Supreme Court Justice Issues DANGEROUS STATEMENT [ “I know this is a controversial view, but I’m willing to say it ... No provision in the Constitution gives them the authority to regulate the Supreme Court — period.”] and Democrats FIGHT BACK
by Michael Popok
MeidasTouch
Aug 5, 2023
Michael Popok of Legal AF reports on the battle brewing between Supreme Court Justice Sam Alito and Senator democrats, as Alito tells the Wall Street Journal that Congress is powerless to impose a code of ethics and conduct on the Supreme Court, and Senator Murphy fires back on national television.
Transcript
go to something that you and your
Democratic colleagues are working on in
the Senate and that is a code of conduct
for the Supreme Court I mean this is
something you introduce regularly but we
did get a response this week from
Supreme Court Justice Samuel lolito and
he said quote I know this is a
controversial view but I'm willing to
say it no provision in the Constitution
gives them meaning Congress the
authority to regulate the Supreme Court
period what do you think he is saying
there and what is your response
first of all it's just stunningly wrong
and and he
um should know that more than anyone
else because his seat on the Supreme
Court exists only because of an Act
passed by Congress it is Congress that
establishes the number of justices on
the Supreme Court it is Congress that
has passed in the past requirements for
justices to disclose certain information
and so it is just wrong on the facts to
say that Congress doesn't have anything
to do with the rules guiding the Supreme
Court in fact from the very beginning
Congress has set those rules but it is
even more disturbing that Alito feels
the need to insert himself into a
congressional debate and it is just more
evidence that these justices on the
Supreme Court these conservative
justices just see themselves as
politicians they just see themselves as
a second legislative body that has just
as much power and right to impose their
political will on the country as
Congress does they're going to bend the
law in order to impose their right-wing
view of how the country should work on
the rest of us and it's why we need to
pass this Common Sense ethics
legislation to at least make sure we
know that these guys aren't in bed
having their Lifestyles paid for by
conservative donors as we have
unfortunately seen uh in these latest
Revelations
this is Michael popock legally AF that
video sets up the Battle Royale between
the Supreme Court Sam Alito and the
Senate Democrats over whether we are
finally once and for all going to have a
U.S Supreme Court that adheres to a code
of conduct a code of ethics mandatory
disqualification the disclosure of
Financial
inter-relationships and entanglements
between parties before the court and
judges sitting up on that bench are we
going to have that or are we not are we
a country of law or of men which is it
it can't be both and this constant
ridiculous struggle where the Supreme
Court says we're we're above ethics
we're above codes of responsibility
really I mean last I looked you were
people human beings that put on your
pants one at a time and you're given the
highest honor in the the country
being confirmed to be one of nine U.S
Supreme Court Justices for a lifetime
appointment you don't think that comes
along with responsibility
certainly Chris Murphy does and Chris
Murphy's just schooled judge Alito and
told him I don't know what you're
talking about it is that he's
flabbergasted by two things one the fact
that Alito who's supposed to be part of
the judicial branch has intervened in
the world of politics and is effectively
lobbying Congress and getting in the
middle of the legislative branch
separation of powers co-equal branches
occupying their own spheres you're not
supposed to color outside the lines and
do it so blatantly and transparently
it's the only thing transparent about
San molito is his transparent lobbying
politically because he's trying to tell
his bosses in Congress because they are
and Chris Murphy just told them why
um that he's above the law that he's a
below he's above ethics and he's above
transparency when it comes to his
financial entanglements with right wing
people
so you saw how we got there that was
Chris Murphy today on or a Sunday
morning talk show responding to Sam
Alito but the Wall Street Journal
article was from a couple of days ago
and that article written by uh Paul
Rifkin and James tarante is entitled
Samuel Alito the Supreme Court's a plane
spoken Defender that was the title of
the article and buried in the article
which was a four-hour interview that Sam
Leto gave it was like a very fawning
puff piece put out by the Wall Street
Journal four hours calling Sam Alito at
one point and important Justice with a
distinctive uh stop interpretive style
that's one way of putting it but during
that interview he said and I quote and
you can hear it in Chris Murphy's video
that I played that uh he says I know
this is a controversial thing to say but
Congress nowhere in the Constitution no
there's no provision of the Constitution
that gives Congress the authority to
regulate the Supreme Court period
meaning back off you don't have the
right or the ability to impose a code of
conduct or code of ethics on the Supreme
Court and you heard Chris Murphy said
what are you talking about it is
Congress
it is congress's Power by which Sam
Alito and the others their seat even
exists right that was an act of Congress
it's an act of Congress that sets the
number of Supreme Court Justices its
Congress that passed and imposes a
financial disclosure obligations on the
Supreme Court and it's Congress that
controls the purse string all the money
that John Roberts is spending as the
head of the of the Judiciary the
judicial branch for all of its court
system and Court personnel and judges
and clerks and courthouses you ever seen
some of these courthouses these
Limestone buildings running three four
five eight hundred million dollars a
piece in cities that has to be approved
through Congress okay they don't have
their own slush fund not that I'm aware
of to pay for that so to say that
Congress has to back out and not have
oversight over a branch for which they
fund
right just shows you the depth of
immorality and really intellectual
dishonesty being practiced by San bolito
and the others Sam Alito who who of
course got caught up over the summer in
the ethics Scandal it's not just
Clarence Thomas taking millions of
dollars of vacations with right-wing
extremists and Nazi memorabilia
collectors like uh the heir of the
travel Crow fortune and not disclosing
it or selling his property including his
family Homestead another vacation
property to other right-wing Maga people
who have business in front of the Court
San Molino did it too he's taken Alaskan
you know going up being you know
glamping luxury camping trips in uh in
Fishing lodges that the average person
would never be able to afford paid for
it by you know the founders of the
Federalist Society you know he's dying
in private homes with people on the
right-wing Christian right who have
business in front of the court without
disclosing it it so it's of course Sam
Alito is hurt by it but don't forget who
Sam Alito is he's also the one that
probably leaked through his office the
Dobbs decision when it was in draft form
in order to ensure that it would be uh
voted in past in in past right taking
away a constitutional right for a woman
to choose in a bodily autonomy that
Dom's decision not Sam malito and good
on Chris Murphy and Sheldon Whitehouse
for taking on the U.S Supreme Court
because if they don't do it who's going
to you see the you see the
megalomaniacal approach by the U.S
Supreme Court we're above it all
really you were just human beings when
you were being confirmed and begging for
the job saying anything that would get
you through the confirmation process
even things that we now know were untrue
about your respect for precedent
we know you lied your way most of you
lied your way through
the confirmation hearings that you each
had Clarence Thomas We Know What You Did
related to your prior sex harassment and
discrimination allegations and Anita
Hill we'll leave that aside for a minute
the rest of you lied about what you
would do if you ever faced with a
challenge to Roe v Wade
and so and you've got a lifetime
appointment
and then you're telling me we also can't
regulate you we can't make what you do
transparent we can't mandate how you're
going to be
um disqualified that is what Senate Bill
359 does Sheldon White House's bill
that's what we're talking about right
that is the Supreme Court ethics recusal
and transparency act and as a side note
as a side note to Chris Murphy Senator
Murphy you just heard from he has
literally introduced every year for the
last 10 years a similar Bill to add a
code of conduct to the U.S Supreme Court
and its justices it's gotten shot down
every time whether whether Democrats
were in control or Republicans are in
control there's Chris Murphy you know
offering that bill but now with all the
spotlight for all of the
um conflicts of interests and financial
entanglement that we've seen primarily
on the right-wing Maga Supreme Court
it's time for the Senate to pass Senate
Bill 359. the Democrats have the votes
they have the president waiting to sign
it and it needs to be done and people
like Sam Alito need to take their big
noses and get it out of politics and
lobbying you know you don't see John
Roberts doing that John Roberts refused
to appear in front of the senate
committee because he said it would be
political and there's a separate nation
of powers San molito said well I've
given a four-hour interview with a Wall
Street Journal I'll say whatever I want
right and as soon as Sheldon White House
pulls you in with a subpoena to the
senate committee and Chris Murphy joins
you're going to say I can't make it
right Sam
is that right
you're going to say you're not available
separation of powers wouldn't be
appropriate
then it's not appropriate for you to get
on and interview with the Wall Street
Journal and have you attack Congress and
they're what they're only trying to do
for the American people which is to have
a out of control Supreme Court a rogue
Supreme Court reigned in and subject to
the exact same code of ethics and code
of conduct that house members senators
and every other judge in America state
or federal is subject to that's all we
want
Supreme Court and you're and I'm sorry
that you think you're above it all in
your Ivory Tower
but if you want to start rebuilding any
level of credibility with the American
people that that branch of government
literally has none at this point this
would be a good starting place don't
give interviews to attack s 359 the bill
and the Senate support it and Justice
Roberts you lead you be the moral leader
do that too we'll continue to keep your
feet to the fire here on hot digs just
like this one only on the Midas touch
Network that's where me Michael popock
that's where all that's where I do all
my work at the intersection of Law and
politics watch us on legal AF every
Wednesday and Saturday because we pull
all this together these kind of Stories
We curate them at the intersection of
U.S law and politics follow me on all
things social media at Ms poke this is
Michael popock legal AF reporting
Clarence Thomas’s Billionaire Benefactor Collects Hitler Art
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Re: Clarence Thomas’s Billionaire Benefactor Collects Hitler
by admin » Sun Aug 06, 2023 12:05 am
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Re: Clarence Thomas’s Billionaire Benefactor Collects Hitler
by admin » Sat Aug 12, 2023 10:43 pm
Florida schools will begin using Clarence Thomas as an example of a black man who developed great wealth and social standing as a result of being owned by rich white men.
-- Charles Carreon, 8/11/23
********************
DeSantis doubles down on claim that some Blacks benefited from slavery: GOP presidential candidate draws renewed criticism after suggesting slavery helped African Americans develop skills such as being a blacksmith
by Kevin Sullivan and Lori Rozsa
Washington Post
July 22, 2023 at 5:32 p.m. EDT
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Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is intensifying his efforts to de-emphasize racism in his state’s public school curriculum by arguing that some Black people benefited from being enslaved and defending his state’s new African American history standards that civil rights leaders and scholars say misrepresents centuries of U.S. reality.
“They’re probably going to show that some of the folks that eventually parlayed, you know, being a blacksmith into doing things later in life,” DeSantis said on Friday in response to reporters’ questions while standing in front of a nearly all-White crowd of supporters.
DeSantis, a GOP presidential candidate who is lagging in polls against the front-runner, former president Donald Trump, and is trying to reset his campaign, quickly drew criticism from educators and even some in his party. He has built his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination on attacking what he calls the radical liberal policies of President Biden and the Democratic Party, but the latest remarks could alienate Black voters just as the GOP tries to court them.
Former U.S. Rep. Will Hurd of Texas, who announced last month that he was joining the race for the GOP nomination, blasted the idea that enslaved people were able to use slavery as some kind of training program.
“Slavery wasn’t a jobs program that taught beneficial skills,” Hurd, the son of a Black father and a White mother, tweeted. “It was literally dehumanizing and subjugated people as property because they lacked any rights or freedoms.”
DeSantis, however, is continuing to defend Florida’s new curriculum, which covers a broad range of topics and includes the assertion for middle school instruction that “slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”
DeSantis said he “wasn’t involved” in writing the new teaching materials, which took effect this week. But he credited “a lot of scholars” with creating “the most robust standards in African American history probably anywhere in the country.”
Civil rights leaders, educators and others have expressed revulsion at the idea that enslaved people benefited from the experience.
As Biden’s running mate, Vice President Harris has stepped up her attack-dog role, and on Friday traveled to Jacksonville to assail DeSantis’s policies in his home state. She emphasized that slavery involved rape, torture and “some of the worst examples of depriving people of humanity in our world.”
Florida State Rep. Fentrice Driskell, a Tampa Democrat who last year became the first Black woman to become House Democratic Leader, called DeSantis’s latest remarks a continuation of DeSantis’s “assault on Black history.”
“Let’s really dissect what he’s saying here,” she said. “He’s saying that to be ripped away from your homelands and brought to another country against your will, or to be born into the atrocity of the dehumanizing institution that was slavery, that those horrors are some way somehow outweighed by the benefit that you get a trade. Are you kidding me?”
DeSantis issued a statement Friday saying, “Democrats like Kamala Harris have to lie about Florida’s educational standards to cover for their agenda of indoctrinating students and pushing sexual topics onto children.” His campaign did not respond to an email on Saturday requesting comment.
Some on the right defended DeSantis, including Fox News host Jesse Watters.
“No one is arguing slaves benefited from slavery,” Watters said Friday on his prime time show. “No one is saying that. It’s not true. They are teaching how Black people develop skills during slavery in some instances that can be applied for their own personal benefit.”
Biden campaign co-chairman Cedric L. Richmond attacked DeSantis’s defense of the new Florida curriculum as “disgusting.” He added in a statement on Saturday that it was “a symptom of the extremism that’s infected the Republican candidates running for president. There’s no debate over slavery. It was utterly evil with zero redeeming qualities.”
Marvin Dunn, a professor emeritus at Florida International University and author of “A History of Florida: Through Black Eyes,” said DeSantis would gain no political advantage from his argument because “it is so outrageous that people are going to reject it.”
“These children know in their hearts and in their minds that slavery was evil,” he said.
“One of the main things about slavery, beyond the physical damage that it did to people of so many generations, was that it prevented people from becoming what they could have become,” he said.
“So what if you became a carpenter or a blacksmith or a good maid? Your chances of that were not determined by you, it was determined by somebody else. That’s not a rationalization for enslavement.”
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Re: Clarence Thomas’s Billionaire Benefactor Collects Hitler
by admin » Sun Aug 13, 2023 10:28 pm
Clarence Thomas’ 38 Vacations: The Other Billionaires Who Have Treated the Supreme Court Justice to Luxury Travel
by Brett Murphy and Alex Mierjeski
Propublica
Aug. 10, 5:45 a.m. EDT
The fullest accounting yet shows how Thomas has secretly reaped the benefits from a network of wealthy and well-connected patrons that is far more extensive than previously understood.
During his three decades on the Supreme Court, Clarence Thomas has enjoyed steady access to a lifestyle most Americans can only imagine. A cadre of industry titans and ultrawealthy executives have treated him to far-flung vacations aboard their yachts, ushered him into the premium suites at sporting events and sent their private jets to fetch him — including, on more than one occasion, an entire 737. It’s a stream of luxury that is both more extensive and from a wider circle than has been previously understood.
Like clockwork, Thomas’ leisure activities have been underwritten by benefactors who share the ideology that drives his jurisprudence. Their gifts include:
At least 38 destination vacations, including a previously unreported voyage on a yacht around the Bahamas; 26 private jet flights, plus an additional eight by helicopter; a dozen VIP passes to professional and college sporting events, typically perched in the skybox; two stays at luxury resorts in Florida and Jamaica; and one standing invitation to an uber-exclusive golf club overlooking the Atlantic coast.
This accounting of Thomas’ travel, revealed for the first time here from an array of previously unavailable information, is the fullest to date of the generosity that has regularly afforded Thomas a lifestyle far beyond what his income could provide. And it is almost certainly an undercount.
While some of the hospitality, such as stays in personal homes, may not have required disclosure, Thomas appears to have violated the law by failing to disclose flights, yacht cruises and expensive sports tickets, according to ethics experts.
Perhaps even more significant, the pattern exposes consistent violations of judicial norms, experts, including seven current and former federal judges appointed by both parties, told ProPublica. “In my career I don’t remember ever seeing this degree of largesse given to anybody,” said Jeremy Fogel, a former federal judge who served for years on the judicial committee that reviews judges’ financial disclosures. “I think it’s unprecedented.”
This year, ProPublica revealed Texas real estate billionaire Harlan Crow’s generosity toward Thomas, including vacations, private jet flights, gifts, the purchase of his mother’s house in Georgia and tuition payments. In an April statement, the justice defended his relationship with Crow. The Crows “are among our dearest friends,” Thomas said. “As friends do, we have joined them on a number of family trips.”
The New York Times recently surfaced VIP treatment from wealthy businessmen he met through the Horatio Alger Association, an exclusive nonprofit. Among them were David Sokol, a former top executive at Berkshire Hathaway, and H. Wayne Huizenga, a billionaire who turned Blockbuster and Waste Management into national goliaths. (The Times noted Thomas gives access to the Supreme Court building for Horatio Alger events; ProPublica confirmed that the access has cost $1,500 or more in donations per person.)
Records and interviews show Thomas had another benefactor, oil baron Paul “Tony” Novelly, whose gifts to the justice have not previously been reported. ProPublica’s totals in this article include trips from Crow.
Each of these men — Novelly, Huizenga, Sokol and Crow — appears to have first met Thomas after he ascended to the Supreme Court. With the exception of Crow, their names are nowhere in Thomas’ financial disclosures, where justices are required by law to publicly report most gifts.
