The United States Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, one of the nine judges in the country’s highest court, accepted luxury gifts and extravagant trips around the world, including travels in private jets and superyachts, for more than two decades from a well-known Republican donor and billionaire Harlan Crow without disclosing them, according to a report published by ProPublica on Thursday (April 6). It added that the omissions seem to violate federal law, passed after the Watergate scandal, that mandates justices, as well as federal judges, members of the US Congress and federal officials to report most gifts. Moreover, the report also threw light on the fact that Thomas, who was appointed to the apex court in 1991 and is considered the most conservative judge, on these undisclosed vacations came in contact with corporate executives and political activists, who might have influenced his judicial opinion. The findings surfaced after ProPublica “uncovered the details of Thomas’ travel by drawing from 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.” The non-profit news organisation reached out to the Supreme Court justice for a comment but he didn’t respond. However, Crow, who is a Dallas-based businessman with deep Republican connections and has contributed more than $10 million in publicly disclosed political contributions, in a statement accepted that he had extended “hospitality” to Thomas and his wife, Virginia ‘Ginni’ Thomas, “over the years”. But added that “Thomas never asked for any of it and it was “no different from the hospitality we have extended to our many other dear friends.” What has the ProPublica report revealed? The report shows that Thomas accepted travel hospitality from Crow that included luxury trips to Indonesia, New Zealand, California, Texas and Georgia. Notably, the Indonesia vacation, which involved nine days of island-hopping in a volcanic archipelago on a superyacht, would have cost the justice and his wife more than $500,000, as per ProPublica. The trips also included stays at properties owned by the Republican donor or his company. One such property is Crow’s private lakeside resort, Camp Topridge, located in a remote corner of the Adirondacks in upstate New York, where Thomas “spends about a week every summer”. According to the report, the area attracts billionaires from across the world and the cost of one room at a nearby hotel built by the Rockefellers starts at $2,250 a night. ProPublica also documented a painting hanging in Crow’s resort that shows Thomas chatting with Leonard Leo, the leader of the Federalist Society, who is “regarded as an architect of the Supreme Court’s recent turn to the right.” The Supreme Court justice is also supposed to have met “executives at Verizon and PricewaterhouseCoopers, major Republican donors and one of the leaders of the American Enterprise Institute, a pro-business conservative think tank” during one of his stays at the resort. Speaking to ProPublica regarding the findings, experts said although no formal code of conduct on the Supreme Court particularly thwarts Thomas from taking such trips, under the Ethics in Government Act of 1978, justices, like federal judges, must report a financial disclosure each year that lists gifts of more than $415 in avoidance of even an “appearance of impropriety.” How have the Democratic and Republican leaders reacted to the revelations? Soon after the publication of the report, several Democratic leaders and Thomas’ critics called for his impeachment, NYT reported. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a congresswoman from New York, tweeted: “This is beyond party or partisanship. This degree of corruption is shocking – almost cartoonish. Thomas must be impeached. Barring some dramatic change, this is what the [chief justice John] Roberts court will be known for: rank corruption, erosion of democracy, and the stripping of human rights.” The revelations have also escalated the demand for passing a bill that would create an ethical conduct code for Supreme Court justices and a special counsel to investigate ethics issues, Al Jazeera said. Talking about the report, Senator Dick Durbin, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said, “The highest court in the land shouldn’t have the lowest ethical standards”. He added that the reported behaviour “is simply inconsistent with the ethical standards the American people expect of any public servant, let alone a Justice of the Supreme Court”. Meanwhile, Republican politicians have either remained silent on the issue or spoken in support of Thomas. One of them is Congressman Darrell Issa, who chairs the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Courts and has defended the justice. According to CNN, he said, “The American left has waged a 30 years’ war on Clarence Thomas and his family. And all the while his character, integrity, and sense of humour have remained steadfast, resolute, and intact.” This isn’t the first time that Thomas has landed in the soup. Most recently, he faced the heat from his critics after he refused to recuse himself as the court heard cases in connection to the 2021 Capitol attack, despite his wife’s support for efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results. Ginni is a conservative activist and founder of a Tea Party group, which was paid half a million dollars by Crow in 2011.
