And the Republican have the nerve to huff and puff and slanderGeorgeSoros much as they like.
For more than two decades, Thomas has accepted luxury trips virtually every year from the Dallas businessman without disclosing them, documents and interviews show. 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.
The extent and frequency of Crow’s apparent gifts to Thomas have no known precedent in the modern history of the U.S. Supreme Court. …
Lawmakers Call for Investigation and Ethics Reforms in Response to ProPublica Report on Clarence Thomas
Influential Democratic legislators are pushing for changes at the Supreme Court and a probe into Thomas’ undisclosed luxury trips provided by powerful conservative donor Harlan Crow.
It’s down right enraging that pigs like this, get away scot-free no matter how many lives they screw up and destroy. Will fate, and the dream of justice, finally catch up with this judicial criminal?
MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell reacts to new reporting from ProPublica revealing Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas failed to disclose a real estate deal with billionaire Republican mega donor Harlan Crow valued at $133,363, despite the 1978 Ethics in Government Act requiring him to.
The transaction marks the first known instance of money flowing from the Republican megadonor to the Supreme Court justice. The Crow company bought the properties for $133,363 from three co-owners — Thomas, his mother and the family of Thomas’ late brother, according to a state tax document and a deed dated Oct. 15, 2014, filed at the Chatham County courthouse.
The purchase put Crow in an unusual position: He now owned the house where the justice’s elderly mother was living. Soon after the sale was completed, contractors began work on tens of thousands of dollars of improvements on the two-bedroom, one-bathroom home, which looks out onto a patch of orange trees. The renovations included a carport, a repaired roof and a new fence and gates, according to city permit records and blueprints.
“The other key point – and I truly, truly cannot emphasize this enough – is that Clarence Thomas’ whole job is to use his judgment to make judgment calls while judging. He sits on the highest court in the land where he judges others and he makes rulings on the best thing to do is when the text or the law is ambiguous, unclear, or even absent,” says Chris Hayes.
Dahlia Lithwick, senior editor at Slate and host of the “Amicus” podcast, talks with Alex Wagner about why the news that Republican activist billionaire Harlan Crow purchased real estate from Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is a scandal of a different magnitude on top of an already extremely compromised Supreme Court.
When news broke last week, by way of dogged reporting in ProPublica, that Justice Clarence Thomas had accepted decades’ worth of hospitality from billionaire Republican donor Harlan Crow, that this same donor had funded his wife’s legal and political activities and in fact helped pay her salary, and that Thomas had disclosed none of this, our suggestion that the justice had clearly broken the law was dismissed as left-wing “smear.”ProPublica’s new reporting, dropped on Thursday, showed that the same billionaire donor, Harlan Crow, spent $133,363 purchasing several properties co-owned by Thomas, and that these sales were never disclosed. As our colleagues at Slate confirmed this week, Thomas’ mother actually still lives in the property owned by Crow, to which he has made valuable improvements (in addition to buying the house next door and dispensing with previously troublesome neighbors).
Unlike the rules around the undisclosed luxury travel reported last week, ProPublica could not find a single ethics expert willing to squint and hop on one foot in a way that would make the failure to report the real estate transaction seem arguably lawful.
The court has not responded in any way to the latest revelations. Defenders of Justice Thomas somehow continue to urge that this is a smear campaign by liberals.
What really scares me is how blatant this is. It tells me that the one conspiracy theory that I believe is correct; that there are people somewhere cranking out conspiracy theories to distract us from the actual problems going on. They used to work out of their mother’s basement, then they got offices in Eastern European countries, now they are in congress. They propose actual legislation about things that help no one and protect us from things that aren’t harming anyone.
Meanwhile, a Supreme Court justice signs his own name on the sale of a house to a guy who obviously wants access to his power. So, either Thomas doesn’t ever mention that he has a family or a mother or that he supports her and visits her, or he was hoping this deal would go unnoticed for a few years. He knew he only needed a few years, and then it would appear normal.
If he had put it on the disclosure form, then we’d know who knew what when. But, since it’s the mainstream/liberal news reporting it, the reporting of the facts becomes the conspiracy theory. Instead of a valid investigation, it’s a “witch hunt”. Or, as he said in his nomination hearings, a high tech lynching.
Apr 12, 2023
For over 20 years, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has accepted luxury trips virtually every year from billionaire Republican donor Harlan Crow without disclosing them, breaking long-standing norms for judges’ conduct. Thomas’ trips with Crow ranged from island-hopping through Indonesia on a superyacht to an annual summer stay at a private Adirondack resort. The extent and frequency of Crow’s apparent gifts to Thomas has no known precedent in the modern history of the Supreme Court.
