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Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas accepted luxury trips around the globe for more than two decades, including travel on a superyacht and private jet, from a prominent Republican donor without disclosing them, according to a new report.
ProPublica reported Thursday on an array of trips funded by Harlan Crow, a Dallas businessman. The publication said Thomas typically spends about a week every summer at Crow’s private resort in the Adirondacks. It said the justice also has vacationed at Crow’s ranch in East Texas and has joined Crow at the Bohemian Grove, an exclusive all-male retreat in California.
ProPublica cited a nine-day trip that Thomas and his wife, Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, took to Indonesia in 2019, shortly after the court released its final opinions of the term. That trip, which included flights on Crow’s jet and island-hopping on a superyacht, would have cost the couple more than $500,000, if they had paid for it themselves, the publication said.
Neither the Supreme Court nor Thomas responded immediately to questions about the report on Thursday morning. ProPublica said Thomas did not respond to questions about its reporting.
In a statement, Crow acknowledged that he has extended “hospitality” to the Thomases “over the years” but said the couple “never asked for any of this hospitality” and that he has not tried to influence the justice on matters before the court.
“We have never asked about a pending or lower court case, and Justice Thomas has never discussed one, and we have never sought to influence Justice Thomas on any legal or political issue,” Crow said. “More generally, I am unaware of any of our friends ever lobbying or seeking to influence Justice Thomas on any case, and I would never invite anyone who I believe had any intention of doing that. These are gatherings of friends.”
Federal law mandates that top officials from the three branches of government, including the Supreme Court, file annual forms detailing their finances, outside income and spouses’ sources of income, with each branch determining its own reporting standards.
Judges are prohibited from accepting gifts from anyone with business before the court. Until recently, however, the judicial branch had not clearly defined an exemption for gifts considered “personal hospitality.”
Revised rules adopted by a committee of the Judicial Conference, the courts’ policymaking body, seek to provide a fuller accounting. The rules took effect March 14.
Gifts such as an overnight stay at a personal vacation home owned by a friend remain exempt from reporting requirements. But the revised rules require disclosure when judges are treated to stays at commercial properties, such as hotels, ski resorts or corporate hunting lodges. The changes also clarify that judges must report travel by private jet.
According to ProPublica, Thomas’s trips funded by Crow do not appear on his financial disclosures.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) vowed in a statement that his panel would take action in response to the ProPublica report, calling the behavior of Thomas “simply inconsistent with the ethical standards the American people expect of any public servant, let alone a Justice on the Supreme Court.”
Durbin and other Democrats renewed calls for the Supreme Court to adopt a strict ethics code that would include a process for investigating alleged misconduct, and some Democrats called on Thomas to resign.
“This cries out for the kind of independent investigation that the Supreme Court – and only the Supreme Court, across the entire government – refuses to perform,” tweeted Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), who has sponsored legislation that would direct the court to adopt an ethics code.
“Is Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas corrupt? I don’t know,” Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.), a member of the House leadership team, said in a tweet. “But his secretive actions absolutely have the appearance of corruption. . . . For the good of the country, he should resign.”
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), who has previously called for Thomas to step down, renewed her call Thursday, saying “[t]his degree of corruption is shocking – almost cartoonish.”
While the wide scope of Crow’s funding of Thomas’s travel has not been previously reported, the largesse directed at the justice by the billionaire donor has provoked controversy previously.
In 2011, the New York Times reported that Crow had done many favors for Thomas and his wife, notably financing the multimillion-dollar purchase and restoration of a cannery in Pin Point, Ga., that was a pet project of the justice.
The Times also reported that Crow helped finance a Savannah, Ga., library project dedicated to Thomas, presented him with a Bible that belonged to Frederick Douglass and reportedly provided $500,000 for Ginni Thomas to start a tea-party-related group.
Thomas, who joined the court in 1991, has drawn scrutiny on other ethical issues in recent years, several related to the political activism of his wife. She has been allied with numerous people and groups that have interests before the court, and she has dedicated herself to right-wing causes involving some of the most polarizing issues in the country.
Ginni Thomas privately pressed then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows to pursue efforts to overturn Donald Trump’s loss in the 2020 presidential election, and she sent emails urging swing-state lawmakers to set aside Joe Biden’s popular-vote victory in awarding electoral votes. When those efforts were revealed by The Post last year, they intensified questions about whether her husband should recuse himself from cases related to the election and attempts to subvert it.
