Sounds Like Clarence Thomas Secretly Accepted 20+ Years of Gifts From a GOP Megadonor
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
"Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or revenue on some items through these links."
The acceptance of lavish gifts and gratis transportation by Supreme Court Justices has been under scrutiny lately.
A new report from ProPublica purports that Justice Clarence Thomas has accepted more than 20 years of extravagant trips for free, and failed to disclose any of them.
Those alleged trips were provided by GOP megadonors.
The enigma of Clarence Thomas is more than just a snappy book title— it's a real ideological quandary that's puzzled courtwatchers since Thomas took the bench as a Supreme Court Justice in 1991.
To hear Justice Thomas himself tell his story, in either his memoir My Grandfather's Son, or in the recent documentary Created Equal: Clarence Thomas In His Own Words, he portrays himself as a man whose modest origins made him favor "regular folks" and a modest lifestyle. In Created Equal, Thomas describes his vacationing habits thusly:
"I prefer the RV parks. I prefer the Walmart parking lots to the beaches and things like that. There’s something normal to me about it. I come from regular stock, and I prefer that — I prefer being around that."
But to others who have examined how Thomas's self-described preferences and beliefs square with his judicial opinions and documented lifestyle, from Jane Mayer's 1994 Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas to more recent podcast conversations, something has always felt amiss.
Thomas's often controversial views have brought him into conflict with many of the Justices who have sat on the Supreme Court bench alongside him, including Thomas's own younger self, and his originalist opinions have felt to some to be so aligned with far-right donors and activist groups like the Federalist Society that it's been speculated that Thomas has been unduly influenced by private interests through lavish gifts.
Up until now (though there has been criticism about the activities of Thomas's activist wife and the donors she courts) the disclosures of Justice Thomas himself—which we've noted require Justices to disclose any gifts received from businesses or any free travel they receive to avoid any ethical conflicts or improper influence—never showed any lavish travel or other such gifts from individuals or entities representing conservative or libertarian interests.
But, if what ProPublica just reported is accurate, the reason Thomas's disclosures never showed any such outings and gifts isn't because they didn't happen. They reportedly very much did, for 20+ years and in the most extravagant fashion, and Thomas failed to disclose them.
On April 6, ProPublica's Joshua Kaplan, Justin Elliott, and Alex Mierjeski published a deeply researched piece that purports decades of luxury trips for Thomas and his wife, Ginny, allegedly facilitated by Dallas businessman and GOP megadonor Harlan Crow, all of which Thomas failed to disclose.
ProPublica relied on "flight records, internal documents distributed to Crow’s employees and interviews with dozens of people ranging from his superyacht’s staff to members of the secretive Bohemian Club to an Indonesian scuba diving instructor" to piece together this extensive gifting scheme. "The extent and frequency of Crow’s apparent gifts to Thomas," ProPublica notes, "...have no known precedent in the modern history of the U.S. Supreme Court."
"These trips appeared nowhere on Thomas’ financial disclosures. His failure to report the flights appears to violate a law passed after Watergate that requires justices, judges, members of Congress and federal officials to disclose most gifts, two ethics law experts said."
Crow, Thomas's wealthy benefactor who facilitated these trips with a policy that "guests didn’t pay," is described by ProPublica as the heir to a real estate fortune who "...recently named Marxism as his greatest fear." Which is perhaps an understandable fear in this one case, since the sheer level of capitalist extravagance on display in the ProPublica reporting on Crow could likely turn even Milton Friedman into Vladimir Lenin. ProPublica says of Thomas's travel:
"A public servant who has a salary of $285,000, he has vacationed on Crow’s superyacht around the globe. He flies on Crow’s Bombardier Global 5000 jet. He has gone with Crow to the Bohemian Grove, the exclusive California all-male retreat, and to Crow’s sprawling ranch in East Texas. And Thomas typically spends about a week every summer at Crow’s private resort in the Adirondacks."
Thomas did not respond to ProPublica's list of questions, and for his part, Crow asserted that he merely showed the Thomas family "hospitality" (in verbiage that, to some, recalls the "personal hospitality loophole" Sen. Whitehouse recently tried to address) that is "no different from the hospitality we have extended to our many other dear friends."
Even on the assumption that that is true, ProPublica consulted experts who confirm that those hospitalities, particularly travel, still needed to be disclosed by Thomas, especially in the case of transport provided by a private jet owned, not by Crow personally, but by a company. And as for those "dear friends" Crow alludes to, ProPublica presents evidence that the "friend group" who joined Thomas on a trip, at least once in 2017, included "executives at Verizon and PricewaterhouseCoopers" and "Leonard Leo, the Federalist Society leader regarded as an architect of the Supreme Court’s recent turn to the right."
While some elements of ProPublica's reporting could be written off by those coming to Thomas's defense, others are harder to deny. Thomas has been photographed at times wearing two different "custom polo shirts" exclusive to those who have traveled on Crow's all-expenses-paid superyacht trips, and on one such aquatic excursion, Thomas signed a book for one of the yacht's staff, writing, "Thank you so much for all your hard work on our New Zealand adventure."
The book was Thomas's own memoir, My Grandfather's Son. The Clarence Thomas of roughly a decade ago, when the trip took place, wrote that inscription on the title page of his memoir, a book in whose text therein the Thomas of 2007 said, "Honesty is what you do when no one is looking."
You Might Also Like
