edward Levi — as the department struggled to recover its bearings after the Watergate scandal.Wolf led the public corruption unit at the U.S. attorney’s office in Boston, securing more than 40 convictions, including of officials close to Mayor Kevin White, a Democrat.

Named to the federal bench by Ronald Reagan in 1985, he exposed the FBI’s use of organized crime figure James “Whitey” Bulger as an informant and how it protected Bulger and an associate as they committed murder and tipped Bulger off so that he could flee when he was about to be indicted. Now a senior judge, Wolf, 76, has campaigned for creation of an international anti-corruption court. As it turns out — and this was the subject of his testimony before a Senate Judiciary subcommittee — Wolf was also briefly a thorn in the side of the Judicial Conference of the United States a dozen years ago, during an earlier ethics episode involving Thomas. At the time, Wolf was serving on that policymaking body of the federal judiciary, which reviews, or is supposed to review, financial disclosure reports by federal judges, including Supreme Court justices.

To call the operations of the Judicial Conference opaque is an understatement. When I asked a few weeks back for the names of the judges, past and present, on the financial disclosure committee, I was told that was not public information. (It was released this week in a letter to Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), who chaired Wednesday’s hearing.)

Wolf’s experience, first reported by Bloomberg News’s Zoe Tillman, was similarly frustrating. In 2011, the Judicial Conference received complaints that Thomas had violated financial disclosure laws by failing for years to identify the sources of income received by his wife, Virginia “Ginni” Thomas. The justice, who had previously reported such information, said he had misunderstood the filing instructions and amended years’ worth of forms. Other stories and complaints followed, including about Thomas’s relationship with conservative donor Harlan Crow — sound familiar? — and whether he had failed to report travel and hospitality provided by Crow and the Federalist Society.

So, Wolf began to ask questions, and stir up trouble: Why were members of the Judicial Conference not informed of the complaints or their disposition? How did the financial disclosure committee determine that Thomas’s conduct did not trigger a referral to the Justice Department under the terms of the Ethics in Government Act? (The law provides that the conference “shall refer to the Attorney General” when there is “reasonable cause to believe” the judge “has willfully failed to file” required information.)

The powers that be put Wolf off. He kept pushing. In the end, the Judicial Conference simply waited Wolf out — his term expired before the matter could be raised at a meeting.

As Wolf explained in his prepared remarks, “It is unfortunately relevant to consider these events today. The [Ethics in Government] Act only performs its vital function if the Conference understands and properly performs its role. I believe that in 2011 and 2012 it did not.” Despite allegations from Congress and the public, the financial disclosure committee “did little to nothing for at least a year.” Its process was “opaque,” failing to disclose the allegations and its response to other members of the conference.

Finally, Wolf said, the committee applied “the wrong standard,” deciding for itself whether Thomas’s violations were willful rather than whether there was a “reasonable cause” to refer the matter.

Maybe that’s right, maybe not. But it seems like a reasonable, and important, point to consider — if you were a lawmaker weighing whether the existing financial disclosure and other ethics rules need to be revised.

This turns out to be a big “if.” Kennedy and Lee came out swinging — at Wolf. Their goal wasn’t to discuss ethics, it was simply to discredit the messenger, at any cost.

Kennedy dismissed Wolf as “a lone federal judge ... obsessed with complaining” about Thomas but himself guilty of ethical missteps. He cited discredited information placed in the file of an FBI informant that Wolf, as a federal prosecutor, had leaked evidence to organized crime. He asserted that Wolf had engaged in a “highly unethical move — that’s an understatement” when he declined to recuse himself from a death penalty case after moderating a panel that included a professor who later became a witness in the case. He asserted that Wolf had behaved improperly when he wrote an opinion piece endorsing a code of conduct to cover Supreme Court justices. “Is Judge Wolf planning on launching a super-PAC next?” Kennedy asked.

And then he left the hearing room before listening to a word of Wolf’s testimony. It takes some gall to hurl these accusations at a federal judge and not stick around to hear his response.

Lee then took up the cudgel. “I am concerned by the tone and tenor of this hearing,” he said. “It feels an awful lot like a political witch hunt, which may be in the process of being aided and abetted by a member of the judiciary.”

When Wolf suggested that Lee’s father, former solicitor general Rex E. Lee, with whom Wolf served in the Ford administration, “would have been very disturbed by the matters that I’ve addressed,” Lee exploded. “Seriously, you’re here attacking a member of the United States Supreme Court on grounds that are frivolous … and you have the audacity to come in and invoke the memory of my late father?” Lee said, raising his voice. “Shame on you, sir.”

Wolf kept his cool. “Some people I respect advised me not to do this … that I would be subject to various unfair attacks,” he said as the hearing drew to a close. “I did it because so many of my colleagues on the bench are deeply disturbed themselves. … So many of us worked so hard to give integrity to the ideal of impartial, equal justice under law, and now that ideal is imperiled.”

Ethics shouldn’t be a partisan issue. I’ve spoken to numerous federal judges, Democratic and Republican nominees alike, and none of them are comfortable with the extent of the benefits that Thomas accepted from Crow.

Much as Kennedy and Lee want to peddle their “everyone does it” line, everyone doesn’t. Other justices have amended their disclosure forms, but Thomas is unique in having to do so repeatedly, only after being called out, and in his pattern of claiming to have misunderstood reporting requirements with which he initially complied.

Wolf’s point, made without hyperbole or insinuation, was less focused on Thomas than on a flawed process that seemed designed to shield the justice’s conduct from appropriate scrutiny. That this observation would expose him to such unhinged attacks suggests how much Republicans fear what a real investigation would uncover.