From left to right, H. Wayne Huizenga, David Sokol and Paul “Tony” Novelly. These business magnates apparently came into Clarence Thomas’ life after he was appointed to one of the most sacrosanct positions of power in American government. Credit: Joel Auerbach/Getty Images, Bloomberg/Getty Images and the Horatio Alger Association Website
The total value of the undisclosed trips they’ve given Thomas since 1991, the year he was appointed to the Supreme Court, is difficult to measure. But it’s likely in the millions.
Huizenga sent his personal 737 to pick Thomas up and bring him to South Florida at least twice, according to John Wener, a former flight attendant and chef on board the plane. If he were picked up in D.C., the five-hour round trip would have cost at least $130,000 each time had Thomas chartered the jet himself, according to estimates from jet charter companies. In February 2016, Thomas flew on Crow’s private jet from Washington to New Haven, Connecticut, before heading back on the jet just three hours later. ProPublica previously reported the flight, but newly obtained U.S. Marshals Service records reveal its purpose: Thomas met with several Yale Law School deans for a tour of the room where they planned to display a portrait of the justice. (Crow’s foundation also gave the school $105,000, earmarked for the “Justice Thomas Portrait Fund,” tax filings show.)
Don Fox, the former general counsel of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics and the senior ethics official in the executive branch, said, “It’s just the height of hypocrisy to wear the robes and live the lifestyle of a billionaire.” Taxpayers, he added, have the right to expect that Supreme Court justices are not living on the dime of others.
Fox, who worked under both Democratic and Republican administrations, said he advised every new political appointee the same thing: Your wealthy friends are the ones you had before you were appointed. “You don’t get to acquire any new ones,” he told them.
Thomas and Novelly did not respond to a detailed list of questions for this story. Huizenga died in 2018 and his son, who is the president of the family’s holding company, also did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
In a statement to ProPublica, Sokol said he’s been close friends with the Thomases for 21 years and acknowledged traveling with and occasionally hosting them. He defended the justice as upright and ethical. “We have never once discussed any pending court matter,” Sokol said. “Our conversations have always revolved around helping young people, sports, and family matters.”
“As to the use of private aviation,” he added, “I believe that given security concerns all of the Supreme Court justices should either fly privately or on governmental aircraft.”
The justices have said they follow court rules prohibiting them from accepting gifts from a group of people so frequently that “a reasonable person would believe that the public office is being used for private gain.” But what actually constitutes a gift under those rules is ambiguous and, in practice, justices have few restrictions on what they can accept. Other members of the court have accepted travel underwritten by wealthy businessmen and speaking invitations at universities. Stephen Breyer accepted a flight to a Nantucket wedding from a Democratic megadonor. Ruth Bader Ginsburg took a tour of Israel and Jordan paid for by an Israeli billionaire. Those gifts are public because Breyer and Ginsburg disclosed them.
Thomas, however, is apparently an extreme outlier for the volume and frequency of all the undisclosed vacations he’s received. He once complained that he sacrificed wealth to sit on the court, though he depicted the choice as a matter of conscience. “The job is not worth doing for what they pay,” he told the bar association in Savannah, Georgia, in 2001, “but it is worth doing for the principle.”
To track Thomas’ relationships and travel, ProPublica examined flight data, emails from airport and university officials, security detail records, tax court filings, meeting minutes and a trove of photographs from personal albums, including cards that Thomas’ wife, Ginni, sent to friends. In addition, reporters interviewed more than 100 eyewitnesses and other sources: jet and helicopter pilots, flight attendants, airport workers, yacht crew members, security guards, photographers, waitresses, caterers, chefs, drivers, river rafting guides and C-suite executives.
ProPublica has not identified any legal cases that Huizenga, Sokol or Novelly had at the Supreme Court during their documented relationships with Thomas, although they all work in industries significantly impacted by the court’s decisions.
In a small-circulation biography given to Huizenga’s friends and family, Thomas acknowledged that he and Huizenga discussed some of the billionaire’s companies but said their relationship was never transactional. “It wasn’t that kind of friendship,” he told the interviewer. The justice said they’d prefer to go to a small restaurant in a strip mall or sit on the billionaire’s lawn and drink tea or diet soda.
“We are in a society where everything is quid pro quo,” Thomas said, but not with the Huizengas. “I don’t do anything for them and they can’t do anything for me.”
“Four Lucky Couples”
On Labor Day weekend 2019, Thomas boarded a private plane in Washington, D.C., for the first leg of a sojourn out West. The vacation had been months in the making and, thanks to Sokol, it was all taken care of. He’s hosted the Thomases virtually every summer for a decade.
The first stop was the Great Plains. It was the home opener at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, which Ginni Thomas had attended before transferring. The Thomases were joined there by other couples, including one of the justice’s most vocal advocates, Mark Paoletta, who then worked for the federal government, and his wife.
Sokol, a major university donor who graduated from the Omaha campus, arranged for the group to attend the football and volleyball games with all-access passes. Clarence Thomas met with the football team the day before the game. The group walked out of the tunnel before kickoff. During halftime, they stood on the sidelines to watch the marching band perform, at one point posing for a picture in the end zone: “The Sokols took four lucky couples to the first Nebraska footbal game of the season,” Ginni Thomas wrote in one of the card captions.
Sokol, back left, has arranged for Thomas and others to attend several sporting events at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. The invitations come with all-access passes and seats in a luxury suite. The justice’s wife, Ginni, has memorialized some of these trips in cards to friends. Credit: Obtained by ProPublica
Sokol runs a private equity firm and now also chairs a holding company that owns large international shipping and power utility corporations. He resigned from Berkshire Hathaway in 2011 amid an internal investigation by the company that found he had violated its insider trading policy. (At the time, Sokol denied wrongdoing and said his resignation was unrelated to the episode; he was never indicted.)
That Saturday, the group watched both the football and volleyball games from luxury suites. The football skybox, which typically costs $40,000 annually, belonged to Tom Osborne, a former Republican congressman who was also the head coach of the team for 25 years. Hosting the Thomases had ripple effects. A local priest requested a ticket for his 87-year-old mother, but the volleyball coach had to tell him none was available. “All of our tickets have been taken for Clarence Thomas and his group,” the coach wrote.
The Thomases have been treated to at least seven University of Nebraska-Lincoln games — five arranged by Sokol — in recent years. The Times first reported on Thomas’ appearances at some of them.
Thomas has never reported any of those tickets on his yearly financial forms. Judiciary disclosure rules require that most gifts worth more than $415 be disclosed. “It’s so obvious,” said Richard Painter, former chief White House ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush. “It all has to be reported.” ProPublica identified more than 60 federal judges who disclosed tickets to sporting events between 2003 and 2019. In 1999, Thomas disclosed private flight and accommodations for the Daytona 500 but hasn’t reported any other sporting events before or since.
In a statement, Osborne confirmed Thomas has “watched a couple of football games” in his suite, which the university had given to him. He said he is “taxed” for the use of the suite but did not answer whether Thomas has ever reimbursed him. The University of Nebraska-Lincoln did not respond to requests for comment.
On Labor Day weekend, 2019, the group sat in former football coach and ex-congressman Tom Osborne’s suite. Osborne told ProPublica he and the justice became friends years ago, when he was in office. Credit: Obtained by ProPublica
The day before the football game, Thomas met with the team. Sokol arranged these visits in emails with the athletic department. Credit: Twitter
On Sunday, the morning after the football game in Nebraska, Sokol flew with Thomas by private jet to Sokol’s Paintbrush Ranch just outside Jackson Hole, Wyoming. The property, valued in the low eight figures, sits in the foothills of Shadow Mountain. A local radio personality said of the estate: “This is the ultimate home and it has the most iconic view of the Tetons I’ve seen. Ever.”
Sokol also owns a waterfront mansion in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, currently worth $20.1 million, where he’s hosted the Thomases as well, according to photos of the visits. The 12,800-square-foot property includes a home theater, elevator, walk-in wine cellar and yacht docking. (In addition, Sokol and Thomas have shared an opulent lodge together while vacationing at Crow’s private lakeside resort, Camp Topridge, in the Adirondacks.)
Sokol’s ranch outside Jackson Hole, Wyoming, which he sold in 2020, is a sprawling, 9,000-square foot estate in the foothills of Shadow Mountain, designed like a lodge. Credit: Realtor Website. Personal information redacted by ProPublica.
The Thomases and others spent several days at the ranch in late summer 2019. Credit: Realtor Website. Personal information redacted by ProPublica.
In Wyoming, the Thomases fished, rafted on the Snake River and sat by a campfire overlooking the Teton Range with the other couples. At one point, the Paolettas serenaded the justice with a song they wrote about him.
Like Thomas, Paoletta did not disclose the trip on his yearly financial filings. At the time, Paoletta was general counsel and the designated ethics official at the Office of Management and Budget. In a statement, Paoletta said he wasn’t required to disclose the trip because he had reimbursed Sokol, but he did not say how much or provide documentation of those payments. “I complied with all ethics laws and regulations,” Paoletta said.
After the football game in Nebraska, Sokol flew the group, including the Thomases, to his opulent ranch overlooking the Teton Range. They rafted, fished and sat by a campfire. At one point, Mark Paoletta and his wife serenaded the justice. Credit: Obtained by ProPublica
Details of the vacation to Nebraska and Wyoming were drawn from photographs, trip planning emails and social media posts, as well as interviews with airport workers, local residents and others familiar with the travel, including river raft guides.
Since 1990, Sokol and his wife have donated more than $1 million to Republican politicians and groups, along with smaller amounts to Democrats. Last October, in New Orleans, Sokol made a direct reference to a pending Supreme Court case while addressing a group of former Horatio Alger scholarship recipients. (Thomas was not in attendance.)
The speech veered into territory that made many of those in attendance uncomfortable and left others appalled, emails and others messages show. Sokol, who has written extensively about American exceptionalism and the virtues of free enterprise, minimized slavery and systemic racism, some felt. He then criticized President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan, arguing Biden had overstepped the government’s authority, according to a recording of the speech obtained by ProPublica.
“It’s going to get overturned by the Supreme Court,” Sokol predicted, echoing a common legal commentary.
He was right. This summer, the court struck down Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan. Thomas voted in the majority.
Sokol has also hosted the Thomases and others at his mansion in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. The waterfront property, which comes with yacht docking, has a private movie theater, among other luxuries. Credit: Obtained by ProPublica
Deep Sea Fishing in the Caribbean
Nearly every spring, Novelly, a billionaire who made his fortune storing and transporting petroleum, takes his two yachts on a fishing expedition to the Bahamas’ Exuma Islands. Photographs from the trips show porcelain beaches, cerulean waters and fresh mahi-mahi. Friends and family come and go for days at a time.
Three of Novelly’s former yacht workers, including a captain, told ProPublica they recall Thomas coming on board the vessels multiple times in recent years. Novelly’s local chauffeur in the Bahamas said his company once picked Thomas up from the billionaire’s private jet and drove him to the marina where one of the yachts, Le Montrachet, frequently docks.
Le Montrachet, named after the premium French wine, is a 126-foot luxury vessel complete with a full bar, multiple dining areas, a baby grand piano, accommodations for 10 guests and a handful of smaller fishing boats and jet skis. Novelly charges about $60,000 a week to outsiders who want to charter it.
Novelly often takes his luxury yacht, Le Montrachet, on fishing expeditions around the Bahamas’ Exuma Islands. The billionaire’s former yacht workers said Thomas was one of his guests. Credit: CharterWorld Website
Another past guest on Novelly’s yacht is “Alligator” Ron Bergeron, one of the biggest land and roadway developers in Florida. Around 2018, Novelly and Thomas went to Bergeron’s private ranch on the edge of the Everglades — a sprawling, gated estate with centuries-old cypress trees and an 1800s-style saloon on site. He described Novelly as a man who likes to share his success with others. “He’s very generous with all his friends,” Bergeron told ProPublica.
Bergeron said his conversations with Thomas at the ranch were strictly about charity work and not business. “You’re talking about a great man,” Bergeron said, “who gives his time to make a difference for America.”
Since 1999, Novelly’s family and companies have publicly disclosed at least $500,000 to conservative causes and Republican candidates in federal elections. (Before then, he had given to both parties.)
Novelly, who recently stepped down from his CEO roles, ran his business affairs aggressively, ending up on the wrong side of the government in at least two cases. He spends much of his time between St. Louis and Boca Raton, Florida, where he has a 23,000 square-foot palatial estate appraised at $22.2 million. In 2002, Novelly established residency and a holding company in the Virgin Islands. During a hearing with local officials, Novelly described the arrangement there as a “quid pro quo,” meaning the U.S. territory received a boost to the local economy in return for offering substantial tax breaks. The IRS would later call it an “abusive tax avoidance scheme” and pursued Novelly for millions in back taxes and penalties. Novelly denied the characterization and eventually settled with the government for a negotiated amount.
There’s no evidence his friendship with Thomas helped Novelly in one of his most significant disputes. In 2005, the Justice Department sued Novelly’s company, Apex Oil, because its corporate predecessor had contributed to a massive groundwater contamination beneath an Illinois village and then Apex refused to help with the cleanup. Apex argued the spill had occurred before the company went through a bankruptcy years earlier. Several judges ruled against Apex, which eventually appealed to the Supreme Court in 2010. The justices declined to hear the case, and the company had to pay about $150 million to help remove oil from the soil.
It’s not clear how Thomas voted in the case because such votes are not typically public. The vacations ProPublica identified appear to have occurred after the case was resolved.
In 2020, Apex Oil, Sokol and Crow helped fund a documentary defending Thomas as a response to an HBO film that was critical of the justice. Sokol called the HBO movie a “Molotov cocktail into our homes” and a prime example of America’s eroding civility.
The “Most Coveted” Invitation in the World
Thomas’ first billionaire benefactor is likely H. Wayne Huizenga, believed to be the only person in American history to build three separate Fortune 500 companies. One of the three was AutoNation, which Huizenga founded in 1996 before building it into the largest car dealer in the country. Between 1998 and 1999, Huizenga’s holding company spent $500,000 lobbying federal agencies that regulate the automotive industry, according to OpenSecrets data. Over the years, the Huizenga family and companies gave millions to state and federal Republican candidates and once threw a fundraiser for the Florida GOP that helped keep the party afloat for months.
The billionaire was known to regularly lavish gifts and perks on those in his orbit. He routinely took friends on opulent vacations. He paid his employees handsomely and sometimes covered their bills and personal expenses. On a whim, Huizenga once handed box tickets for the opera, which were worth thousands, to his caterer, Bob Leonardi.
“I led the life of a multimillionaire without being one,” Leonardi said.
Huizenga’s employees frequently saw Thomas around the billionaire’s mansion in Fort Lauderdale. Bob Leonardi, middle, was Huizenga’s caterer for years and said his boss liked to share his wealth with friends and employees. Credit: Obtained by ProPublica
For 20 years, Thomas benefited from Huizenga’s attention as well, availing himself of the billionaire’s fleet of aircraft and other luxuries. Huizenga took Thomas to see the Miami Dolphins and Florida Panthers several times between the mid-’90s and mid-2000s, according to interviews and photographs. Huizenga owned both teams at the time.
Executives saw Thomas around Huizenga’s office often. Richard Rochon, the former president of Huizenga Holdings, said Thomas once shadowed the billionaire during meetings. “He just wants to see what I do every day,” Rochon recalled Huizenga saying.
On at least two occasions, Thomas attended Huizenga’s birthday and Christmas parties, which the billionaire held inside his private hangar at the Fort Lauderdale airport. Van Poole, a lobbyist and former chairman of the Florida GOP, recalled riding down the elevator at the nearby Hyatt Pier 66 hotel — which Huizenga also controlled — when the Thomases stepped in with a security detail. The group discussed college sports and then traveled to the party together, Poole said.
Thomas occasionally flew on Huizenga’s helicopters, sometimes taking off from the roof of the corporate headquarters, and at least one of his Gulfstream jets around Florida, according to his former pilots. But the billionaire’s most luxurious planes were a pair of 737 jets he had retrofitted like a lounge, complete with recliners, love seats, mahogany dining and card tables and gourmet food.
At least two times in the mid 2000s, Huizenga sent one of them to pick up Thomas and deliver him to Fort Lauderdale, said John Wener, the flight attendant on board.
Huizenga owned a fleet of aircraft that he kept in a private hangar at the Fort Lauderdale airport. Two of the planes were 737 jets he had retrofitted to look like lounges. He sent those planes to pick up Thomas at least twice and deliver him to South Florida, according to a flight attendant on board. Credit: Lynne Sladky/AP Photo
Wener recalled chatting with the justice about his nomination to the Supreme Court and the tumultuous Senate confirmation hearings after Thomas’ former aide, Anita Hill, accused him of sexual harassment. “He said, ‘Just imagine a job interview and you’re in front of 100 people that hate you,’” Wener recalled Thomas remarking. “‘How would that interview go?’”