The Post also reported last month that a little-known conservative activist group led by Ginni Thomas collected nearly $600,000 in anonymous donations to wage a cultural battle against the left over three years. The previously unreported donations to the fledgling group Crowdsourcing for Culture and Liberty were channeled through a right-wing think tank in Washington that agreed to serve as a funding conduit from 2019 until the start of last year, according to documents and interviews.
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Immediate removal from the court. No question.
+1.
Let’s remember the protest “collar” that RGB wore immediately after the election of DJT in 2016. And continued to wear.
As leftist justices go, she was among the strongest in terms of jurisprudence…more clear-headed and brilliant in crafting her arguments.
But it was a mistake. She was being overtly political. It was a deep blue conflict of interest. But she kept doing it, and it became a leftie meme (as much as the left has successful memes).
IIRC, Justice Alito was rightfully scolded when he blurted out “it’s a lie!” during something Obama said. But we know there are different standards for the party that comprises 85% of the Deep State. Do we really think protestors lurking around Sotomayor or Kagan’s private residences would have gotten that far without a DOJ intervention…as far as they did with Kavanaugh and Coney Barrett? Course not–aside from the fact that rightwingers don’t collectivize as a general rule, it would have been squelched before they could even attempt it.
The slobbering partisans seeking to create the one-party state they so desperately seek are making the cause for civil war so much more justified. Keep it coming. We’re a banana republic now, not because of the gun-toting country bumpkins, but because of the party of compassionate, tolerant urban sophisticates.
Finally, Lauren wakes up after a few weeks of rather mediocre responses. Kind of thought maybe you were using ChatGPT to write them for you. Nice to have you back.
I find it adorable that a fashion choice equals everything the Thomas’ have done the last couple decades. Then again, you probably believe that Clarence and his wife don’t talk politics…
Leave that aside – on the actual court, Thomas rarely asks questions (he went a decade without asking a single one), and when he does actually pipe up and write something down, his legal reasoning is weak. His rationale for inviting same sex marriage to be struck down, yet not interracial marriage, was so weak no other justice even joined him on it. Find me the major opinion he’s ever been assigned to write. I’ll wait.
Thomas and Alito are the Stadler and Waldorf of the Court these days. I don’t agree with Gorsuch very much, but his intelligence is beyond reproach.
Supreme Court sides with 12-year-old transgender girl fighting West Virginia’s sports ban
“The Supreme Court denied the state’s request to temporarily revive the ban while the underlying litigation continues without explanation, as it often does in emergency cases. Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissented from that decision.”
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2023/04/06/supreme-court-transgender-girls-sports/11509293002/
Are the seven other Supreme Court saying they agree with the case, or giving away how they’d rule? Nope, they’re saying you have to let the case play put through the legal system. This is how you end up with a decision where Gorsuch and Jackson, to pick two different random justices, agree.
But not Alito and Thomas. They can’t wait. Talk about hyperpartisans. Talk about too political. This is why I hold them in such low regard.
Joe– Predictably, you reduce RGB’s “collar” to fashion choice. She was partisan, everyone knew she was partisan, and since she was basically a rotating corpse those last few years, nobody really cared because the just wanted her not to croak before they could rig #45 out of re-election. While they won on the rigging, they couldn’t quite pump enough formaldehyde in her. Again, I say this while recognizing her keen legal mind, while recognizing Alito received censure for blurting out. I give your cult more credit because I’m nowhere near the entrenched partisan you are. But then, I recognize Washington Post to be as authoritative as Breitbart.
As far Democracy-Dies-in-Darkness is concerned, this represents attempt #8,746 to try to defame Thomas out of office. If these “scandalous” trips have been happening for 20 years, it would be impossible for a public figure like Thomas to hide them and the top-tier investigative journalists at the WaPoo, always eager to find dirt on the man, would have dug this up decades ago. Could it be that there was nothing adjudicated that hinged on these trips? Are we going to pretend that the three leftie Justices don’t talk politics–as though they aren’t allowed to have any semblance of a private life that reflects their interests and views? I’ll concede it’s probably something they should significantly limit, but I randomly turned on CNN one time while in Washington DC (it’s a radio station there) and heard none other than Justice Kagan, “talking politics”. And I like Kagan. Certainly better than the other two leftie ladies.
