The head of a Supreme Court "transparency" watchdog helping to spearhead a campaign alleging ethics violations among justices, including Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, admitted his group failed to disclose its own lobbying.

Tax attorneys told the Washington Examiner in July it appeared that Fix the Court, a charity formerly a project of New Venture Fund, a liberal nonprofit group managed by the dark money organization and for-profit consultancy Arabella Advisors, likely skirted federal law in 2021 and 2022 due to not reporting activities on financial disclosures that constitute grassroots lobbying. Fix the Court Executive Director Gabe Roth has now come clean following those allegations, noting, "I have been corrected."

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"In terms of the 501(c)(3) rules, basically there's direct lobbying on legislation, where you're talking to members of Congress, or their staff on legislation," Roth told attorney David Lat in an interview on his Original Jurisdiction podcast released Wednesday. "I think last year that worked out to be something like 3 1/2 or 4% of my time."

The IRS classifies grassroots lobbying as efforts "to influence legislation by attempting to affect the opinion of the public," including by calling on people to contact their representatives to take certain positions on measures. Roth revealed in the same interview that such advocacy makes up "about 4%" of Fix the Court's activities.

"So yeah, my confusion was I didn’t hire lobbyists, so like, why does the IRS care how much time I spend?" the executive director explained to Lat. "But turns out they do. I have been corrected, and that’s being worked on as we speak."

Lat then replied to Roth, "[Lobbying] has to be below a certain percentage, right, like 20 or something?" referring to how charities such as Fix the Court are permitted to lobby so long as it constitutes no more than 20% of their annual expenditures, according to the IRS. Still, formal advocacy is supposed to be reported by tax-exempt organizations on financial disclosures, and Fix the Court checked the box "no" on these forms in 2021 and 2022 to the question of whether it lobbied, the Washington Examiner reported.

However, Roth alleged in response, "It’s generally 15% to 20% of your time has to be not doing lobbying, which, you know, in a world where I’m reading a ton of briefs, and spending a ton of time reading very verbose lawyer’s writings, is not very typical."

"When Fix the Court was part of New Venture Fund, I never had to fill out these forms," Roth said, "and this is really my first time doing it, and at first, I didn’t get help, which, again, was the wrong idea. I think if you’re a justice, and you’ve been a justice for five years, 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, you don’t have an excuse because you have done this every year, No. 1."

The comments from Roth may further undercut the group's position as an "ethics" group wholly committed to promoting "transparency." Senate Republicans decried hypocrisy in May on the heels of the director panicking after unwittingly leaking to the Washington Examiner his group's donors, which included liberal groups such as New Venture Fund, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. Fix the Court, which initially didn't file a Form 990 in 2021 until the Washington Examiner pointed out this discrepancy, faced an IRS complaint in June from the conservative watchdog National Legal and Policy Center over allegations it illegally overpaid Roth.

Those GOP calls were because Fix the Court is one of several Democratic-linked activist hubs slamming justices for not reporting gifts and other financial matters, despite a lack of laws requiring doing so. Fix the Court, for instance, has taken aim at Thomas for not disclosing information about his relationship with Texas real estate mogul Harlan Crow and Alito after he wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal in defense of not making public a 2008 trip he took alongside businessman Paul Singer.

"I definitely see the irony," Roth said in the interview with Lat when asked, "So, what if some people say, ‘Well, isn’t it a bit rich or at least ironic for Fix the Court to be going around calling out the justices for disclosure problems when you can’t get your own disclosures right?"

Lat had noted in his question, "The Wall Street Journal editorial page and the Washington Examiner called you to task for failing to acknowledge in the Form 990, the form you have to file with the IRS as a nonprofit, that you engage in some lobbying. Back in May, you committed what you yourself acknowledged was a ‘screw up’ when you accidentally disclosed some contributors to the Examiner."

"Look, here’s the thing, we at Fix the Court are working to be better at compliance," Roth told Lat. "I’ve made that clear. The board has made that clear. We have finally hired professionals to help us out, which obviously I should have done from the start, and they’re helping ensure that all of our paperwork is bottomed up and good to go."

Fix the Court has maintained close ties to top Democrats, being included at least seven times between 2022 and 2023 in press releases issued by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI). The Rhode Island Democrat is behind a bill endorsed by Roth called the Supreme Court Ethics, Recusal, and Transparency Act, which seeks to "require the Supreme Court and other federal courts to implement several ethics and transparency practices" and "direct federal agencies to study and report on the implementation of the bill's requirements," according to a description on the Congressional Budget Office's website.

Tax attorneys have said Fix the Court could open itself up to penalties from the IRS should the agency rule it failed to report lobbying, and charities that engage in too much formal advocacy could also risk losing tax-exempt status, the IRS says.

One example that experts pointed to as apparent lobbying was how Fix the Court published a blog post in October 2022 detailing its endorsement of a bill called the Judiciary Accountability Act, which would require certain workplace conduct policies for the court related to whistleblowers and harassment, after telling the public in January in a separate post, "The Judiciary Must Do More to Prevent Harassment in the Courthouse," to "Ask your senators and representatives to protect the employees of the Judiciary!"

"The proximity of the favorable reference to the Judicial Accountability Act and the call to action makes this grassroots lobbying, the cost of which should have been reported on Form 990," Alan Dye, a partner at Webster, Chamberlain, & Bean, said.

Roth added in the Lat interview, "I made a mistake. I want to grow from this. I want to learn from this. I just wish the justices who are making these mistakes far more frequently on a far larger scale than you or I or anyone else we know would fess up to it."

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The Wall Street Journal said in an August editorial, "‘Fix the Court’ Should Fix Itself," Roth's outfit "should first 'heal itself,' to quote Democratic Senators, before Congress or the IRS demands that it be restructured."

“Gabe [Roth] and Fix the Court have always acted in good faith, and the moment we realized our 990 was incomplete, we started working to correct it," Fix the Court's president of its board of directors, Josh Cohen, told the outlet. "Fix the Court is fiercely non-partisan in a moment when partisanship dominates and it continues to demand the highest ethical standard for justices nominated by both Democratic and Republican presidents — the same standard we demand from the other two branches."