In the early 2000s, Huizenga gave Thomas something that was priceless at the time: a standing invitation to his exclusive, members-only golf club, the Floridian. Designed by golf legend Gary Player, the course was lined with cottages for Huizenga’s friends, a yacht marina for them to dock and a helipad if they wanted to fly in. One family friend told the Huizenga family biographer that the Floridian was “the most coveted private golf invitation in the world.” Those who worked and played there said the membership rolls were a Rolodex of the rich, famous and powerful: From Michael Douglas and Rush Limbaugh to Michael Bloomberg and former Vice President Dan Quayle. Donald Trump once asked to be a member but Huizenga spurned him, according to three of Huizenga’s former employees.
All 200-plus members were “honorary” and didn’t pay dues — Huizenga covered everything. “It was a little slice of heaven, a magical place,” former media personality Matt Lauer told the biographer. “You drove through the gates and it was this fairytale land that he had created.”
One of the crown jewels of Huizenga’s business empire was the Floridian golf and yacht club. When Huizenga owned the property, he gave honorary invitations to some 200 close friends without charging them an initiation fee or dues. Thomas was seen by several employees at the club over the years. Credit: Floridian Website
It’s unclear if Thomas was a member or Huizenga’s frequent guest with similar privileges. The billionaire’s former personal photographer and two former golf pros at the club recalled seeing Thomas there multiple times over the years. One of Huizenga’s helicopter pilots said he had picked the justice up from the property. And a fifth employee, a former waitress and concierge, said she once served Thomas and Huizenga, who were wearing golf attire, as they dined alone in the enormous waterfront clubhouse for lunch. “Have you met a Supreme Court justice?” Huizenga asked the waitress before she took their order. “This is Clarence Thomas.”
Today, the Floridian, which the Huizenga family sold in 2010 before it underwent renovations, has a $150,000 initiation fee.
Paying for Access to the Supreme Court Chambers
Thomas first met Huizenga at a formal gala in Washington, D.C., in 1992, when they were both inducted into the Horatio Alger Association. Henry Kissinger and Maya Angelou were among the other honorees that year. The organization, named after the 19th-century novelist who popularized rags-to-riches folklore, gives millions in college scholarships each year and also brings together some of the country’s wealthiest, self-made business tycoons for opulent events. (In real life, Alger was a minister on Cape Cod who resigned from his parish after he was credibly accused of molesting boys.)
“We were proud to honor Justice Thomas more than 30 years ago,” an association spokesperson said in a statement, “and remain grateful for his continued involvement in our organization.” She said Thomas spends countless hours mentoring scholarship recipients.
Thomas met Huizenga in 1992 at their induction ceremony in Washington, D.C. They became close friends for decades afterward and the billionaire, who died in 2018, regularly hosted Thomas in Florida. Thomas acknowledged the pair occasionally talked about business but said their relationship was never transactional. Credit: Obtained by ProPublica
Thomas appears to have met Huizenga, Sokol, Novelly and Bergeron through the organization. Several of Thomas’ trips to Florida in the 2000s appear to have been connected with the association. In that time period, he joined Huizenga at Horatio Alger scholarship ceremonies in South Florida, travel that the justice disclosed in several of his yearly financial filings.
However, he never identified Huizenga in any of his disclosures. The association spokesperson confirmed to ProPublica that the billionaire hosted those events “and covered all costs involved.”
Experts said that means Thomas’ disclosures would be, at a minimum, incomplete and misleading because the rules require federal judges to identify the source of the gifts they receive. “Source means the person or entity that paid for it,” said Kathleen Clark, a legal ethics authority at Washington University in St. Louis.
Belonging to the association has had its privileges. As part of a board meeting, the Thomases once went on a lavish trip to Jamaica, where they were hosted by a wealthy donor who owned a luxury hotel atop a former sugar plantation. Johnny Cash performed. Horatio Alger Association membership itself is worth at least $200,000, according to the organization’s meeting minutes in 2007, a sum that those who nominate a new member are responsible for raising in that person’s honor. The association spokesperson said there was no requirement to raise money for new members back when Thomas was inducted.
Thomas has likely helped the group earn many times that figure since then. Every year, the justice hosts an event for members inside the Supreme Court’s Great Hall. The Times previously reported that the event afforded the Horatio Alger Association unusual access to the court.
Membership into the Horatio Alger Association itself comes with a price tag. The association requires members to donate at least $200,000 on behalf of new inductees. A spokesperson said that when Thomas was inducted there wasn’t a donation requirement. Credit: Obtained by ProPublica. Highlights by ProPublica
ProPublica examined boxes of the association’s historical archives, including financial records that show the group has required donations of at least $1,500 — $7,500 for nonmembers — to attend the Supreme Court event. In 2004, those who donated $100,000 for a table at the main ceremony got 10 seats inside the Supreme Court. In the judiciary’s code of conduct — which is general guidance that does not apply to Supreme Court justices, though they say they consult it — there is explicit language advising federal judges against using their position to fundraise for outside organizations.
Financial records from the Horatio Alger Association archives show the group has been fundraising off of an event hosted by Thomas inside the Supreme Court building. Credit: Obtained by ProPublica. Highlights by ProPublica.
But that’s what Thomas has done, said Virginia Canter, a former government ethics lawyer who served in administrations of both parties and reviewed the association’s financial records at ProPublica’s request.
“To use the Supreme Court to fundraise for somebody’s charity is, to me, an abuse of office,” she said. Canter acknowledged the organization may do good work, but that’s besides the point, she said, because wealthy donors aren’t supposed to be able to pay thousands of dollars to visit a justice inside the courthouse walls.
“It’s pay to play,” Canter added, “isn’t it?”
Do you have any tips on the Supreme Court? Brett Murphy can be reached by email at [email protected] and by Signal or WhatsApp at 508-523-5195. Justin Elliott can be reached by email at [email protected] or by Signal or WhatsApp at 774-826-6240. Josh Kaplan can be reached by email at [email protected] and by Signal or WhatsApp at 734-834-9383.
Josh Kaplan and Justin Elliott contributed reporting.
Brett Murphy
Brett Murphy is a reporter on ProPublica’s national desk. His work uncovering a new junk science known as 911 call analysis won a George Polk Award, among other honors.
[email protected]
Alex Mierjeski
Alex is a research reporter at ProPublica.
[email protected]
@Amierjeski
by Brett Murphy and Alex Mierjeski
Propublica
Aug. 10, 5:45 a.m. EDT
The fullest accounting yet shows how Thomas has secretly reaped the benefits from a network of wealthy and well-connected patrons that is far more extensive than previously understood.
During his three decades on the Supreme Court, Clarence Thomas has enjoyed steady access to a lifestyle most Americans can only imagine. A cadre of industry titans and ultrawealthy executives have treated him to far-flung vacations aboard their yachts, ushered him into the premium suites at sporting events and sent their private jets to fetch him — including, on more than one occasion, an entire 737. It’s a stream of luxury that is both more extensive and from a wider circle than has been previously understood.
Like clockwork, Thomas’ leisure activities have been underwritten by benefactors who share the ideology that drives his jurisprudence. Their gifts include:
At least 38 destination vacations, including a previously unreported voyage on a yacht around the Bahamas; 26 private jet flights, plus an additional eight by helicopter; a dozen VIP passes to professional and college sporting events, typically perched in the skybox; two stays at luxury resorts in Florida and Jamaica; and one standing invitation to an uber-exclusive golf club overlooking the Atlantic coast.
This accounting of Thomas’ travel, revealed for the first time here from an array of previously unavailable information, is the fullest to date of the generosity that has regularly afforded Thomas a lifestyle far beyond what his income could provide. And it is almost certainly an undercount.
While some of the hospitality, such as stays in personal homes, may not have required disclosure, Thomas appears to have violated the law by failing to disclose flights, yacht cruises and expensive sports tickets, according to ethics experts.
Perhaps even more significant, the pattern exposes consistent violations of judicial norms, experts, including seven current and former federal judges appointed by both parties, told ProPublica. “In my career I don’t remember ever seeing this degree of largesse given to anybody,” said Jeremy Fogel, a former federal judge who served for years on the judicial committee that reviews judges’ financial disclosures. “I think it’s unprecedented.”
This year, ProPublica revealed Texas real estate billionaire Harlan Crow’s generosity toward Thomas, including vacations, private jet flights, gifts, the purchase of his mother’s house in Georgia and tuition payments. In an April statement, the justice defended his relationship with Crow. The Crows “are among our dearest friends,” Thomas said. “As friends do, we have joined them on a number of family trips.”
The New York Times recently surfaced VIP treatment from wealthy businessmen he met through the Horatio Alger Association, an exclusive nonprofit. Among them were David Sokol, a former top executive at Berkshire Hathaway, and H. Wayne Huizenga, a billionaire who turned Blockbuster and Waste Management into national goliaths. (The Times noted Thomas gives access to the Supreme Court building for Horatio Alger events; ProPublica confirmed that the access has cost $1,500 or more in donations per person.)
Records and interviews show Thomas had another benefactor, oil baron Paul “Tony” Novelly, whose gifts to the justice have not previously been reported. ProPublica’s totals in this article include trips from Crow.
Each of these men — Novelly, Huizenga, Sokol and Crow — appears to have first met Thomas after he ascended to the Supreme Court. With the exception of Crow, their names are nowhere in Thomas’ financial disclosures, where justices are required by law to publicly report most gifts.
From left to right, H. Wayne Huizenga, David Sokol and Paul “Tony” Novelly. These business magnates apparently came into Clarence Thomas’ life after he was appointed to one of the most sacrosanct positions of power in American government. Credit: Joel Auerbach/Getty Images, Bloomberg/Getty Images and the Horatio Alger Association Website
The total value of the undisclosed trips they’ve given Thomas since 1991, the year he was appointed to the Supreme Court, is difficult to measure. But it’s likely in the millions.
Huizenga sent his personal 737 to pick Thomas up and bring him to South Florida at least twice, according to John Wener, a former flight attendant and chef on board the plane. If he were picked up in D.C., the five-hour round trip would have cost at least $130,000 each time had Thomas chartered the jet himself, according to estimates from jet charter companies. In February 2016, Thomas flew on Crow’s private jet from Washington to New Haven, Connecticut, before heading back on the jet just three hours later. ProPublica previously reported the flight, but newly obtained U.S. Marshals Service records reveal its purpose: Thomas met with several Yale Law School deans for a tour of the room where they planned to display a portrait of the justice. (Crow’s foundation also gave the school $105,000, earmarked for the “Justice Thomas Portrait Fund,” tax filings show.)
Don Fox, the former general counsel of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics and the senior ethics official in the executive branch, said, “It’s just the height of hypocrisy to wear the robes and live the lifestyle of a billionaire.” Taxpayers, he added, have the right to expect that Supreme Court justices are not living on the dime of others.
Fox, who worked under both Democratic and Republican administrations, said he advised every new political appointee the same thing: Your wealthy friends are the ones you had before you were appointed. “You don’t get to acquire any new ones,” he told them.
Thomas and Novelly did not respond to a detailed list of questions for this story. Huizenga died in 2018 and his son, who is the president of the family’s holding company, also did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
In a statement to ProPublica, Sokol said he’s been close friends with the Thomases for 21 years and acknowledged traveling with and occasionally hosting them. He defended the justice as upright and ethical. “We have never once discussed any pending court matter,” Sokol said. “Our conversations have always revolved around helping young people, sports, and family matters.”
“As to the use of private aviation,” he added, “I believe that given security concerns all of the Supreme Court justices should either fly privately or on governmental aircraft.”
The justices have said they follow court rules prohibiting them from accepting gifts from a group of people so frequently that “a reasonable person would believe that the public office is being used for private gain.” But what actually constitutes a gift under those rules is ambiguous and, in practice, justices have few restrictions on what they can accept. Other members of the court have accepted travel underwritten by wealthy businessmen and speaking invitations at universities. Stephen Breyer accepted a flight to a Nantucket wedding from a Democratic megadonor. Ruth Bader Ginsburg took a tour of Israel and Jordan paid for by an Israeli billionaire. Those gifts are public because Breyer and Ginsburg disclosed them.
Thomas, however, is apparently an extreme outlier for the volume and frequency of all the undisclosed vacations he’s received. He once complained that he sacrificed wealth to sit on the court, though he depicted the choice as a matter of conscience. “The job is not worth doing for what they pay,” he told the bar association in Savannah, Georgia, in 2001, “but it is worth doing for the principle.”
To track Thomas’ relationships and travel, ProPublica examined flight data, emails from airport and university officials, security detail records, tax court filings, meeting minutes and a trove of photographs from personal albums, including cards that Thomas’ wife, Ginni, sent to friends. In addition, reporters interviewed more than 100 eyewitnesses and other sources: jet and helicopter pilots, flight attendants, airport workers, yacht crew members, security guards, photographers, waitresses, caterers, chefs, drivers, river rafting guides and C-suite executives.
ProPublica has not identified any legal cases that Huizenga, Sokol or Novelly had at the Supreme Court during their documented relationships with Thomas, although they all work in industries significantly impacted by the court’s decisions.
In a small-circulation biography given to Huizenga’s friends and family, Thomas acknowledged that he and Huizenga discussed some of the billionaire’s companies but said their relationship was never transactional. “It wasn’t that kind of friendship,” he told the interviewer. The justice said they’d prefer to go to a small restaurant in a strip mall or sit on the billionaire’s lawn and drink tea or diet soda.
“We are in a society where everything is quid pro quo,” Thomas said, but not with the Huizengas. “I don’t do anything for them and they can’t do anything for me.”
“Four Lucky Couples”
On Labor Day weekend 2019, Thomas boarded a private plane in Washington, D.C., for the first leg of a sojourn out West. The vacation had been months in the making and, thanks to Sokol, it was all taken care of. He’s hosted the Thomases virtually every summer for a decade.
The first stop was the Great Plains. It was the home opener at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, which Ginni Thomas had attended before transferring. The Thomases were joined there by other couples, including one of the justice’s most vocal advocates, Mark Paoletta, who then worked for the federal government, and his wife.
Sokol, a major university donor who graduated from the Omaha campus, arranged for the group to attend the football and volleyball games with all-access passes. Clarence Thomas met with the football team the day before the game. The group walked out of the tunnel before kickoff. During halftime, they stood on the sidelines to watch the marching band perform, at one point posing for a picture in the end zone: “The Sokols took four lucky couples to the first Nebraska footbal game of the season,” Ginni Thomas wrote in one of the card captions.
Sokol, back left, has arranged for Thomas and others to attend several sporting events at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. The invitations come with all-access passes and seats in a luxury suite. The justice’s wife, Ginni, has memorialized some of these trips in cards to friends. Credit: Obtained by ProPublica
Sokol runs a private equity firm and now also chairs a holding company that owns large international shipping and power utility corporations. He resigned from Berkshire Hathaway in 2011 amid an internal investigation by the company that found he had violated its insider trading policy. (At the time, Sokol denied wrongdoing and said his resignation was unrelated to the episode; he was never indicted.)
That Saturday, the group watched both the football and volleyball games from luxury suites. The football skybox, which typically costs $40,000 annually, belonged to Tom Osborne, a former Republican congressman who was also the head coach of the team for 25 years. Hosting the Thomases had ripple effects. A local priest requested a ticket for his 87-year-old mother, but the volleyball coach had to tell him none was available. “All of our tickets have been taken for Clarence Thomas and his group,” the coach wrote.
The Thomases have been treated to at least seven University of Nebraska-Lincoln games — five arranged by Sokol — in recent years. The Times first reported on Thomas’ appearances at some of them.
Thomas has never reported any of those tickets on his yearly financial forms. Judiciary disclosure rules require that most gifts worth more than $415 be disclosed. “It’s so obvious,” said Richard Painter, former chief White House ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush. “It all has to be reported.” ProPublica identified more than 60 federal judges who disclosed tickets to sporting events between 2003 and 2019. In 1999, Thomas disclosed private flight and accommodations for the Daytona 500 but hasn’t reported any other sporting events before or since.
In a statement, Osborne confirmed Thomas has “watched a couple of football games” in his suite, which the university had given to him. He said he is “taxed” for the use of the suite but did not answer whether Thomas has ever reimbursed him. The University of Nebraska-Lincoln did not respond to requests for comment.
On Labor Day weekend, 2019, the group sat in former football coach and ex-congressman Tom Osborne’s suite. Osborne told ProPublica he and the justice became friends years ago, when he was in office. Credit: Obtained by ProPublica
The day before the football game, Thomas met with the team. Sokol arranged these visits in emails with the athletic department. Credit: Twitter
On Sunday, the morning after the football game in Nebraska, Sokol flew with Thomas by private jet to Sokol’s Paintbrush Ranch just outside Jackson Hole, Wyoming. The property, valued in the low eight figures, sits in the foothills of Shadow Mountain. A local radio personality said of the estate: “This is the ultimate home and it has the most iconic view of the Tetons I’ve seen. Ever.”