BTW, if spouses of SCOTUS justices aren’t allowed to have a political life, I hope someone gets the word out to Jackson Brown and her hubby. Since I think both she and Sotomayor are laughingstocks, but not Kagan, I guess I’m racist (oh well) but not anti-Semitic? It’s so hard to keep track these days.
This is classic Washington Post reporting. A group says Justice Thomas accepted gifts from a billionaire friend who states he has no interest in any matter before the Supreme Court (it sounds like his interest is actually in the political activities of Thomas’s wife, which she is free to pursue independent of her husband’s job). There was no duty for him to report these gifts under the prior rules of the Supreme Court prior to the new rules instituted March 14th of this year. The Washington Post reporter supplied reactions from four democratic Congressmen, but no reaction from any Republicans. Of course all Democrats (including Pat B. above) will call for him to resign. The ONLY reason they call for this is because they want an opening in the Supreme Court while there is a Democrat president in office to fill it.
You bring up a good point. Unless their marriage is just for financial benefits, there is no way the wife’s political activities don’t influence the justice. This seems like a deep red conflict of interest and bolsters the case for immediate resignation.
Influencing Thomas for what? Crow said he has no interest in any of the cases before the court and the Washington Post did not cite any. Where is the conflict of interest? Of course Thomas would have to recuse himself from any future cases in which Crow or any of his companies was a party. Are you afraid Crow is going to turn Thomas into a conservative Repulican?
What incentive other than preferential treatment is there for giving $500k worth of anything to a supreme court justice?
Regardless, state bar associations – the bodies that regulate law licenses – require lawyers to avoid the very appearance of impropriety. Supreme court justices should be held to an even higher standard.
It was first investigated deeply and reported by ProPublica. The Post’s article is merely a reaction piece with minor additions.
Meanwhile in the Washington Post’s coverage of the Biden Crime Family taking money from Chinese and Russian sources, as well as who the big guy was that got 10%……………crickets. Typical from the Bezos Post.
Are we back to “Hilary’s email” conspiracies again, but today it’s “Biden’s Laptop “.
Sounds a little lame to me.
Oh… and the Russian thing is just projection, blaming the other guy for what he’s already done.
Dan is adorable. Even your beloved legacy media sources are now admitting that both Biden’s laptop and Hillary’s server were 100% true. The Delaware repair shop owner who wisely followed all laws and procedures in donating the contents faced routine death threats–TOTALLY not the behavior of a mob that knows its cult leaders have something to hide.
Let me guess: the lab leak was a joke, the vaccines were perfectly well vetted and safe, and absolutely nothing remotely resembling a leftie insurrection happened during the summer of hate in 2020?
WaPo is like our “state-affiliated media” NPR–just water carriers for one party. It should be given the same credibility that the Hunter Laptop theory was given for the first 18 months when NY Post dropped the story. None at all. But this won’t happen, of course.
Isn’t it funny how both the WaPo and NPR are prepping for more massive layoffs and membership and donations continue to plunge? With every laid-off craptivist journo the profession gets a hair’s breadth closer to restoring its integrity.
Do you count Khashoggi, he of the Washington Post, as one of those layoffs?
I’m all for throwing the book at the corrupt. Just make sure you include Kushner’s $2 billion private equity investment from MBS … shortly after Kushner’s boss let the Saudis dismember someone with a bone saw and covered for them … on the list.
Joe again (so much fun!)– In the extremely unlikely event that these latest Thomas smears held water, do you REALLY think the neolib/neocon allegiance would risk trying to impeach Thomas, probably relatively close to the end of his judicial appointment, when it could easily open a floodgate to investigations on similar corruption among Dem-appointed SCOTUS justices, or (far more likely) corrupt figures like Garland, Austin, and Mayorkas? Furthermore, while Dems have despised Clarence Thomas with a virulent passion ever since they paid Anita Hill handsomely for her histrionics, the growing evidence that their stronghold over blacks is weakening doesn’t bode well for the notion of them leading an effort to impeach only the second non-white SCOTUS justice in history.
And since politics isn’t about reality but about perception, they’re not going to risk it. Even with the WaPo carrying water for them as they always have done. Just more ragebait akin to Breitbart or The Blaze. The delusion that WaPo and NPR represent some sort of “elevated thought” over their rightwing alternatives is precisely the sort of false prestige that demagogues have used in the past to mobilize people into legitimizing–oh, I dunno–medical experiments on easily manipulated children.
