He is going to pay back the money when he gets his income tax refund.

Via TPM

When federal appellate court judge Boyce F. Martin Jr. announced his retirement in July, he was praised as “one of the giants of the Kentucky judiciary.”

But what was unknown publicly until Friday was that Martin left the bench under a cloud of accusations that he had racked up nearly $140,000 in “questionable travel expenses.”

The details came out in a decision filed by five members of a federal panel on judicial conduct. The decision was in response to a petition filed by Boyce in August asking that his name be kept confidential and that his case not be referred to the Justice Department. Both requests were denied.

Martin is a Democrat who was first appointed to the 6th U.S Circuit Court of Appeals by President Jimmy Carter in 1979. At the time of his retirement, he was the court’s longest serving judge.

In an interview with the Louisville Courier-Journal in July, Martin talked fondly of his time on the bench but also said both he and his wife were battling cancer.

“It is time to go,” Martin told the newspaper. “I want to go out at the top of my game rather than having to be carried up and down from the bench.”

Behind the scenes, Martin was apparently trying to put to rest a court investigation into his travel expenses. A judicial committee looking into the matter even notified him that it planned to take his testimony about the spending.

Before the investigation could go any further, according to Friday’s decision, Martin submitted his letter of resignation to President Obama. Because of that, the court investigators halted their inquiry and never reached a conclusion about the expenses.

He told the court he planned to pay back the travel expenses in three installments, concluding in August 2013, and hoped that would be enough to make the matter go away.

In its decision, the panel said that Martin had paid the first two installments but had yet to make the third. It also noted he had blamed the travel expenses on “administrative errors” despite his plans to pay them back. It also said he disputed that a number of the expenses were inapproprate.

In its decision, the panel wrote that the court’s efforts to disclose Martin’s name and refer his case to the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section were appropriate under federal rules.