Sokol also owns a waterfront mansion in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, currently worth $20.1 million, where he’s hosted the Thomases as well, according to photos of the visits. The 12,800-square-foot property includes a home theater, elevator, walk-in wine cellar and yacht docking. (In addition, Sokol and Thomas have shared an opulent lodge together while vacationing at Crow’s private lakeside resort, Camp Topridge, in the Adirondacks.)
Sokol’s ranch outside Jackson Hole, Wyoming, which he sold in 2020, is a sprawling, 9,000-square foot estate in the foothills of Shadow Mountain, designed like a lodge. Credit: Realtor Website. Personal information redacted by ProPublica.
The Thomases and others spent several days at the ranch in late summer 2019. Credit: Realtor Website. Personal information redacted by ProPublica.
In Wyoming, the Thomases fished, rafted on the Snake River and sat by a campfire overlooking the Teton Range with the other couples. At one point, the Paolettas serenaded the justice with a song they wrote about him.
Like Thomas, Paoletta did not disclose the trip on his yearly financial filings. At the time, Paoletta was general counsel and the designated ethics official at the Office of Management and Budget. In a statement, Paoletta said he wasn’t required to disclose the trip because he had reimbursed Sokol, but he did not say how much or provide documentation of those payments. “I complied with all ethics laws and regulations,” Paoletta said.
After the football game in Nebraska, Sokol flew the group, including the Thomases, to his opulent ranch overlooking the Teton Range. They rafted, fished and sat by a campfire. At one point, Mark Paoletta and his wife serenaded the justice. Credit: Obtained by ProPublica
Details of the vacation to Nebraska and Wyoming were drawn from photographs, trip planning emails and social media posts, as well as interviews with airport workers, local residents and others familiar with the travel, including river raft guides.
Since 1990, Sokol and his wife have donated more than $1 million to Republican politicians and groups, along with smaller amounts to Democrats. Last October, in New Orleans, Sokol made a direct reference to a pending Supreme Court case while addressing a group of former Horatio Alger scholarship recipients. (Thomas was not in attendance.)
The speech veered into territory that made many of those in attendance uncomfortable and left others appalled, emails and others messages show. Sokol, who has written extensively about American exceptionalism and the virtues of free enterprise, minimized slavery and systemic racism, some felt. He then criticized President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan, arguing Biden had overstepped the government’s authority, according to a recording of the speech obtained by ProPublica.
“It’s going to get overturned by the Supreme Court,” Sokol predicted, echoing a common legal commentary.
He was right. This summer, the court struck down Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan. Thomas voted in the majority.
Sokol has also hosted the Thomases and others at his mansion in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. The waterfront property, which comes with yacht docking, has a private movie theater, among other luxuries. Credit: Obtained by ProPublica
Deep Sea Fishing in the Caribbean
Nearly every spring, Novelly, a billionaire who made his fortune storing and transporting petroleum, takes his two yachts on a fishing expedition to the Bahamas’ Exuma Islands. Photographs from the trips show porcelain beaches, cerulean waters and fresh mahi-mahi. Friends and family come and go for days at a time.
Three of Novelly’s former yacht workers, including a captain, told ProPublica they recall Thomas coming on board the vessels multiple times in recent years. Novelly’s local chauffeur in the Bahamas said his company once picked Thomas up from the billionaire’s private jet and drove him to the marina where one of the yachts, Le Montrachet, frequently docks.
Le Montrachet, named after the premium French wine, is a 126-foot luxury vessel complete with a full bar, multiple dining areas, a baby grand piano, accommodations for 10 guests and a handful of smaller fishing boats and jet skis. Novelly charges about $60,000 a week to outsiders who want to charter it.
Novelly often takes his luxury yacht, Le Montrachet, on fishing expeditions around the Bahamas’ Exuma Islands. The billionaire’s former yacht workers said Thomas was one of his guests. Credit: CharterWorld Website
Another past guest on Novelly’s yacht is “Alligator” Ron Bergeron, one of the biggest land and roadway developers in Florida. Around 2018, Novelly and Thomas went to Bergeron’s private ranch on the edge of the Everglades — a sprawling, gated estate with centuries-old cypress trees and an 1800s-style saloon on site. He described Novelly as a man who likes to share his success with others. “He’s very generous with all his friends,” Bergeron told ProPublica.
Bergeron said his conversations with Thomas at the ranch were strictly about charity work and not business. “You’re talking about a great man,” Bergeron said, “who gives his time to make a difference for America.”
Since 1999, Novelly’s family and companies have publicly disclosed at least $500,000 to conservative causes and Republican candidates in federal elections. (Before then, he had given to both parties.)
Novelly, who recently stepped down from his CEO roles, ran his business affairs aggressively, ending up on the wrong side of the government in at least two cases. He spends much of his time between St. Louis and Boca Raton, Florida, where he has a 23,000 square-foot palatial estate appraised at $22.2 million. In 2002, Novelly established residency and a holding company in the Virgin Islands. During a hearing with local officials, Novelly described the arrangement there as a “quid pro quo,” meaning the U.S. territory received a boost to the local economy in return for offering substantial tax breaks. The IRS would later call it an “abusive tax avoidance scheme” and pursued Novelly for millions in back taxes and penalties. Novelly denied the characterization and eventually settled with the government for a negotiated amount.
There’s no evidence his friendship with Thomas helped Novelly in one of his most significant disputes. In 2005, the Justice Department sued Novelly’s company, Apex Oil, because its corporate predecessor had contributed to a massive groundwater contamination beneath an Illinois village and then Apex refused to help with the cleanup. Apex argued the spill had occurred before the company went through a bankruptcy years earlier. Several judges ruled against Apex, which eventually appealed to the Supreme Court in 2010. The justices declined to hear the case, and the company had to pay about $150 million to help remove oil from the soil.
It’s not clear how Thomas voted in the case because such votes are not typically public. The vacations ProPublica identified appear to have occurred after the case was resolved.
In 2020, Apex Oil, Sokol and Crow helped fund a documentary defending Thomas as a response to an HBO film that was critical of the justice. Sokol called the HBO movie a “Molotov cocktail into our homes” and a prime example of America’s eroding civility.
The “Most Coveted” Invitation in the World
Thomas’ first billionaire benefactor is likely H. Wayne Huizenga, believed to be the only person in American history to build three separate Fortune 500 companies. One of the three was AutoNation, which Huizenga founded in 1996 before building it into the largest car dealer in the country. Between 1998 and 1999, Huizenga’s holding company spent $500,000 lobbying federal agencies that regulate the automotive industry, according to OpenSecrets data. Over the years, the Huizenga family and companies gave millions to state and federal Republican candidates and once threw a fundraiser for the Florida GOP that helped keep the party afloat for months.
The billionaire was known to regularly lavish gifts and perks on those in his orbit. He routinely took friends on opulent vacations. He paid his employees handsomely and sometimes covered their bills and personal expenses. On a whim, Huizenga once handed box tickets for the opera, which were worth thousands, to his caterer, Bob Leonardi.
“I led the life of a multimillionaire without being one,” Leonardi said.
Huizenga’s employees frequently saw Thomas around the billionaire’s mansion in Fort Lauderdale. Bob Leonardi, middle, was Huizenga’s caterer for years and said his boss liked to share his wealth with friends and employees. Credit: Obtained by ProPublica
For 20 years, Thomas benefited from Huizenga’s attention as well, availing himself of the billionaire’s fleet of aircraft and other luxuries. Huizenga took Thomas to see the Miami Dolphins and Florida Panthers several times between the mid-’90s and mid-2000s, according to interviews and photographs. Huizenga owned both teams at the time.
Executives saw Thomas around Huizenga’s office often. Richard Rochon, the former president of Huizenga Holdings, said Thomas once shadowed the billionaire during meetings. “He just wants to see what I do every day,” Rochon recalled Huizenga saying.
On at least two occasions, Thomas attended Huizenga’s birthday and Christmas parties, which the billionaire held inside his private hangar at the Fort Lauderdale airport. Van Poole, a lobbyist and former chairman of the Florida GOP, recalled riding down the elevator at the nearby Hyatt Pier 66 hotel — which Huizenga also controlled — when the Thomases stepped in with a security detail. The group discussed college sports and then traveled to the party together, Poole said.
Thomas occasionally flew on Huizenga’s helicopters, sometimes taking off from the roof of the corporate headquarters, and at least one of his Gulfstream jets around Florida, according to his former pilots. But the billionaire’s most luxurious planes were a pair of 737 jets he had retrofitted like a lounge, complete with recliners, love seats, mahogany dining and card tables and gourmet food.
At least two times in the mid 2000s, Huizenga sent one of them to pick up Thomas and deliver him to Fort Lauderdale, said John Wener, the flight attendant on board.
Huizenga owned a fleet of aircraft that he kept in a private hangar at the Fort Lauderdale airport. Two of the planes were 737 jets he had retrofitted to look like lounges. He sent those planes to pick up Thomas at least twice and deliver him to South Florida, according to a flight attendant on board. Credit: Lynne Sladky/AP Photo
Wener recalled chatting with the justice about his nomination to the Supreme Court and the tumultuous Senate confirmation hearings after Thomas’ former aide, Anita Hill, accused him of sexual harassment. “He said, ‘Just imagine a job interview and you’re in front of 100 people that hate you,’” Wener recalled Thomas remarking. “‘How would that interview go?’”
In the early 2000s, Huizenga gave Thomas something that was priceless at the time: a standing invitation to his exclusive, members-only golf club, the Floridian. Designed by golf legend Gary Player, the course was lined with cottages for Huizenga’s friends, a yacht marina for them to dock and a helipad if they wanted to fly in. One family friend told the Huizenga family biographer that the Floridian was “the most coveted private golf invitation in the world.” Those who worked and played there said the membership rolls were a Rolodex of the rich, famous and powerful: From Michael Douglas and Rush Limbaugh to Michael Bloomberg and former Vice President Dan Quayle. Donald Trump once asked to be a member but Huizenga spurned him, according to three of Huizenga’s former employees.
All 200-plus members were “honorary” and didn’t pay dues — Huizenga covered everything. “It was a little slice of heaven, a magical place,” former media personality Matt Lauer told the biographer. “You drove through the gates and it was this fairytale land that he had created.”
One of the crown jewels of Huizenga’s business empire was the Floridian golf and yacht club. When Huizenga owned the property, he gave honorary invitations to some 200 close friends without charging them an initiation fee or dues. Thomas was seen by several employees at the club over the years. Credit: Floridian Website
It’s unclear if Thomas was a member or Huizenga’s frequent guest with similar privileges. The billionaire’s former personal photographer and two former golf pros at the club recalled seeing Thomas there multiple times over the years. One of Huizenga’s helicopter pilots said he had picked the justice up from the property. And a fifth employee, a former waitress and concierge, said she once served Thomas and Huizenga, who were wearing golf attire, as they dined alone in the enormous waterfront clubhouse for lunch. “Have you met a Supreme Court justice?” Huizenga asked the waitress before she took their order. “This is Clarence Thomas.”
Today, the Floridian, which the Huizenga family sold in 2010 before it underwent renovations, has a $150,000 initiation fee.
Paying for Access to the Supreme Court Chambers
Thomas first met Huizenga at a formal gala in Washington, D.C., in 1992, when they were both inducted into the Horatio Alger Association. Henry Kissinger and Maya Angelou were among the other honorees that year. The organization, named after the 19th-century novelist who popularized rags-to-riches folklore, gives millions in college scholarships each year and also brings together some of the country’s wealthiest, self-made business tycoons for opulent events. (In real life, Alger was a minister on Cape Cod who resigned from his parish after he was credibly accused of molesting boys.)
“We were proud to honor Justice Thomas more than 30 years ago,” an association spokesperson said in a statement, “and remain grateful for his continued involvement in our organization.” She said Thomas spends countless hours mentoring scholarship recipients.
Thomas met Huizenga in 1992 at their induction ceremony in Washington, D.C. They became close friends for decades afterward and the billionaire, who died in 2018, regularly hosted Thomas in Florida. Thomas acknowledged the pair occasionally talked about business but said their relationship was never transactional. Credit: Obtained by ProPublica
Thomas appears to have met Huizenga, Sokol, Novelly and Bergeron through the organization. Several of Thomas’ trips to Florida in the 2000s appear to have been connected with the association. In that time period, he joined Huizenga at Horatio Alger scholarship ceremonies in South Florida, travel that the justice disclosed in several of his yearly financial filings.
However, he never identified Huizenga in any of his disclosures. The association spokesperson confirmed to ProPublica that the billionaire hosted those events “and covered all costs involved.”
Experts said that means Thomas’ disclosures would be, at a minimum, incomplete and misleading because the rules require federal judges to identify the source of the gifts they receive. “Source means the person or entity that paid for it,” said Kathleen Clark, a legal ethics authority at Washington University in St. Louis.
Belonging to the association has had its privileges. As part of a board meeting, the Thomases once went on a lavish trip to Jamaica, where they were hosted by a wealthy donor who owned a luxury hotel atop a former sugar plantation. Johnny Cash performed. Horatio Alger Association membership itself is worth at least $200,000, according to the organization’s meeting minutes in 2007, a sum that those who nominate a new member are responsible for raising in that person’s honor. The association spokesperson said there was no requirement to raise money for new members back when Thomas was inducted.
Thomas has likely helped the group earn many times that figure since then. Every year, the justice hosts an event for members inside the Supreme Court’s Great Hall. The Times previously reported that the event afforded the Horatio Alger Association unusual access to the court.
Membership into the Horatio Alger Association itself comes with a price tag. The association requires members to donate at least $200,000 on behalf of new inductees. A spokesperson said that when Thomas was inducted there wasn’t a donation requirement. Credit: Obtained by ProPublica. Highlights by ProPublica
ProPublica examined boxes of the association’s historical archives, including financial records that show the group has required donations of at least $1,500 — $7,500 for nonmembers — to attend the Supreme Court event. In 2004, those who donated $100,000 for a table at the main ceremony got 10 seats inside the Supreme Court. In the judiciary’s code of conduct — which is general guidance that does not apply to Supreme Court justices, though they say they consult it — there is explicit language advising federal judges against using their position to fundraise for outside organizations.
Financial records from the Horatio Alger Association archives show the group has been fundraising off of an event hosted by Thomas inside the Supreme Court building. Credit: Obtained by ProPublica. Highlights by ProPublica.
But that’s what Thomas has done, said Virginia Canter, a former government ethics lawyer who served in administrations of both parties and reviewed the association’s financial records at ProPublica’s request.
“To use the Supreme Court to fundraise for somebody’s charity is, to me, an abuse of office,” she said. Canter acknowledged the organization may do good work, but that’s besides the point, she said, because wealthy donors aren’t supposed to be able to pay thousands of dollars to visit a justice inside the courthouse walls.
“It’s pay to play,” Canter added, “isn’t it?”
Do you have any tips on the Supreme Court? Brett Murphy can be reached by email at [email protected] and by Signal or WhatsApp at 508-523-5195. Justin Elliott can be reached by email at [email protected] or by Signal or WhatsApp at 774-826-6240. Josh Kaplan can be reached by email at [email protected] and by Signal or WhatsApp at 734-834-9383.
Josh Kaplan and Justin Elliott contributed reporting.
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Brett Murphy is a reporter on ProPublica’s national desk. His work uncovering a new junk science known as 911 call analysis won a George Polk Award, among other honors.
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Re: Clarence Thomas’s Billionaire Benefactor Collects Hitler
by admin » Mon Aug 14, 2023 1:05 am
Clarence Thomas Had a Child in Private School. Harlan Crow Paid the Tuition. Crow paid for private school for a relative Thomas said he was raising “as a son.” “This is way outside the norm,” said a former White House ethics lawyer.
by Joshua Kaplan, Justin Elliott and Alex Mierjeski
Propublica
May 4, 6 a.m. EDT
Photo illustration by Lisa Larson-Walker/ProPublica. Source images: Chris Goodney/Bloomberg via Getty Images, piemags/DCM/Alamy Stock Photo, Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images.
Update, May 4, 2023: This story has been updated to reflect that Mark Paoletta, a longtime friend of Clarence Thomas who has also served as Ginni Thomas’ lawyer, acknowledged Harlan Crow’s tuition payments.
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.
The payments extended beyond that month, according to Christopher Grimwood, a former administrator at the school. Crow paid Martin’s tuition the entire time he was a student there, which was about a year, Grimwood told ProPublica.
“Harlan picked up the tab,” said Grimwood, who got to know Crow and the Thomases and had access to school financial information through his work as an administrator.
Before and after his time at Hidden Lake, Martin attended a second boarding school, Randolph-Macon Academy in Virginia. “Harlan said he was paying for the tuition at Randolph-Macon Academy as well,” Grimwood said, recalling a conversation he had with Crow during a visit to the billionaire’s Adirondacks estate.
ProPublica interviewed Martin, his former classmates and former staff at both schools. The exact total Crow paid for Martin’s education over the years remains unclear. If he paid for all four years at the two schools, the price tag could have exceeded $150,000, according to public records of tuition rates at the schools.
