(Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
Evidence reveals previously undisclosed luxury travel and gifts that Justice Clarence Thomas took from billionaire BFF Harlan Crow. You’ll be forgiven if that lede sounds familiar, but this is actually breaking news and not a rehash of the last time we learned that Clarence Thomas gobbling up free gifts without including them on legally mandated disclosure forms. Or the time before that. Or the time before that. It can get confusing.
Indeed, it’s worth noting that we wrote a story entitled “How Have We Not Yet Hit The Bottom Of The Clarence Thomas Scandal?” OVER A YEAR AGO.
A new Thomas scandal is up there with death, taxes, and RFK Jr. admitting to something batshit insane.
All told, Clarence Thomas has taken somewhere around $6 million in undisclosed gifts as identified by Fix the Court ever since he started not-so-subtly threatening to abandon his post as the Court’s conservative vanguard unless someone figured out how to get him better paid as ProPublica uncovered. Since then he’s gotten trips, a rent-free home for his mom, the private school tuition for his “like-a-son” that he no longer talks to, and an RV through a loan that he apparently never paid back. That doesn’t include the Federalist Society’s chief paying Ginni Thomas under the table.
A letter to lawyers for Thomas’s billionaire mancrush Harlan Crow from Senate Finance Committee Chair Ron Wyden flags previously undisclosed flights and reasserts a demand for more information on Crow’s tax treatment for his superyacht. Because Crow has taken millions in losses on his taxes ostensibly based on his boat, though the Thomas probe has raised questions as to whether or not the yacht has ever been a for-profit venture as opposed to a mechanism solely to take from Crow-entity Peter to pay Crow-entity Paul and write it all off.
Furthermore, it was revealed just a few weeks ago that Justice Thomas enjoyed complimentary use of private jets paid for by Mr. Crow on 17 different occasions since 2016, with 9 of those flights coming in the last three years. While Justice Thomas has only recently updated his financial disclosures to include an eight-day voyage aboard the Michaela Rose in Indonesia in 2019, Justice Thomas still has not disclosed other trips on the Michaela Rose. Public reports show evidence that Justice Thomas was a passenger aboard the Michaela Rose in Greece, New Zealand and elsewhere.
Earlier this year, the Supreme Court blessed a public corruption scheme where companies hand over gratuities to a state or local public official to “thank” them for delivering the results the company wants. Since the gift isn’t explicitly dangled beforehand, the Supreme Court — with a supporting vote from Thomas, of course — declared that this is an innocent payout. If the gift happens to engender further beneficial acts from the official now accustomed to getting paid off on the backend, well, the Supreme Court sees nothing wrong with that (at least under federal law).
This case doesn’t address whether or not a federal official can be charged for accepting tips, but the rhetoric employed in the opinion doesn’t suggest that the majority has much appetite for punishing anything without an explicit, pre-action, quid pro quo. The sort of arrangement easily circumvented by a patronage relationship between a government official and a “friend” who just happens to have billions of dollars and an agenda.
But you know what’s most galling about the vacation amnesia that Clarence Thomas and his benefactor seem to have developed?
The average American worker gets 11 vacation days a year and around 55 percent of Americans don’t even use them all. Most of us toil to keep the bills paid, giving our bosses back the paid vacation in the form of gratuitous labor. We take a trip to Disneyworld once or twice with the kids and then head back to the grind to pay it off.
Meanwhile, Clarence Thomas seems to have simply forgotten the various times he lounged on a superyacht as it wended its way through the Greek isles. Who amongst us hasn’t taken a private jet that someone else paid for to New Zealand and just totally blanked on it? With a roughly $240K paycheck, all that private luxury travel becomes so impossible to keep straight!
Or maybe he actually does remember those trips and just decided to thumb his nose at federal anti-corruption measures because he has unchecked contempt for the American people.
Hard to say which honestly.
Earlier: Senators Beg Merrick Garland To Do His Job And Investigate Clarence Thomas
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Clarence Thomas Took EVEN MORE Free Trips On Private Planes That He’s Still Not Disclosed!
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.
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