Clarence Thomas’ job is sitting in judgement on other Americans - talk about a bad joke.
Coming from a person who has been displaying zero respect for the laws he’s supposed to abide by. I share these news clips because they explain it better than I can. If only more American were interested . . .
Former U.S. Office of Government Ethics Director Walter Shaub and NBC News Presidential Historian Michael Beschloss discuss Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s failure to disclose a 2014 real estate deal and luxury travel with Republican billionaire Harlan Crow amid calls for his investigation.
How long will he be allowed to get away with it.
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Looking towards the Supreme Court itself,
September 15, 2021 - * Nancy Gertner
How the Supreme Court handled the new Texas ban on abortions after six weeks of pregnancy paints a far, far different picture. Indeed, when the Supreme Court acts in a way that no legal expert could have predicted, according to no rules that can be identified in advance, much less applied in the next case, it ceases to work as a court at all, no matter how it is characterized.
…
… In fact, it had nothing to do with law at all. It was about power, a message delivered anonymously by five justices, literally, at midnight, without full briefing or oral argument. We did it, the five-member majority of the court was saying, because we can . We are, after all, the Supreme Court. …
Last month, ProPublica reported that **Thomas accepted luxury travel from Crow virtually every year for decades, including international superyacht cruises and private jet flights around the world. Crow also paid money to Thomas and his relatives in an undisclosed real estate deal, ProPublica found. After he purchased the house where Thomas’ mother lives, Crow poured tens of thousands of dollars into improving the property. And roughly 15 years ago, Crow donated much of the budget of a political group founded by Thomas’ wife, which paid her a $120,000 salary.
“This is way outside the norm. This is way in excess of anything I’ve seen,” said Richard Painter, former chief White House ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush, referring to the cascade of gifts over the years.
In 2008, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas decided to send his teenage grandnephew to Hidden Lake Academy, a private boarding school in the foothills of northern Georgia. The boy, Mark Martin, was far from home. For the previous decade, he had lived with the justice and his wife in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. Thomas had taken legal custody of Martin when he was 6 years old and had recently told an interviewer he was “raising him as a son.”
Tuition at the boarding school ran more than $6,000 a month. But Thomas did not cover the bill. A bank statement for the school from July 2009, buried in unrelated court filings, shows the source of Martin’s tuition payment for that month: the company of billionaire real estate magnate Harlan Crow. …
… Grimwood, the administrator at Hidden Lake, told ProPublica that Crow wired the school money once a month to pay Martin’s tuition fees. Grimwood had multiple roles on the campus, including overseeing an affiliated wilderness program. He said he was speaking about the payments because he felt the public should know about outside financial support for Supreme Court justices. Martin returned to Randolph-Macon his senior year. …
Gotta wonder, what else will be coming out, and will any of it ever make a difference?
I think what people find difficult is, it’s hard to accept that if someone paid a bill, how does it become “buried?” I’ve taken these identity quizzes, the ones you do when you are doing something like a large bank transfer or getting access to some kind of financial information. They ask things like, “did you own a beige car in 1988?” or “was your home in the Brookfield neighborhood in 1997?” Or, when I do my taxes and I forget something, they already know, it’s like a test.
Anyway, there’s a belief that if there are forms to fill out, there is someone with the authority to review those forms, watch for blanks and incongruities, and report them when found. To me, it’s just obvious, because I hate Thomas anyway, I can see he’s living way beyond what he makes. Either he never talks about this kid that he says he loves, or his fellow Justices don’t raise an eyebrow when they find out he’s going to a fancy boarding school.
That it took this long for this stuff to come out does make me question the entire system. I can relate to people who don’t give this much thought until it’s in the news, and then they listen to whatever biased news outlet they’ve chosen. It’s easy to just say, well, of course, the whole system is corrupt, so I’ll just pick the corrupt guy who loves America in the way that I do, and point to the corrupt things the other guy is doing, because, that’s what everybody’s doing.
What really sucks is when the people I like actually do something crappy. It makes it really hard to defend the individual, and hard to maintain loyalty to the “team”. So, where was I going with this? I forgot.
Tali Farhadian Weinstein, former federal and New York state prosecutor, and Dahlia Lithwick, senior editor for Slate, talk with Alex Wagner about the latest revelations about questionable payments to Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife, Ginni, and what the recent spate of Supreme Court scandals means for the legitimacy of the court.
The discussion of what congress can do went nowhere. They went with “witch hunt” defense.
“We can talk about ethics, and that’s great, but we’re also going to talk about today the concentrated effort by the left to delegitimize this court, and to cherry-pick examples to make a point,” said ranking Republican Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.
