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I have no personal vendetta against Clarence Thomas. I seek only to provide the committee with information which it may regard as relevant.

During this period at the Department of Education, my working relationship with Judge Thomas was positive.

I retired when the Supreme Court rose for the summer recess in 2009, and a couple of weeks later I drove north from Washington with no regrets about the prior 19 years or about the decision to try living a more normal life for whatever time might remain.

I am a pretty good lawyer, and I decided to close the office and to enter politics.

But the courts have dismissed the lawsuits against me and Lee Brown.

I was on the state board of directors of the American Civil Liberties Union.

I was on the campaign trail for 18 months. I never got a question about the District of Columbia in South Carolina.

In 1979, the Supreme Court ruled 5-3 in Smith v. Maryland that a few days' worth of phone records for a single individual were not protected by the Fourth Amendment. The NSA today, though, collects hundreds of millions of phone records from hundreds of millions of Americans without an individualized warrant.

At Columbia Law School, my professor of constitutional law and federal courts, Gerald Gunther, was determined to place me in a federal court clerkship, despite what was then viewed as a grave impediment: On graduation, I was the mother of a 4-year-old child.

I was born in Columbia in 1954, the year the Supreme Court invalidated racial segregation in public schools. I visited frequently but did not live there.