"Forget The KKK, Modern-Day Liberals Are The Biggest Impediment": Clarence Thomas Reflects On Biden Experience

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas says that modern day liberals posed the biggest impediment to his career, as opposed to what he was taught to believe.

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"I felt as though in my life I had been looking at the wrong people as the people who would be problematic toward me. We were told that, 'Oh, it's gonna be the bigot in the pickup truck; it's gonna be the Klansmen; it's gonna be the rural sheriff," Thomas says in a forthcoming documentary, "Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words."

"But it turned out that through all of that, ultimately the biggest impediment was the modern day liberal," he added. "They were the ones who would discount all those things because they have one issue or because they have the power to caricature you," according to ABC News.

Thomas has joined public criticism of former Vice President and 2020 Democratic candidate Joe Biden, whose handling of Thomas's 1991 Supreme Court hearings when he was a Senator has fallen under harsh scrutiny.

Thomas sat for more than 22 hours of interviews over a six-month period in 2018, according to the film's publicist. Manifold has advertised the movie as a chance to "tell the Clarence Thomas story truly and fully, without cover-ups or distortions."

The movie also casts a spotlight on Biden, who has faced renewed criticism from his fellow Democrats for his treatment of Anita Hill, an African-American law professor who had accused Thomas of sexual harassment and testified publicly before the committee during the 1991 hearings. Biden called Hill to apologize earlier this year for his handling of the case. -ABC News

Thomas denied Hill's allegations, which he referred to during the Biden-led hearings as a "high-tech lynching."

"Do I have like stupid written on the back of my shirt? I mean, come on. We know what this is all about," Thomas says in the documentary.

"People should just tell the truth: ‘This is the wrong black guy; he has to be destroyed.’ Just say it. Then now we’re at least honest with each other. The idea was to get rid of me. And then, after I was there, it was to undermine me."

While Thomas does not mention Biden by name, he is asked by filmmakers to respond directly to Biden's line of questioning during the hearings on his views of natural law.

"I have no idea what he was talking about," Thomas says of Biden.

"I understood what he was trying to do. I didn't really appreciate it," he added. "Natural law was nothing more than a way of tricking me into talking about abortion." -ABC News

In response to the documentary, Biden's deputy communications director Bill Russo said in a statement to ABC: "Then-Senator Biden voted against Clarence Thomas in the Senate Judiciary Committee, he argued against him on the Senate floor, and he voted against his confirmation to a lifetime seat on the Supreme Court. It is no surprise that Justice Thomas does not have a positive view of him."

Thomas was eventually confirmed in the Senate by a slim margin of 52 to 48 on Oct. 15, 1991. 

"Most of my opponents on the judiciary committee cared about only one thing," Thomas says in the film. "How would I rule on abortion rights. You really didn't matter and your life didn't matter. What mattered is what they wanted and what they wanted was this particular issue."

Thomas speaks at length about his journey from childhood in impoverished rural Georgia, to a stint in a Roman Catholic seminary, and on to the elite classrooms of Holy Cross and Yale. He describes his grandfather, a fuel oil deliveryman in Savannah, as one of the biggest influences on his life, teaching him determination and self-reliance.

Thomas says those values are what sustain him in the face of persistent criticism as a black conservative.

"There's different sets of rules for different people," he says. "If you criticize a black person who's more liberal, you're a racist. Whereas you can do whatever to me, or to now (HUD Secretary) Ben Carson, and that's fine, because you're not really black because you're not doing what we expect black people to do." -ABC News

The documentary is set for theatrical release in early 2020 and will air on PBS next spring.