26/08/2026
The highest judge in America is facing a massive multi-million dollar investigation that could cost him his law license.
A formal disbarment complaint has been filed against Chief Justice John Roberts at the DC Bar, alleging a pattern of financial disclosure violations spanning two decades.
At the center of the complaint is the documented commission income earned by his wife Jane Sullivan Roberts while working as a legal recruiter at Major, Lindsey & Africa between 2007 and 2014.
According to internal records released by whistleblower Kendal Price, she earned $10.3 million in commissions during that period from elite law firms, some of which argued cases before the Supreme Court during the same years.
The complaint alleges Roberts failed to recuse himself from over 500 cases argued by firms that had paid his household, and repeatedly mischaracterized his wife's commission income as salary on federal financial disclosure forms.
After Business Insider published the whistleblower documents in 2023, Roberts amended his disclosure to correctly reflect the commission structure and, for the first time, disclosed an equity stake in his wife's subsequent employer — an interest omitted from three prior annual filings.
The $20 million figure cited in the complaint includes estimated income from Jane Roberts's time at her later employer Macrae from 2015 onward, which has not been independently verified.
The documented figure from whistleblower records stands at $10.3 million.
Legal ethics professor Bennett Gershman of Pace Law School, who reviewed the arrangement for the whistleblower, concluded that characterizing commission income as salary is incorrect not only factually but as a matter of law.
Richard Painter, chief ethics lawyer under George W. Bush, said Roberts had misleadingly described his wife's earnings.
The Supreme Court's 2023 ethics code, introduced amid mounting scrutiny, contains no enforcement mechanism.