Thomas did not report the tuition payments from Crow on his annual financial disclosures. Several years earlier, Thomas disclosed a gift of $5,000 for Martin’s education from another friend. It is not clear why he reported that payment but not Crow’s.
The tuition payments add to the picture of how the Republican megadonor has helped fund the lives of Thomas and his family.
“You can’t be having secret financial arrangements,” said Mark W. Bennett, a retired federal judge appointed by President Bill Clinton. Bennett said he was friendly with Thomas and declined to comment for the record about the specifics of Thomas’ actions. But he said that when he was on the bench, he wouldn’t let his lawyer friends buy him lunch.
A July 2009 bank statement for Hidden Lake Academy shows a wire from Crow Holdings LLC. Credit: Excerpt from court records. Highlights added by ProPublica.
Thomas did not respond to questions. In response to previous ProPublica reporting on gifts of luxury travel, he said that the Crows “are among our dearest friends” and that he understood he didn’t have to disclose the trips.
ProPublica sent Crow a detailed list of questions and his office responded with a statement that did not dispute the facts presented in this story.
“Harlan Crow has long been passionate about the importance of quality education and giving back to those less fortunate, especially at-risk youth,” the statement said. “It’s disappointing that those with partisan political interests would try to turn helping at-risk youth with tuition assistance into something nefarious or political.” The statement added that Crow and his wife have “supported many young Americans” at a “variety of schools, including his alma mater.” Crow went to Randolph-Macon Academy.
Crow did not address a question about how much he paid in total for Martin’s tuition. Asked if Thomas had requested the support for either school, Crow’s office responded, “No.”
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.
Painter said that when he was at the White House, an official who’d taken what Thomas had would have been fired: “This amount of undisclosed gifts? You’d want to get them out of the government.”
A federal law passed after Watergate requires justices and other officials to publicly report most gifts. Ethics law experts told ProPublica they believed Thomas was required by law to disclose the tuition payments because they appear to be a gift to him.
Justices also must report many gifts to their spouses and dependent children. The law’s definition of dependent child is narrow, however, and likely would not apply to Martin since Thomas was his legal guardian, not his parent. The best case for not disclosing Crow’s tuition payments would be to argue the gifts were to Martin, not Thomas, experts said.
But that argument was far-fetched, experts said, because minor children rarely pay their own tuition. Typically, the legal guardian is responsible for the child’s education.
“The most reasonable interpretation of the statute is that this was a gift to Thomas and thus had to be reported. It’s common sense,” said Kathleen Clark, an ethics law expert at Washington University in St. Louis. “It’s all to the financial benefit of Clarence Thomas.”
Martin, now in his 30s, told ProPublica he was not aware that Crow paid his tuition. But he defended Thomas and Crow, saying he believed there was no ulterior motive behind the real estate magnate’s largesse over the decades. “I think his intentions behind everything is just a friend and just a good person,” Martin said.
[After this story was published, Mark Paoletta, a longtime friend of Clarence Thomas who has also served as Ginni Thomas’ lawyer, released a statement. Paoletta confirmed that Crow paid for Martin’s tuition at both Randolph-Macon Academy and Hidden Lake, saying Crow paid for one year at each. He did not give a total amount but, based on the tuition rates at the time, the two years would amount to roughly $100,000.
Paoletta said that Thomas did not have to report the payments because Martin was not his “dependent child” as defined in the disclosure law. He criticized ProPublica for reporting on this and said “the Thomases and the Crows are kind, generous, and loving people who tried to help this young man.”]
Crow has long been an influential figure in pro-business conservative politics. He has given millions to efforts to move the law and the judiciary to the right and serves on the boards of think tanks that publish scholarship advancing conservative legal theories.
Crow has denied trying to influence the justice but has said he extended hospitality to him just as he has to other dear friends. From the start, their relationship has intertwined expensive gifts and conservative politics. In a recent interview with The Dallas Morning News, Crow recounted how he first met Thomas. In 1996, the justice was scheduled to give a speech in Dallas for an anti-regulation think tank. Crow offered to fly him there on his private jet. “During that flight, we found out we were kind of simpatico,” the billionaire said.
The following year, the Thomases began to discuss taking custody of Martin. His father, Thomas’ nephew, had been imprisoned in connection with a drug case. Thomas has written that Martin’s situation held deep resonance for him because his own father was absent and his grandparents had taken him in “under very similar circumstances.”
Thomas had an adult son from a previous marriage, but he and wife, Ginni, didn’t have children of their own. They pitched Martin’s parents on taking the boy in.
“Thomas explained that the boy would have the best of everything — his own room, a private school education, lots of extracurricular activities,” journalists Kevin Merida and Michael Fletcher reported in their biography of Thomas.
Thomas gained legal custody of Martin and became his legal guardian around January 1998, according to court records.
Martin, who had been living in Georgia with his mother and siblings, moved to Virginia, where he lived with the justice from the ages of 6 to 19, he said.
Living with the Thomases came with an unusual perk: lavish travel with Crow and his family. Martin told ProPublica that he and Thomas vacationed with the Crows “at least once a year” throughout his childhood.
That included visits to Camp Topridge, Crow’s private resort in the Adirondacks, and two cruises on Crow’s superyacht, Martin said. On a trip in the Caribbean, Martin recalled riding jet skis off the side of the billionaire’s yacht.
Roughly 20 years ago, Martin, Thomas and the Crows went on a cruise on the yacht in Russia and the Baltics, according to Martin and two other people familiar with the trip. The group toured St. Petersburg in a rented helicopter and visited the Yusupov Palace, the site of Rasputin’s murder, said one of the people. They were joined by Chris DeMuth, then the president of the conservative think tank the American Enterprise Institute. (Thomas’ trips with Crow to the Baltics and the Caribbean have not previously been reported.)
Thomas reconfigured his life to balance the demands of raising a child with serving on the high court. He began going to the Supreme Court before 6 a.m. so he could leave in time to pick Martin up after class and help him with his homework. By 2001, the justice had moved Martin to private school out of frustration with the Fairfax County public school system’s lax schedule, The American Lawyer magazine reported.
For high school, Thomas sent Martin to Randolph-Macon Academy, a military boarding school 75 miles west of Washington, D.C., where he was in the class of 2010. The school, which sits on a 135-acre campus in the Shenandoah Valley, charged between $25,000 to $30,000 a year. Martin played football and basketball, and the justice sometimes visited for games.
Randolph-Macon was also Crow’s alma mater. Thomas and Crow visited the campus in April 2007 for the dedication of an imposing bronze sculpture of the Air Force Honor Guard, according to the school magazine. Crow donated the piece to Randolph-Macon, where it is a short walk from Crow Hall, a classroom building named after the Dallas billionaire’s family.
Harlan Crow and Clarence Thomas attended the 2007 dedication of a statue gifted by Crow to Randolph-Macon Academy. Credit: The Sabre Magazine
Martin sometimes chafed at the strictures of military school, according to people at Randolph-Macon at the time, and he spent his junior year at Hidden Lake Academy, a therapeutic boarding school in Georgia. Hidden Lake boasted one teacher for every 10 students and activities ranging from horseback riding to canoeing. Those services came at an added cost. At the time, a year of tuition was roughly $73,000, plus fees.
The July 2009 bank statement from Hidden Lake was filed in a bankruptcy case for the school, which later went under. The document shows that Crow Holdings LLC wired $6,200 to the school that month, the exact cost of the month’s tuition. The wire is marked “Mark Martin” in the ledger.
Crow’s office said in its statement that Crow’s funding of students’ tuition has “always been paid solely from personal funds, sometimes held at and paid through the family business.”
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.
Thomas has long been one of the less wealthy members of the Supreme Court. Still, when Martin was in high school, he and Ginni Thomas had income that put them comfortably in the top echelon of Americans.
In 2006 for example, the Thomases brought in more than $500,000 in income. The following year, they made more than $850,000 from Clarence Thomas’ salary from the court, Ginni Thomas’ pay from the Heritage Foundation and book payments for the justice’s memoir.
It appears that at some point in Martin’s childhood, Thomas was paying for private school himself. Martin told ProPublica that Thomas sold his Corvette — “his most prized car” — to pay for a year of tuition, although he didn’t remember when that occurred.
In 2002, a friend of Thomas’ from the RV community who owned a Florida pest control company, Earl Dixon, offered Thomas $5,000 to help defray the costs of Martin’s education. Thomas’ disclosure of that earlier gift, several experts said, could be viewed as evidence that the justice himself understood he was required to report tuition aid from friends.
“At first, Thomas was worried about the propriety of the donation,” Thomas biographers Merida and Fletcher recounted. “He agreed to accept it if the contribution was deposited directly into a special trust for Mark.” In his annual filing, Thomas reported the money as an “education gift to Mark Martin.”
Thomas disclosed an education gift to Martin from a friend in his 2002 disclosure filing. Credit: Free Law Project
Do you have any tips on the Supreme Court or the judiciary? Josh Kaplan can be reached by email at [email protected] and by Signal or WhatsApp at 734-834-9383. Justin Elliott can be reached by email at [email protected] or by Signal or WhatsApp at 774-826-6240.
Gabriel Sandoval contributed research.
Josh Kaplan is a reporter at ProPublica.
by Joshua Kaplan, Justin Elliott and Alex Mierjeski
Propublica
May 4, 6 a.m. EDT
Photo illustration by Lisa Larson-Walker/ProPublica. Source images: Chris Goodney/Bloomberg via Getty Images, piemags/DCM/Alamy Stock Photo, Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images.
Update, May 4, 2023: This story has been updated to reflect that Mark Paoletta, a longtime friend of Clarence Thomas who has also served as Ginni Thomas’ lawyer, acknowledged Harlan Crow’s tuition payments.
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.
The payments extended beyond that month, according to Christopher Grimwood, a former administrator at the school. Crow paid Martin’s tuition the entire time he was a student there, which was about a year, Grimwood told ProPublica.
“Harlan picked up the tab,” said Grimwood, who got to know Crow and the Thomases and had access to school financial information through his work as an administrator.
Before and after his time at Hidden Lake, Martin attended a second boarding school, Randolph-Macon Academy in Virginia. “Harlan said he was paying for the tuition at Randolph-Macon Academy as well,” Grimwood said, recalling a conversation he had with Crow during a visit to the billionaire’s Adirondacks estate.
ProPublica interviewed Martin, his former classmates and former staff at both schools. The exact total Crow paid for Martin’s education over the years remains unclear. If he paid for all four years at the two schools, the price tag could have exceeded $150,000, according to public records of tuition rates at the schools.
Thomas did not report the tuition payments from Crow on his annual financial disclosures. Several years earlier, Thomas disclosed a gift of $5,000 for Martin’s education from another friend. It is not clear why he reported that payment but not Crow’s.
The tuition payments add to the picture of how the Republican megadonor has helped fund the lives of Thomas and his family.
“You can’t be having secret financial arrangements,” said Mark W. Bennett, a retired federal judge appointed by President Bill Clinton. Bennett said he was friendly with Thomas and declined to comment for the record about the specifics of Thomas’ actions. But he said that when he was on the bench, he wouldn’t let his lawyer friends buy him lunch.
A July 2009 bank statement for Hidden Lake Academy shows a wire from Crow Holdings LLC. Credit: Excerpt from court records. Highlights added by ProPublica.
Thomas did not respond to questions. In response to previous ProPublica reporting on gifts of luxury travel, he said that the Crows “are among our dearest friends” and that he understood he didn’t have to disclose the trips.
ProPublica sent Crow a detailed list of questions and his office responded with a statement that did not dispute the facts presented in this story.
“Harlan Crow has long been passionate about the importance of quality education and giving back to those less fortunate, especially at-risk youth,” the statement said. “It’s disappointing that those with partisan political interests would try to turn helping at-risk youth with tuition assistance into something nefarious or political.” The statement added that Crow and his wife have “supported many young Americans” at a “variety of schools, including his alma mater.” Crow went to Randolph-Macon Academy.
Crow did not address a question about how much he paid in total for Martin’s tuition. Asked if Thomas had requested the support for either school, Crow’s office responded, “No.”
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.
Painter said that when he was at the White House, an official who’d taken what Thomas had would have been fired: “This amount of undisclosed gifts? You’d want to get them out of the government.”
A federal law passed after Watergate requires justices and other officials to publicly report most gifts. Ethics law experts told ProPublica they believed Thomas was required by law to disclose the tuition payments because they appear to be a gift to him.
Justices also must report many gifts to their spouses and dependent children. The law’s definition of dependent child is narrow, however, and likely would not apply to Martin since Thomas was his legal guardian, not his parent. The best case for not disclosing Crow’s tuition payments would be to argue the gifts were to Martin, not Thomas, experts said.
But that argument was far-fetched, experts said, because minor children rarely pay their own tuition. Typically, the legal guardian is responsible for the child’s education.
“The most reasonable interpretation of the statute is that this was a gift to Thomas and thus had to be reported. It’s common sense,” said Kathleen Clark, an ethics law expert at Washington University in St. Louis. “It’s all to the financial benefit of Clarence Thomas.”
Martin, now in his 30s, told ProPublica he was not aware that Crow paid his tuition. But he defended Thomas and Crow, saying he believed there was no ulterior motive behind the real estate magnate’s largesse over the decades. “I think his intentions behind everything is just a friend and just a good person,” Martin said.
[After this story was published, Mark Paoletta, a longtime friend of Clarence Thomas who has also served as Ginni Thomas’ lawyer, released a statement. Paoletta confirmed that Crow paid for Martin’s tuition at both Randolph-Macon Academy and Hidden Lake, saying Crow paid for one year at each. He did not give a total amount but, based on the tuition rates at the time, the two years would amount to roughly $100,000.
Paoletta said that Thomas did not have to report the payments because Martin was not his “dependent child” as defined in the disclosure law. He criticized ProPublica for reporting on this and said “the Thomases and the Crows are kind, generous, and loving people who tried to help this young man.”]
Crow has long been an influential figure in pro-business conservative politics. He has given millions to efforts to move the law and the judiciary to the right and serves on the boards of think tanks that publish scholarship advancing conservative legal theories.
Crow has denied trying to influence the justice but has said he extended hospitality to him just as he has to other dear friends. From the start, their relationship has intertwined expensive gifts and conservative politics. In a recent interview with The Dallas Morning News, Crow recounted how he first met Thomas. In 1996, the justice was scheduled to give a speech in Dallas for an anti-regulation think tank. Crow offered to fly him there on his private jet. “During that flight, we found out we were kind of simpatico,” the billionaire said.
The following year, the Thomases began to discuss taking custody of Martin. His father, Thomas’ nephew, had been imprisoned in connection with a drug case. Thomas has written that Martin’s situation held deep resonance for him because his own father was absent and his grandparents had taken him in “under very similar circumstances.”
Thomas had an adult son from a previous marriage, but he and wife, Ginni, didn’t have children of their own. They pitched Martin’s parents on taking the boy in.
“Thomas explained that the boy would have the best of everything — his own room, a private school education, lots of extracurricular activities,” journalists Kevin Merida and Michael Fletcher reported in their biography of Thomas.
Thomas gained legal custody of Martin and became his legal guardian around January 1998, according to court records.
Martin, who had been living in Georgia with his mother and siblings, moved to Virginia, where he lived with the justice from the ages of 6 to 19, he said.
Living with the Thomases came with an unusual perk: lavish travel with Crow and his family. Martin told ProPublica that he and Thomas vacationed with the Crows “at least once a year” throughout his childhood.
That included visits to Camp Topridge, Crow’s private resort in the Adirondacks, and two cruises on Crow’s superyacht, Martin said. On a trip in the Caribbean, Martin recalled riding jet skis off the side of the billionaire’s yacht.
Roughly 20 years ago, Martin, Thomas and the Crows went on a cruise on the yacht in Russia and the Baltics, according to Martin and two other people familiar with the trip. The group toured St. Petersburg in a rented helicopter and visited the Yusupov Palace, the site of Rasputin’s murder, said one of the people. They were joined by Chris DeMuth, then the president of the conservative think tank the American Enterprise Institute. (Thomas’ trips with Crow to the Baltics and the Caribbean have not previously been reported.)
Thomas reconfigured his life to balance the demands of raising a child with serving on the high court. He began going to the Supreme Court before 6 a.m. so he could leave in time to pick Martin up after class and help him with his homework. By 2001, the justice had moved Martin to private school out of frustration with the Fairfax County public school system’s lax schedule, The American Lawyer magazine reported.
For high school, Thomas sent Martin to Randolph-Macon Academy, a military boarding school 75 miles west of Washington, D.C., where he was in the class of 2010. The school, which sits on a 135-acre campus in the Shenandoah Valley, charged between $25,000 to $30,000 a year. Martin played football and basketball, and the justice sometimes visited for games.
