Supreme Court docket Justice Clarence Thomas went on two extra journeys offered by Texas billionaire and conservative donor Harlan Crow than he beforehand disclosed, in accordance with a Senate Democrat-led 20-month investigation into ethics practices on the Supreme Court docket launched on Saturday. Thomas didn’t embody the journeys in his previous monetary kinds, and, in accordance with the committee, they solely heard about them after threatening to subpoena Crow.
Democratic workers members of the Judiciary Committee concluded their investigation with a 93-page report—together with about 800 pages of paperwork—that delves into what they describe as an “moral disaster” of the courtroom’s personal making.
In an announcement after the report turned public on Saturday, Michael Zona, a spokesman for Crow, denounced the inquiry as “political, partisan, and unconstitutional from the beginning” and held that his shopper had turned over the data “voluntarily.”
The extra journeys on Crow’s dime have been one of many “few new revelations in a report that in any other case largely summarized details about largess accepted by justices — and failures to reveal it — that had already turn out to be public,” the New York Instances’ Charlie Savage studies.
The 2 beforehand undisclosed journeys—one the place Thomas flew on Crow’s personal jet from Nebraska to Saranac, NY for a five-day retreat at one of many billionaire’s residences and one other the place the justice spent the evening on Crow’s yacht after being flown from Washington, DC to New Jersey for the dedication of a statue—each befell in 2021. The just lately unveiled itinerary is the most recent revelations in opposition to Thomas, who has come beneath hearth for reportedly accepting thousands and thousands of {dollars} in presents.
In response to the Judiciary Committee report, Thomas has accepted lavish presents from rich benefactors, “a number of of whom had enterprise earlier than the Court docket, and almost all of whom first met Thomas after he joined the Court docket,” since his affirmation in 1991.
“The quantity, worth, and extravagance of the presents accepted by Justice Thomas,” the report reads, “haven’t any comparability in trendy American historical past.”
Following the loss of life of Justice Antonin Scalia in 2016 throughout a free keep at one other Texas businessman’s looking lodge, members of the Supreme Court docket have come beneath elevated scrutiny about how they disclose—or don’t—these sorts of presents. That scrutiny grew exponentially when, within the spring of 2023, ProPublica launched a collection of investigations into Justice Thomas and Crow’s decades-long relationship.
Drawing from flight information, inner paperwork distributed to Crow’s workers, and interviews with dozens of individuals “starting from his superyacht’s workers to members of the secretive Bohemian Membership to an Indonesian scuba diving teacher,” ProPublica discovered that “Crow’s entry to the justice extends to anybody the businessman chooses to ask alongside” together with “company executives and political activists.” (Following ProPublica’s reporting, this previous summer time, Thomas amended his monetary disclosure for 2019 to incorporate different journeys involving Crow, writing that he “inadvertently omitted” them on his earlier studies.)