As for Jamal Khasshogi, I still listened to NPR regularly back then (though didn’t take it seriously) and was amazed about their desperate attempt to elevate a complete nobody to something like the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Nobody knew who he was before then, yet it got day-to-day coverage. I think the legacy media was crestfallen that, aside from about 5% of the elevated elite (yourself included, my dear friend) who believe fancypants coastal media are the Great Moral Arbiters, nobody really gave a crap about Jamal. It goes to show, much like the Blue Checkmark mean-girls-clique that Elon Musk rightfully lampooned, journalists seriously overvalue themselves.
Joe (last time)–As usual, I appreciate that you continue to engage me, and I hope that, little by little, I’m at least peeling away the door to your echo chamber so you can try to begin to understand how benighted Hoosier hayseeds like me REALLY think. If “think” is the right word for those random synapses buzzing around in our liquid brains.
So frustrating that that whole democracy thing gets keeps getting the kulaks so fired up.
Lauren, it’s not really doing any thing to change my mind, but engagement is lots of fun. It’s pretty clear to just about everyone we’re generally yelling past each other.
If you want to change my mind and make an impact, propose an alternative. It’s fine to scream “tear it all down” but you’ve been strangely silent on the solution. Replacing one corrupt system led by elites with a new set of elites who still won’t care about the body politic and will be just as corrupt in about 4 weeks, if not sooner, doesn’t seem all that useful to me.
I would like to see what the other justices have done before outright condemnation. If he’s the only one, then yes, he should immediately step down.
There has been an “odor” around Clarence Thomas since he lied to the Senate Committee about Ms. Hill. How much more should the country endure before he leaves? We’ve had divisions in the past, recall the Warren Court and its efforts to change criminal procedure, but none of the members of the Warren Court had the same odor around them as Clarence Thomas. Someday, he will realize that he is a problem and will be persuaded to retire, collect his undeserved pension and enter a world of “no freebies.”
The “odor” is just a political philosophy you don’t like–all the more infuriating when it’s a racial minority who holds those views. Nothing else to it.
From the lies coming out of Anita Hill’s mouth until five minutes ago, Clarence Thomas has endured three decades of relentless attacks from the left. The bigger question: how many SCOTUS justices to you have to go through among “most beleaguered in the modern era” before you get a liberal justice that faced as many attempts at defamation from conservatives?
Thomas, Alito, Kavanaugh, Coney Barrett have all faced more direct physical threats than RGB or Breyer ever did. And the last two have only been on the bench for a few years.
Why ARE y’all always so violent?!?
Hope the D politicians remember their outrage and vitriol when taking up the matter of insider trading by members of Congress, like Nancy Pelosi and her husband (who appears to be the greatest investor of our day and age–better than Warren Buffett, even).
What a surprise? A court with very little accountability or oversight has corrupt justices. Who could have predicted a court, where the “conservative” majority embraces money and corporate power controlling the political system, would have a corrupt justice in their ranks? He should be impeached, but the Republicans will stop at nothing to keep control of power. Look at the authoritarian movement happening at this moment in Tennessee.
I mean, the Washington Post investigated it so it must be true. Always an even-handed publication, that one is.
Truly the “conservatives” embrace corporate power, which is why they have so many great friends in Apple and Microsoft and Google and (until recently) Twitter, or why Fortune 500 companies embrace the Wokecult like it was ever fashionable. Corporations and all those big-city affluent conservatives! Yep. Wesley, you do realize “Bonfire of the Vanities” isn’t a new release anymore, right?
And then there’s that authoritarian movement happening at this moment in Tennessee. I mean, I agree that the Karen should face the same punishment as Justin Shuckinjive and Justin Steppinfetchit, since heckler’s veto is not a form of free speech–it’s actually yet another variant of censorship. But insurrectionist movements tend to get praised when they come from the political party responsible for 98% of violence, even when they happen in GOP-led states. Like the transurrection in Oklahoma a few weeks ago. At least most of that violence is against one another. Pray, continue.
Voters will be interested to hear about accountability on this astonishing and disturbing report. The Senate and House should hold hearings and demand answers from Justice Thomas and the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court needs to explain it too. It looks really bad.
LOL. WaPo “journalists” have you found the Roe leaker yet? You remember, the stolen documents from a Supreme Court deliberation that was perfectly timed for your preset agenda.
Democrats stating this is cause for “immediate” removal is hilarious and a reason I need to put IBJ further in my rear view mirror. There are no adult discussions here.