Randolph-Macon was also Crow’s alma mater. Thomas and Crow visited the campus in April 2007 for the dedication of an imposing bronze sculpture of the Air Force Honor Guard, according to the school magazine. Crow donated the piece to Randolph-Macon, where it is a short walk from Crow Hall, a classroom building named after the Dallas billionaire’s family.
Harlan Crow and Clarence Thomas attended the 2007 dedication of a statue gifted by Crow to Randolph-Macon Academy. Credit: The Sabre Magazine
Martin sometimes chafed at the strictures of military school, according to people at Randolph-Macon at the time, and he spent his junior year at Hidden Lake Academy, a therapeutic boarding school in Georgia. Hidden Lake boasted one teacher for every 10 students and activities ranging from horseback riding to canoeing. Those services came at an added cost. At the time, a year of tuition was roughly $73,000, plus fees.
The July 2009 bank statement from Hidden Lake was filed in a bankruptcy case for the school, which later went under. The document shows that Crow Holdings LLC wired $6,200 to the school that month, the exact cost of the month’s tuition. The wire is marked “Mark Martin” in the ledger.
Crow’s office said in its statement that Crow’s funding of students’ tuition has “always been paid solely from personal funds, sometimes held at and paid through the family business.”
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.
Thomas has long been one of the less wealthy members of the Supreme Court. Still, when Martin was in high school, he and Ginni Thomas had income that put them comfortably in the top echelon of Americans.
In 2006 for example, the Thomases brought in more than $500,000 in income. The following year, they made more than $850,000 from Clarence Thomas’ salary from the court, Ginni Thomas’ pay from the Heritage Foundation and book payments for the justice’s memoir.
It appears that at some point in Martin’s childhood, Thomas was paying for private school himself. Martin told ProPublica that Thomas sold his Corvette — “his most prized car” — to pay for a year of tuition, although he didn’t remember when that occurred.
In 2002, a friend of Thomas’ from the RV community who owned a Florida pest control company, Earl Dixon, offered Thomas $5,000 to help defray the costs of Martin’s education. Thomas’ disclosure of that earlier gift, several experts said, could be viewed as evidence that the justice himself understood he was required to report tuition aid from friends.
“At first, Thomas was worried about the propriety of the donation,” Thomas biographers Merida and Fletcher recounted. “He agreed to accept it if the contribution was deposited directly into a special trust for Mark.” In his annual filing, Thomas reported the money as an “education gift to Mark Martin.”
Thomas disclosed an education gift to Martin from a friend in his 2002 disclosure filing. Credit: Free Law Project
Do you have any tips on the Supreme Court or the judiciary? Josh Kaplan can be reached by email at [email protected] and by Signal or WhatsApp at 734-834-9383. Justin Elliott can be reached by email at [email protected] or by Signal or WhatsApp at 774-826-6240.
Gabriel Sandoval contributed research.
Josh Kaplan is a reporter at ProPublica.
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Re: Clarence Thomas’s Billionaire Benefactor Collects Hitler
by admin » Wed Dec 20, 2023 12:48 am
A “Delicate Matter”: Clarence Thomas’ Private Complaints About Money Sparked Fears He Would Resign
by Justin Elliott, Joshua Kaplan, Alex Mierjeski and Brett Murphy
Dec. 18, 6 a.m. EST
https://www.propublica.org/article/clar ... %20friends.
Interviews and newly unearthed documents reveal that Thomas, facing financial strain, privately pushed for a higher salary and to allow Supreme Court justices to take speaking fees.
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In early January 2000, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was at a five-star beach resort in Sea Island, Georgia, hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt.
After almost a decade on the court, Thomas had grown frustrated with his financial situation, according to friends. He had recently started raising his young grandnephew, and Thomas’ wife was soliciting advice on how to handle the new expenses. The month before, the justice had borrowed $267,000 from a friend to buy a high-end RV.
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At the resort, Thomas gave a speech at an off-the-record conservative conference. He found himself seated next to a Republican member of Congress on the flight home. The two men talked, and the lawmaker left the conversation worried that Thomas might resign.
Congress should give Supreme Court justices a pay raise, Thomas told him. If lawmakers didn’t act, “one or more justices will leave soon” — maybe in the next year.
At the time, Thomas’ salary was $173,600, equivalent to over $300,000 today. But he was one of the least wealthy members of the court, and on multiple occasions in that period, he pushed for ways to make more money. In other private conversations, Thomas repeatedly talked about removing a ban on justices giving paid speeches.
Thomas’ efforts were described in records from the time obtained by ProPublica, including a confidential memo to Chief Justice William Rehnquist from a top judiciary official seeking guidance on what he termed a “delicate matter.”
The documents, as well as interviews, offer insight into how Thomas was talking about his finances in a crucial period in his tenure, just as he was developing his relationships with a set of wealthy benefactors.
Congress never lifted the ban on speaking fees or gave the justices a major raise. But in the years that followed, as ProPublica has reported, Thomas accepted a stream of gifts from friends and acquaintances that appears to be unparalleled in the modern history of the Supreme Court. Some defrayed living expenses large and small — private school tuition, vehicle batteries, tires. Other gifts from a coterie of ultrarich men supplemented his lifestyle, such as free international vacations on the private jet and superyacht of Dallas real estate billionaire Harlan Crow.
Precisely what led so many people to offer Thomas money and other gifts remains an open question. There’s no evidence the justice ever raised the specter of resigning with Crow or his other wealthy benefactors.
George Priest, a Yale Law School professor who has vacationed with Thomas and Crow, told ProPublica he believes Crow’s generosity was not intended to influence Thomas’ views but rather to make his life more comfortable. “He views Thomas as a Supreme Court justice as having a limited salary,” Priest said. “So he provides benefits for him.”
Thomas and Crow didn’t respond to questions for this story. Crow, a major Republican donor, has not had cases at the Supreme Court since Thomas joined it and has previously said Thomas is a dear friend. David Sokol, a conservative financier who has taken Thomas on vacation on a private jet, said in a statement that he and Thomas had never discussed the justice’s finances or when he might retire.
Thomas’ comments in 2000 were to Florida Rep. Cliff Stearns, a vocal conservative who’d been in Congress for 11 years and occasionally socialized with the justice. They set off a flurry of activity across the judiciary and Capitol Hill. “His importance as a conservative was paramount,” Stearns said in a recent interview. “We wanted to make sure he felt comfortable in his job and he was being paid properly.”
There’s an often-criticized dynamic surrounding most important jobs in the federal government: The posts pay far less than comparable jobs in the private sector, but officials can cash in once they leave. Ex-regulators sell advice to the regulated. Generals retire to join military contractors. Former senators get jobs lobbying Congress.
But there is no revolving-door payday waiting on the other side of a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court. Justices generally stay on the bench past their 80th birthday, if not until death. In 2000, justices were paid more than cabinet secretaries or members of Congress, and far more than the average American. Still, judges’ salaries were not keeping pace with inflation, a source of ire throughout the federal judiciary. Young associates at top law firms made more than Supreme Court justices, while partners at the firms could earn millions a year.
Table with 2 columns and 4 rows.
Job Salaries in 2022
Median American worker $60,070
Member of Congress $174,000
Associate Supreme Court Justice $274,200
Partner at highest-paying law firm $7,294,000
Note: Median American figure is for full-time, year-round workers. Law partner figure is for the highest-paying of the 100 largest firms. (Sources: U.S. Census Current Population Survey, The American Lawyer)
Some of Thomas’ colleagues were extremely wealthy — Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was married to a high-paid tax lawyer and Justice Stephen Breyer to the daughter of a wealthy British lord. Thomas did not come from money. When he was appointed to the court in 1991, he was 43 years old and had spent almost all his adult life working for the government. At the time, he still had student loans from law school, Thomas has said.
The full details of Thomas’ finances over the years remain unclear. He made at least two big purchases around the early ’90s: a Corvette and a house in the Virginia suburbs on 5 acres of land. When Thomas and his wife, Ginni, bought the home for $522,000 a year after he joined the court, they borrowed all but $8,000, less than 2% of the purchase price, property records show.
Public records suggest a degree of financial strain. Throughout the first decade of his tenure, the couple regularly borrowed more money, including a $100,000 credit line on their house and a consumer loan of up to $50,000. Around January 1998, Thomas’ life changed when he took in his 6-year-old grandnephew, becoming his legal guardian and raising him as a son. The Thomases sent the child to a series of private schools.
In early January 2000, Thomas took the trip to the Georgia beach resort. Thomas was there to deliver a keynote speech at Awakening, a “conservative thought weekend” featuring golf, shooting lessons and aromatherapy along with panel discussions with businessmen and elected officials. (A founder and organizer of the annual event, Ernest Taylor, told ProPublica that Thomas’ trip was paid for by the organization. Thomas reported 11 free trips that year on his annual financial disclosure, mostly to colleges and universities, but did not disclose attending the conservative conference, an apparent violation of federal disclosure law.)
Thomas spoke at the Awakening conference in 2000. Credit:Screenshot by ProPublica of Awakening brochure
On a commercial flight back from Awakening, Thomas brought up the prospect of justices resigning to Stearns, the Republican lawmaker. Worried, Stearns wrote a letter to Thomas after the flight promising “to look into a bill to raise the salaries of members of The Supreme Court.”
“As we agreed, it is worth a lot to Americans to have the constitution properly interpreted,” Stearns wrote. “We must have the proper incentives here, too.”
Stearns’ office soon sought help from a lobbying firm working on the issue, and he delivered a speech on the House floor about judges’ salaries getting eroded by inflation. Thomas’ warning about resignations was relayed at a meeting of the heads of several judges’ associations. L. Ralph Mecham, then the judiciary’s top administrative official, fired off the memo describing Thomas’ complaints to Rehnquist, his boss.
“I understand that Justice Thomas clearly told him that in his view departures would occur within the next year or so,” Mecham wrote of Thomas’ conversation with Stearns. Mecham worried that “from a tactical point of view,” congressional Democrats might oppose a raise if they sensed “the apparent purpose is to keep Justices [Antonin] Scalia and Thomas on the Court.” (Scalia had nine children and was also one of the less wealthy justices. Scalia, Mecham and Rehnquist have since died.)
It’s not clear if Rehnquist ever responded. Several months later, Rehnquist focused his annual year-end report on what he called “the most pressing issue facing the Judiciary: the need to increase judicial salaries.”
Stearns sent a letter to Thomas after their conversation about pay and possible resignations at the Supreme Court. Credit:George Washington University Special Collections Research Center
Several people close to Thomas told ProPublica they believed that it was implausible the justice would ever retire early, and that he may have exaggerated his concerns to bolster the case for a raise. But around 2000, chatter that Thomas was dissatisfied about money circulated through conservative legal circles and on Capitol Hill, according to interviews with prominent attorneys, former members of Congress and Thomas’ friends. “It was clear he was unhappy with his financial situation and his salary,” one friend said.
Former Sen. Trent Lott, then the Republican Senate majority leader, recalled in a recent interview that there were serious concerns at the time that Thomas or other justices would leave.
The public received hardly a hint that such conversations about Thomas were unfolding in Washington. Thomas did once allude to government salaries, in a 2001 speech praising the value of public service. “The job is not worth doing for what they pay. It’s not worth doing for the grief,” he said. “But it is worth doing for the principle.”
Thomas delivered a speech in 2001 on the value of public service. Credit:Screenshot by ProPublica via C-SPAN
Around that time, Thomas was also pushing to allow justices to make paid speeches — a source of income that had been banned in the 1980s. On several occasions, Thomas discussed lifting the ban with appellate Judge David Hansen, who chaired the judiciary’s committee responsible for lobbying Congress on issues like pay, according to Mecham’s memo.
At Sen. Mitch McConnell’s request, a provision removing the ban for judges was quietly inserted into a spending bill in mid-2000. Why McConnell made the proposal became a subject of scrutiny in the legal press. After the Legal Times reported the measure had been dubbed the “Keep Scalia on the Court” bill, Scalia responded that the “honorarium ban makes no difference to me” and denied that he would ever leave the court for financial reasons. (The ban was never lifted. McConnell did not respond to a request for comment.)
During his second decade on the court, Thomas’ financial situation appears to have markedly improved. In 2003, he received the first payments of a $1.5 million advance for his memoir, a record-breaking sum for justices at the time. Ginni Thomas, who had been a congressional staffer, was by then working at the Heritage Foundation and was paid a salary in the low six figures.
Thomas also received dozens of expensive gifts throughout the 2000s, sometimes coming from people he’d met only shortly before. Thomas met Earl Dixon, the owner of a Florida pest control company, while getting his RV serviced outside Tampa in 2001, according to the Thomas biography “Supreme Discomfort.” The next year, Dixon gave Thomas $5,000 to put toward his grandnephew’s tuition. Thomas reported the payment in his annual disclosure filing.
The Judiciary Has Policed Itself for Decades. It Doesn’t Work.
Larger gifts went undisclosed. Crow paid for two years of private high school, which tuition rates indicate would’ve cost roughly $100,000. In 2008, another wealthy friend forgave “a substantial amount, or even all” of the principal on the loan Thomas had used to buy the quarter-million dollar RV, according to a recent Senate inquiry prompted by The New York Times’ reporting. Much of the Thomases’ leisure time was also paid for by a small set of billionaire businessmen, who brought the justice and his family on free vacations around the world. (Thomas has said he did not need to disclose the gifts of travel and his lawyer has disputed the Senate findings about the RV.)
By 2019, the justices’ pay hadn’t changed beyond keeping up with inflation. But Thomas’ views had apparently transformed from two decades before. That June, during a public appearance, Thomas was asked about salaries at the court. “Oh goodness, I think it’s plenty,” Thomas responded. “My wife and I are doing fine. We don’t live extravagantly, but we are fine.”
A few weeks later, Thomas boarded Crow’s private jet to head to Indonesia. He and his wife were off on vacation, an island cruise on Crow’s 162-foot yacht.
by Justin Elliott, Joshua Kaplan, Alex Mierjeski and Brett Murphy
Dec. 18, 6 a.m. EST
https://www.propublica.org/article/clar ... %20friends.
Interviews and newly unearthed documents reveal that Thomas, facing financial strain, privately pushed for a higher salary and to allow Supreme Court justices to take speaking fees.
https://www.propublica.org/article/clar ... ars-scotus
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Change Appearance
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Series:Friends of the Court: SCOTUS Justices’ Beneficial Relationships With Billionaire Donors
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In early January 2000, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was at a five-star beach resort in Sea Island, Georgia, hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt.
After almost a decade on the court, Thomas had grown frustrated with his financial situation, according to friends. He had recently started raising his young grandnephew, and Thomas’ wife was soliciting advice on how to handle the new expenses. The month before, the justice had borrowed $267,000 from a friend to buy a high-end RV.
Get Our Top Investigations
Subscribe to the Big Story newsletter.
Email address:
Enter your email
At the resort, Thomas gave a speech at an off-the-record conservative conference. He found himself seated next to a Republican member of Congress on the flight home. The two men talked, and the lawmaker left the conversation worried that Thomas might resign.
Congress should give Supreme Court justices a pay raise, Thomas told him. If lawmakers didn’t act, “one or more justices will leave soon” — maybe in the next year.
At the time, Thomas’ salary was $173,600, equivalent to over $300,000 today. But he was one of the least wealthy members of the court, and on multiple occasions in that period, he pushed for ways to make more money. In other private conversations, Thomas repeatedly talked about removing a ban on justices giving paid speeches.
Thomas’ efforts were described in records from the time obtained by ProPublica, including a confidential memo to Chief Justice William Rehnquist from a top judiciary official seeking guidance on what he termed a “delicate matter.”
The documents, as well as interviews, offer insight into how Thomas was talking about his finances in a crucial period in his tenure, just as he was developing his relationships with a set of wealthy benefactors.
Congress never lifted the ban on speaking fees or gave the justices a major raise. But in the years that followed, as ProPublica has reported, Thomas accepted a stream of gifts from friends and acquaintances that appears to be unparalleled in the modern history of the Supreme Court. Some defrayed living expenses large and small — private school tuition, vehicle batteries, tires. Other gifts from a coterie of ultrarich men supplemented his lifestyle, such as free international vacations on the private jet and superyacht of Dallas real estate billionaire Harlan Crow.
Precisely what led so many people to offer Thomas money and other gifts remains an open question. There’s no evidence the justice ever raised the specter of resigning with Crow or his other wealthy benefactors.
George Priest, a Yale Law School professor who has vacationed with Thomas and Crow, told ProPublica he believes Crow’s generosity was not intended to influence Thomas’ views but rather to make his life more comfortable. “He views Thomas as a Supreme Court justice as having a limited salary,” Priest said. “So he provides benefits for him.”
Thomas and Crow didn’t respond to questions for this story. Crow, a major Republican donor, has not had cases at the Supreme Court since Thomas joined it and has previously said Thomas is a dear friend. David Sokol, a conservative financier who has taken Thomas on vacation on a private jet, said in a statement that he and Thomas had never discussed the justice’s finances or when he might retire.
Thomas’ comments in 2000 were to Florida Rep. Cliff Stearns, a vocal conservative who’d been in Congress for 11 years and occasionally socialized with the justice. They set off a flurry of activity across the judiciary and Capitol Hill. “His importance as a conservative was paramount,” Stearns said in a recent interview. “We wanted to make sure he felt comfortable in his job and he was being paid properly.”
There’s an often-criticized dynamic surrounding most important jobs in the federal government: The posts pay far less than comparable jobs in the private sector, but officials can cash in once they leave. Ex-regulators sell advice to the regulated. Generals retire to join military contractors. Former senators get jobs lobbying Congress.
But there is no revolving-door payday waiting on the other side of a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court. Justices generally stay on the bench past their 80th birthday, if not until death. In 2000, justices were paid more than cabinet secretaries or members of Congress, and far more than the average American. Still, judges’ salaries were not keeping pace with inflation, a source of ire throughout the federal judiciary. Young associates at top law firms made more than Supreme Court justices, while partners at the firms could earn millions a year.
Table with 2 columns and 4 rows.
Job Salaries in 2022
Median American worker $60,070
Member of Congress $174,000
Associate Supreme Court Justice $274,200
Partner at highest-paying law firm $7,294,000
Note: Median American figure is for full-time, year-round workers. Law partner figure is for the highest-paying of the 100 largest firms. (Sources: U.S. Census Current Population Survey, The American Lawyer)
Some of Thomas’ colleagues were extremely wealthy — Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was married to a high-paid tax lawyer and Justice Stephen Breyer to the daughter of a wealthy British lord. Thomas did not come from money. When he was appointed to the court in 1991, he was 43 years old and had spent almost all his adult life working for the government. At the time, he still had student loans from law school, Thomas has said.
The full details of Thomas’ finances over the years remain unclear. He made at least two big purchases around the early ’90s: a Corvette and a house in the Virginia suburbs on 5 acres of land. When Thomas and his wife, Ginni, bought the home for $522,000 a year after he joined the court, they borrowed all but $8,000, less than 2% of the purchase price, property records show.
Public records suggest a degree of financial strain. Throughout the first decade of his tenure, the couple regularly borrowed more money, including a $100,000 credit line on their house and a consumer loan of up to $50,000. Around January 1998, Thomas’ life changed when he took in his 6-year-old grandnephew, becoming his legal guardian and raising him as a son. The Thomases sent the child to a series of private schools.
In early January 2000, Thomas took the trip to the Georgia beach resort. Thomas was there to deliver a keynote speech at Awakening, a “conservative thought weekend” featuring golf, shooting lessons and aromatherapy along with panel discussions with businessmen and elected officials. (A founder and organizer of the annual event, Ernest Taylor, told ProPublica that Thomas’ trip was paid for by the organization. Thomas reported 11 free trips that year on his annual financial disclosure, mostly to colleges and universities, but did not disclose attending the conservative conference, an apparent violation of federal disclosure law.)
Thomas spoke at the Awakening conference in 2000. Credit:Screenshot by ProPublica of Awakening brochure
On a commercial flight back from Awakening, Thomas brought up the prospect of justices resigning to Stearns, the Republican lawmaker. Worried, Stearns wrote a letter to Thomas after the flight promising “to look into a bill to raise the salaries of members of The Supreme Court.”
“As we agreed, it is worth a lot to Americans to have the constitution properly interpreted,” Stearns wrote. “We must have the proper incentives here, too.”
Stearns’ office soon sought help from a lobbying firm working on the issue, and he delivered a speech on the House floor about judges’ salaries getting eroded by inflation. Thomas’ warning about resignations was relayed at a meeting of the heads of several judges’ associations. L. Ralph Mecham, then the judiciary’s top administrative official, fired off the memo describing Thomas’ complaints to Rehnquist, his boss.
“I understand that Justice Thomas clearly told him that in his view departures would occur within the next year or so,” Mecham wrote of Thomas’ conversation with Stearns. Mecham worried that “from a tactical point of view,” congressional Democrats might oppose a raise if they sensed “the apparent purpose is to keep Justices [Antonin] Scalia and Thomas on the Court.” (Scalia had nine children and was also one of the less wealthy justices. Scalia, Mecham and Rehnquist have since died.)
It’s not clear if Rehnquist ever responded. Several months later, Rehnquist focused his annual year-end report on what he called “the most pressing issue facing the Judiciary: the need to increase judicial salaries.”
Stearns sent a letter to Thomas after their conversation about pay and possible resignations at the Supreme Court. Credit:George Washington University Special Collections Research Center
Several people close to Thomas told ProPublica they believed that it was implausible the justice would ever retire early, and that he may have exaggerated his concerns to bolster the case for a raise. But around 2000, chatter that Thomas was dissatisfied about money circulated through conservative legal circles and on Capitol Hill, according to interviews with prominent attorneys, former members of Congress and Thomas’ friends. “It was clear he was unhappy with his financial situation and his salary,” one friend said.
Former Sen. Trent Lott, then the Republican Senate majority leader, recalled in a recent interview that there were serious concerns at the time that Thomas or other justices would leave.
The public received hardly a hint that such conversations about Thomas were unfolding in Washington. Thomas did once allude to government salaries, in a 2001 speech praising the value of public service. “The job is not worth doing for what they pay. It’s not worth doing for the grief,” he said. “But it is worth doing for the principle.”
Thomas delivered a speech in 2001 on the value of public service. Credit:Screenshot by ProPublica via C-SPAN
Around that time, Thomas was also pushing to allow justices to make paid speeches — a source of income that had been banned in the 1980s. On several occasions, Thomas discussed lifting the ban with appellate Judge David Hansen, who chaired the judiciary’s committee responsible for lobbying Congress on issues like pay, according to Mecham’s memo.
At Sen. Mitch McConnell’s request, a provision removing the ban for judges was quietly inserted into a spending bill in mid-2000. Why McConnell made the proposal became a subject of scrutiny in the legal press. After the Legal Times reported the measure had been dubbed the “Keep Scalia on the Court” bill, Scalia responded that the “honorarium ban makes no difference to me” and denied that he would ever leave the court for financial reasons. (The ban was never lifted. McConnell did not respond to a request for comment.)
During his second decade on the court, Thomas’ financial situation appears to have markedly improved. In 2003, he received the first payments of a $1.5 million advance for his memoir, a record-breaking sum for justices at the time. Ginni Thomas, who had been a congressional staffer, was by then working at the Heritage Foundation and was paid a salary in the low six figures.
Thomas also received dozens of expensive gifts throughout the 2000s, sometimes coming from people he’d met only shortly before. Thomas met Earl Dixon, the owner of a Florida pest control company, while getting his RV serviced outside Tampa in 2001, according to the Thomas biography “Supreme Discomfort.” The next year, Dixon gave Thomas $5,000 to put toward his grandnephew’s tuition. Thomas reported the payment in his annual disclosure filing.
The Judiciary Has Policed Itself for Decades. It Doesn’t Work.
Larger gifts went undisclosed. Crow paid for two years of private high school, which tuition rates indicate would’ve cost roughly $100,000. In 2008, another wealthy friend forgave “a substantial amount, or even all” of the principal on the loan Thomas had used to buy the quarter-million dollar RV, according to a recent Senate inquiry prompted by The New York Times’ reporting. Much of the Thomases’ leisure time was also paid for by a small set of billionaire businessmen, who brought the justice and his family on free vacations around the world. (Thomas has said he did not need to disclose the gifts of travel and his lawyer has disputed the Senate findings about the RV.)
By 2019, the justices’ pay hadn’t changed beyond keeping up with inflation. But Thomas’ views had apparently transformed from two decades before. That June, during a public appearance, Thomas was asked about salaries at the court. “Oh goodness, I think it’s plenty,” Thomas responded. “My wife and I are doing fine. We don’t live extravagantly, but we are fine.”
A few weeks later, Thomas boarded Crow’s private jet to head to Indonesia. He and his wife were off on vacation, an island cruise on Crow’s 162-foot yacht.
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Re: Clarence Thomas’s Billionaire Benefactor Collects Hitler
by admin » Mon Jan 08, 2024 12:56 am
Dems Makes URGENT DEMAND to Clarence Thomas in Trump Case
MeidasTouch
Jan 7, 2024
Justice Clarence Thomas will obtain more money if Trump is re-elected from his wife’s right wing MAGA consulting and lobbying firms, and that combined with his wife’s key role in organizing the Jan6 insurrection disqualifies Thomas from presiding over Trump-related cases. Michael Popok of Legal AF reports on a new demand by House Democrats that Thomas recuse himself from all things Trump and the ballot banning cases, or else.
Transcript
this is Michael popok legal AF let me
lead off with a quote from a new letter
prepared by leaders of the house
addressed to Clarence Thomas encouraging
Clarence Thomas to abide by the new code
of conduct of the Supreme Court and step
off the bench on anything related to
Donald Trump and especially those cases
like Colorado coming up before him now
on appeal as to whether Donald Trump
should be on the ballot or not and this
is how the letter ends I'm going to
start my hot take with it quote fewer
than half of all Americans trust the
Supreme Court and that number will fall
even lower if you Clarence Thomas rule
in this case that's how the letter ends
I'm going to talk to you about where we
are with it why it's so important
important for us to shine a CLE light on
Clarence Thomas and His ethical his
being ethically challenged and
compromised and how that impacts our
justice system there's no other way to
put this the relationship between
Clarence Thomas and his wife Jenny
Thomas a wife of 36 years
is such that the household of the
Thomases is financially benefited
benefiting from her close relationship
with Donald Trump from her leading Maga
right-wing not for-profit consultancies
and other organizations to support
Donald Trump's uh legal and political
and policy decisions she made tons of
money for her and for her husband when
Donald Trump was in office she's in she
is incentivized to try to get him back
into office in order to help the family
financially that alone is a
disqualifying event for Clarence Thomas
that he's going to benefit from some
business at the court and you also have
the fact that Jenny Thomas is not just a
an accidental witness to the Jan 6th
Insurrection she was the party planner
and wedding planner she was the
organizer for bringing people to the
capital that ultimately led to the riots
that were encouraged by Donald Trump
right her foundations raised money to
bust people in to participate at in what
became the Insurrection so she's not
just a passive drive by hey I wonder
what's going on over there on the on the
mall she knows what was going on in the
mall and then leading up to Jan 6 she
from the from the uh day after the
election all the way up to right before
Jan 6 she was a fervent supporter of
Donald Trump and trying to promote the
stop the steel uh arguments texting
incessantly Mark Meadows the chief of
staff now an indicted co-conspirator
to get him to overturn the will of the
people election officials and elected
officials dozens and dozens of text
messages have been revealed by Jenny
Thomas and she testified to the Jan 6
committee the report of the Jan 6
committee all 300 and something pages is
the foundational evidence for both the
Secretary of State and the Colorado
Supreme Court Justices ultimately
through the trial court level the basis
to find that Donald Trump was an
insurrectionist Andor committed
Rebellion against the Constitution
leading to him being banned on the 14th
Amendment article 3 she's she was she
testified not she testified she tried to
remove Liz Cheney and Adam kininger uh
kininger from being on the
panel in the early stages so jinny
Thomas who's benefiting financially
therefore Clarence Thomas is benefiting
financially who who has uh who is a
witness related to Donald Trump's
insurrectionist and rebellious Behavior
who was the party planner wedding
planner if you will for Jan 6th right
and and the Jan 6 report being this
important of a piece of evidence that's
being used by judges and by Secretary of
States to ban Donald Trump how could how
can Clarence Thomas even think that he
could satisfy the conditions of the new
code of conduct that the Supreme Court
just passed but is self- policing not
only self- policing each judge each
justice has to make the decision for
themselves there's no motion to
disqualify that we can file some people
might be thinking why don't they file a
motion to disqualify like at the trial
court level because there is no
equivalent at the United States Supreme
Court level because they didn't adopt a
policing mechanism within their own code
of conduct to let litigants let alone
average citizens move to disqualify a
Justice it's up to the Justice's own
conscience to make the decision whether
the the um the factors uh apply and he
should be disqualified or accuse himself
good
luck but what do we have we got a new
letter that's right from senior leaders
of the uh Democratic party in the house
led by Hank Johnson these are all
Congress people uh AOC and Dan Goldman
who's one of the managers of Donald
Trump's impeachment along with several
others who've written a very strong and
pointed letter not to Clarence not to
Clarence Thomas's boss not to John
Roberts the chief justice but right to
Clarence Thomas associate
Justice and here's what it says I'm
going to read you the the the really
important
parts uh dear Justice Thomas on December
15 2023 we wrote imploring that you
recuse yourself that means Step Off the
Bench from any participation in the case
of US versus Trump that's the main
underlying Jack Smith special counsel
case in the District of Columbia given
your wife's intimate involvement in Mr
Trump's alleged efforts to overturn the
2020
election um more particularly they refer
to jinny Thomas's substantial
involvement in the events leading up to
Jan 6's Insurrection and the financial
incentive it it preent it presents to
your household if Trump is reelected all
of these things being disqualifying they
then walk through the actual code of
conduct that we're now uh we're now
waiting around for Clarence Thomas to uh
decide whether it applies to him or not
in Canon
3B that provision of the code of conduct
it states that quote a Justice should
disqualify himself or herself in a
proceeding in which the Justice's
impartiality might be reasonably
questioned where that is where an
unbiased and reasonable person who is
aware of all relevant circumstances
would doubt that the Justice could
fairly discharge his or her duties the
code details such instances including
those in which the Justice knows that
the Justice or the Justice's spouse has
a financial interest in the subject
matter in controversy or in a party to
the proceeding Trump or any other
interest that could be affected
substantially by the outcome of the
proceeding and that's the framework and
then they go off and tell Clarence
Thomas exactly how those how those
factors here have been implicated and he
should disqualify himself so they start
with her testimony before the Jan 6
Committee just to remind everybody or
those that didn't know when when Jenny
Thomas was uh summoned to testify before
the house Chan 6 committee your wife
told the committee this is the letter
back to Thomas that she attended the Jan
6 stop the steel rally where Mr Trump
jined up the attendees into a mob
whipped them
up but what she left out is that she was
instrumental in planning it bringing the
insurrectionist to the capital your wife
was one of nine board members for a
conservative political group that helped
lead to stop the steel movement a
movement which culminated in the Jan 6
attack that the Colorado Supreme Court
deemed an Insurrection it is
Unthinkable it is Unthinkable that you
could be impartial in deciding whether
an event your wife personally organized
qualifies as an Insurrection that would
prevent someone from holding the office
of President just think about that for a
minute she not only organized it she was
paid to organize it so there's part of
the financial incentive that we talked
about she's not just a witness to the
Jan 6 um uh Rally or on the ellipse she
organizes it and then it goes on to say
on page two of the letter furthermore
your wife of 36 years Miss Thomas has
shown a fervent interest in or bias in
favor of Mr
Trump um she urged Mr Trump's Chief of
Staff the indicted Mark Meadows to
pursue unrelenting efforts to overturn
the 2020 presidential election with
dozens of text messages starting
immediately after election day and
ending only days after the Jan 6th
attack on the US capital not before
she's still texting him after the
Insurrection she also signed a letter
urging then minority leader McCarthy to
remove Adam K kininger and Liz Cheney
from the Jan 6 committee that is the
foundational basis of having Donald
Trump removed from the ballot Miss
Thomas was a witness due to her intimate
involvement and that committee's report
is integral to the case and now they hit
Clarence and Jenny Thomas where they
live in their pocketbook this is the
same group of people that have taken
millions of dollars of lavish trips from
right-wing Maga uh extremists who have
business before the court who have sold
and participated real estate
transactions with right-wing Maga people
or people who have business before the
court who have accepted Gifts of tuition
for nephews from people who have
business before the court who have filed
Amicus or friends of the court brief or
actually are litigants before the court
so they've never seen a
um a financial incentive that they
haven't ignored they've never seen one
that was worth disqualifying them and
since the Supreme Court back where I the
code of conduct has made this self-
policing there is no way to file a
motion to disqualify or recuse a United
States Supreme Court member you can at
the trial court level there is a process
for the litigants the parties based on
the facts in the law to disqualify a
trial judge you can't do it at the
Supreme Court level even the chief judge
chief justice Roberts can't go to
Clarence Thomas and tap him on the
shoulder and say you're out Clarence
we're going with eight on this one
you're code of conduct has been violated
we have to leave it to the person who
actually is the person charged with um
violating the code of conduct to decide
whether he has violated the code of
conduct how ludicrous um it's not even
self- policing it's it's Justice by
Justice policing with no alternative or
appeal
process so they hit him where they live
financially
finally it is foreseeable on the bottom
of page two of the letter that your
wife's earning capacity will be
positively impacted should the court
Grant the relief sought by the former
president in other words put him back on
the ballot and help him become president
again they then outline that before
Trump was President her consultancy at
an entity called Liberty Consulting made
up to less than $115,000 after he was
elected to try to file briefs and do
lobbying to help his uh Trump's policy
policies like the Muslim ban and things
related to covid it skyrocketed to up to
$250,000 uh Miss Thomas's professional
and financial interests the letter goes
on to say are aligned with Mr Trump
becoming president again and should he
be reelected it is likely that your
wife's income will be favorably impacted
your wife's income benefits your
household Therefore your family and by
extension you personally you Clarence
Thomas have a financial stake in the
outcome of this case which disqualifies
you from any involvement in it to
protect this is how the letter ends to
protect the Court's Integrity whatever's
left of it and the legitimacy of its
decision in this Monumental case you sir
must recuse yourself now we'll have to
sit back and watch it's up to Clarence
Thomas again it can only be where we do
a pressure campaign as led by the
Democrats in the house and the Senate
and by the midest touch network and on
legal AF where we shine the CLE light on
it and we don't let up with a ention or
pressure until he relents and if he
doesn't relent then we can call out the
United States Supreme Court and for the
illegitimate process by which they
render their decisions related to Donald
Trump can't ignore it they want to bury
their heads in the sand we can't we
don't have that luxury when our
constitutional republic and Liberty is
hanging by a thread in the balance
that's why we do hot takes like this
that's why we do legal AF at the
intersection of law politics and justice
to bring it to you to call out justices
that are conflicted to call out Donald
Trump when he takes inconsistent
positions in briefs hoping nobody will
notice we notice Jack Smith notices
prosecutors notices attorney general's
notice and judges notice and the public
at large who's going to make up that
jury notice and we're going to help
bring it to their attention one place on
the mightest touch Network this is uh
the only place exclusively don't turn
that dial as they used to say stay right
here help them get to 2 million they're
about 80,000 people away from turning
the do the odometer over to 2 million
free subscribers help them get there
this is the network you've been waiting
for and without you we're nothing it's
an independent Grassroots social media
platform devoted to this kind of
thinking this kind of analysis we don't
blow smoke or Sunshine especially when
it comes to law and politics so follow
us on Wednesdays and Saturdays at 8:00
p.m. eastern time on a show we call
legal AF and then on hot takes like this
one about every day if not every hour at
that same intersection law politics and
Justice give me a thumbs up if you like
what we're doing here helps keep me on
the air till my next hot take till my
next legal AF says Michael popac
reporting thanks so much for watching
******************************
Congress of the United States
Washington, DC 20515
December 15, 2023
The Honorable Clarence Thomas
Associate Justice
Supreme Court of the United States
1 First Street NE
Washington, DC 20543
Dear Justice Thomas,
This week, Special Counsel Jack Smith asked the Supreme Court to decide a key question in the case of United States of America v. Donald J. Trump, a case in which Mr. Trump is charged with conspiring to overturn the legitimate results of the 2020 presidential election, conspiring to obstruct the certification of the electoral vote, and actually obstructing the certification of the electoral vote.1 In this week’s filing, Mr. Smith asked the Supreme Court to grant certiorari to decide “Whether a former President is absolutely immune from federal prosecution for crimes committed while in office or is constitutionally protected from federal prosecution when he has been impeached but not convicted before the criminal proceedings begin.”2 The Supreme Court has directed Mr. Trump to file a response to the request for certiorari.3 For the reasons explained below, we strongly implore you to exercise your discretion and recuse yourself from this and any other decisions in the case of United States v. Trump.
Faith in the Supreme Court has plummeted, and fewer than half of all Americans trust the Supreme Court.4 Public perception is growing that the Supreme Court flouts the rules, in large part due to your recently reported ties to and luxury travel with billionaire Republican donors that you hid for decades.5 The public pressure has grown so intense, that last month the Supreme Court announced a formal—though unenforceable—Code of Conduct.6 You signed the Code, publicly proclaiming that you subscribe to it. In Cannon 3B, the Code states that “A Justice should disqualify himself or herself in a proceeding in which the Justice’s impartiality might reasonably be questioned, that is, where an unbiased and reasonable person who is aware of all relevant circumstances would doubt that the Justice could fairly discharge his or her duties.”7 The Code details such instances, including those in which “The Justice or Justice’s spouse…is known by the Justice:…(iii) to have an interest that could be substantially affected by the outcome of the proceeding; or (iv) likely to be a material witness in the proceeding.”8
We know through public reporting and through Congressional investigations that your wife, Virginia (“Ginni”) Thomas was intimately involved in Mr. Trump’s alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 election and to obstruct its certification – the very conspiracies at issue in this case. Your wife not only attended the pro-Trump rally that preceded the January 6th attack on the United States Capitol, she was one of nine board members for a conservative political group that helped lead the “Stop the Steal” movement.9 She traded at least 29 text messages with Mr. Trump’s Chief of Staff (Mark Meadows) in which she urged him to “pursue unrelenting efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election,” starting immediately after Election Day 2020 and ending only days after the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol.10 In these text messages, your wife pleaded with Mr. Meadows to continue the fight to overturn the election results, calling the election a “heist” and saying in one message: “Sounds like Sidney and her team are getting inundated with evidence of fraud. Make a plan. Release the Kraken and save us from the left taking America down.”11 Your wife also pressed Arizona and Wisconsin lawmakers to overturn President Biden’s 2020 victory, urging them to set aside President Biden’s popular-vote victory and to choose their own presidential electors, despite state law to the contrary.12 These details about your wife’s activities raise serious questions about your ability to be or even to appear impartial in any cases before the Supreme Court involving the 2020 election and the January 6th insurrection.
If you want to show the American people that the Supreme Court’s recent Code of Conduct is worth more than the paper it is written on, you must do the honorable thing and recuse yourself from any decisions in the case of United States v. Trump.
Sincerely,
Henry C. "Hank" Johnson, Jr.
Member of Congress
Jamie Raskin
Member of Congress
Madeleine Dean
Member of Congress
Sheila Jackson Lee
Member of Congress
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
Member of Congress
Gerald E. Connolly
Member of Congress
Dan Goldman
Member of Congress
Jasmine Crockett
Member of Congress
_______________
Notes:
1 Indictment, United States v. Trump, (D.D.C. Aug 01, 2023), available at: https://www.justice.gov/storage/US_v_Tr ... cr_257.pdf.
2 Petition for Writ of Certiorari, United States v. Trump, __U.S. __ (2023), available at: https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/ ... Donald%20J. %20Trump%20Petition.pdf.
3 ABC News, “Supreme Court will consider special counsel’s request to rule on Trump’s immunity in Jan. 6 case,” Katherine Faulders and Alexander Mallin, December 11, 2023, https://abcnews.go.com/US/special-couns ... limmunity/ story?id=105556211.
4 Gallup, “Approval of U.S. Supreme Court Down to 40%, a New Low,” Jeffrey M. Jones, September 23, 2021, https://news.gallup.com/poll/354908/app ... w-low.aspx.
5 See collection of 2023 stories at ProPublica, “Friends of the Court: SCOTUS Justices’ Beneficial Relationships with Billionaire Donors, https://www.propublica.org/series/supreme-court-scotus.
6 ABC News, “Under ethics pressure, Supreme Court announces it’s adopting code of conduct,” Devin Dwyer, November 12, 2023, https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/ethics- ... 104856337; U.S. Supreme Court, Code of Conduct for Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States, available at: https://www.supremecourt.gov/about/Code ... 3_2023.pdf.
7 Code of Conduct for Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States, Cannon 3B(2).
8 Id. Cannon 3B(2)(d).
9 CNN Politics: “January 6 committee has text messages between Ginni Thomas and Mark Meadows, Ryan Nobles, Annie Grayer, Zachary Cohen, and Jamie Gangel, March 25, 2022, https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/24/politics ... tmessages/ index.html; New York Times, “The Long Crusade of Clarence and Ginni Thomas,” Danny Hakim and Jo Becker, February 22, 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/22/maga ... homas.html.
10 Washington Post, “Virginia Thomas urged White House chief to pursue unrelenting efforts to overturn the 2020 election, texts show,” Bob Woodward and Robert Costa, March 24, 2022, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics ... ows-texts; CBS News, “Ginni Thomas, Justice Clarence Thomas’ wife, exchanged texts with Mark Meadows about efforts to overturn the 2020 election,” March 24, 2022, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ginni-thom ... n-overturn.
11 CNN Politics: “January 6 committee has text messages between Ginni Thomas and Mark Meadows, Ryan Nobles, Annie Grayer, Zachary Cohen, and Jamie Gangel, March 25, 2022, https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/24/politics ... tmessages/ index.html
12 Washington Post, “Ginni Thomas pressed Wisconsin lawmakers to overturn Biden’s 2020 victory,” Emma Brown, September 1, 2022, https://www.washingtonpost.com/investig ... r-tauchen/.
MeidasTouch
Jan 7, 2024
Justice Clarence Thomas will obtain more money if Trump is re-elected from his wife’s right wing MAGA consulting and lobbying firms, and that combined with his wife’s key role in organizing the Jan6 insurrection disqualifies Thomas from presiding over Trump-related cases. Michael Popok of Legal AF reports on a new demand by House Democrats that Thomas recuse himself from all things Trump and the ballot banning cases, or else.
Transcript
this is Michael popok legal AF let me
lead off with a quote from a new letter
prepared by leaders of the house
addressed to Clarence Thomas encouraging
Clarence Thomas to abide by the new code
of conduct of the Supreme Court and step
off the bench on anything related to
Donald Trump and especially those cases
like Colorado coming up before him now
on appeal as to whether Donald Trump
should be on the ballot or not and this
is how the letter ends I'm going to
start my hot take with it quote fewer
than half of all Americans trust the
Supreme Court and that number will fall
even lower if you Clarence Thomas rule
in this case that's how the letter ends
I'm going to talk to you about where we
are with it why it's so important
important for us to shine a CLE light on
Clarence Thomas and His ethical his
being ethically challenged and
compromised and how that impacts our
justice system there's no other way to
put this the relationship between
Clarence Thomas and his wife Jenny
Thomas a wife of 36 years
is such that the household of the
Thomases is financially benefited
benefiting from her close relationship
with Donald Trump from her leading Maga
right-wing not for-profit consultancies
and other organizations to support
Donald Trump's uh legal and political
and policy decisions she made tons of
money for her and for her husband when
Donald Trump was in office she's in she
is incentivized to try to get him back
into office in order to help the family
financially that alone is a
disqualifying event for Clarence Thomas
that he's going to benefit from some
business at the court and you also have
the fact that Jenny Thomas is not just a
an accidental witness to the Jan 6th
Insurrection she was the party planner
and wedding planner she was the
organizer for bringing people to the
capital that ultimately led to the riots
that were encouraged by Donald Trump
right her foundations raised money to
bust people in to participate at in what
became the Insurrection so she's not
just a passive drive by hey I wonder
what's going on over there on the on the
mall she knows what was going on in the
mall and then leading up to Jan 6 she
from the from the uh day after the
election all the way up to right before
Jan 6 she was a fervent supporter of
Donald Trump and trying to promote the
stop the steel uh arguments texting
incessantly Mark Meadows the chief of
staff now an indicted co-conspirator
to get him to overturn the will of the
people election officials and elected
officials dozens and dozens of text
messages have been revealed by Jenny
Thomas and she testified to the Jan 6
committee the report of the Jan 6
committee all 300 and something pages is
the foundational evidence for both the
Secretary of State and the Colorado
Supreme Court Justices ultimately
through the trial court level the basis
to find that Donald Trump was an
insurrectionist Andor committed
Rebellion against the Constitution
leading to him being banned on the 14th
Amendment article 3 she's she was she
testified not she testified she tried to
remove Liz Cheney and Adam kininger uh
kininger from being on the
panel in the early stages so jinny
Thomas who's benefiting financially
therefore Clarence Thomas is benefiting
financially who who has uh who is a
witness related to Donald Trump's
insurrectionist and rebellious Behavior
who was the party planner wedding
planner if you will for Jan 6th right
and and the Jan 6 report being this
important of a piece of evidence that's
being used by judges and by Secretary of
States to ban Donald Trump how could how
can Clarence Thomas even think that he
could satisfy the conditions of the new
code of conduct that the Supreme Court
just passed but is self- policing not
only self- policing each judge each
justice has to make the decision for
themselves there's no motion to
disqualify that we can file some people
might be thinking why don't they file a
motion to disqualify like at the trial
court level because there is no
equivalent at the United States Supreme
Court level because they didn't adopt a
policing mechanism within their own code
of conduct to let litigants let alone
average citizens move to disqualify a
Justice it's up to the Justice's own
conscience to make the decision whether
the the um the factors uh apply and he
should be disqualified or accuse himself
good
luck but what do we have we got a new
letter that's right from senior leaders
of the uh Democratic party in the house
led by Hank Johnson these are all
Congress people uh AOC and Dan Goldman
who's one of the managers of Donald
Trump's impeachment along with several
others who've written a very strong and
pointed letter not to Clarence not to
Clarence Thomas's boss not to John
Roberts the chief justice but right to
Clarence Thomas associate
Justice and here's what it says I'm
going to read you the the the really
important
parts uh dear Justice Thomas on December
15 2023 we wrote imploring that you
recuse yourself that means Step Off the
Bench from any participation in the case
of US versus Trump that's the main
underlying Jack Smith special counsel
case in the District of Columbia given
your wife's intimate involvement in Mr
Trump's alleged efforts to overturn the
2020
election um more particularly they refer
to jinny Thomas's substantial
involvement in the events leading up to
Jan 6's Insurrection and the financial
incentive it it preent it presents to
your household if Trump is reelected all
of these things being disqualifying they
then walk through the actual code of
conduct that we're now uh we're now
waiting around for Clarence Thomas to uh
decide whether it applies to him or not
in Canon
3B that provision of the code of conduct
it states that quote a Justice should
disqualify himself or herself in a
proceeding in which the Justice's
impartiality might be reasonably
questioned where that is where an
unbiased and reasonable person who is
aware of all relevant circumstances
would doubt that the Justice could
fairly discharge his or her duties the
code details such instances including
those in which the Justice knows that
the Justice or the Justice's spouse has
a financial interest in the subject
matter in controversy or in a party to
the proceeding Trump or any other
interest that could be affected
substantially by the outcome of the
proceeding and that's the framework and
then they go off and tell Clarence
Thomas exactly how those how those
factors here have been implicated and he
should disqualify himself so they start
with her testimony before the Jan 6
Committee just to remind everybody or
those that didn't know when when Jenny
Thomas was uh summoned to testify before
the house Chan 6 committee your wife
told the committee this is the letter
back to Thomas that she attended the Jan
6 stop the steel rally where Mr Trump
jined up the attendees into a mob
whipped them
up but what she left out is that she was
instrumental in planning it bringing the
insurrectionist to the capital your wife
was one of nine board members for a
conservative political group that helped
lead to stop the steel movement a
movement which culminated in the Jan 6
attack that the Colorado Supreme Court
deemed an Insurrection it is
Unthinkable it is Unthinkable that you
could be impartial in deciding whether
an event your wife personally organized
qualifies as an Insurrection that would
prevent someone from holding the office
of President just think about that for a
minute she not only organized it she was
paid to organize it so there's part of
the financial incentive that we talked
about she's not just a witness to the
Jan 6 um uh Rally or on the ellipse she
organizes it and then it goes on to say
on page two of the letter furthermore
your wife of 36 years Miss Thomas has
shown a fervent interest in or bias in
favor of Mr
Trump um she urged Mr Trump's Chief of
Staff the indicted Mark Meadows to
pursue unrelenting efforts to overturn
the 2020 presidential election with
dozens of text messages starting
immediately after election day and
ending only days after the Jan 6th
attack on the US capital not before
she's still texting him after the
Insurrection she also signed a letter
urging then minority leader McCarthy to
remove Adam K kininger and Liz Cheney
from the Jan 6 committee that is the
foundational basis of having Donald
Trump removed from the ballot Miss
Thomas was a witness due to her intimate
involvement and that committee's report
is integral to the case and now they hit
Clarence and Jenny Thomas where they
live in their pocketbook this is the
same group of people that have taken
millions of dollars of lavish trips from
right-wing Maga uh extremists who have
business before the court who have sold
and participated real estate
transactions with right-wing Maga people
or people who have business before the
court who have accepted Gifts of tuition
for nephews from people who have
business before the court who have filed
Amicus or friends of the court brief or
actually are litigants before the court
so they've never seen a
um a financial incentive that they
haven't ignored they've never seen one
that was worth disqualifying them and
since the Supreme Court back where I the
code of conduct has made this self-
policing there is no way to file a
motion to disqualify or recuse a United
States Supreme Court member you can at
the trial court level there is a process
for the litigants the parties based on
the facts in the law to disqualify a
trial judge you can't do it at the
Supreme Court level even the chief judge
chief justice Roberts can't go to
Clarence Thomas and tap him on the
shoulder and say you're out Clarence
we're going with eight on this one
you're code of conduct has been violated
we have to leave it to the person who
actually is the person charged with um
violating the code of conduct to decide
whether he has violated the code of
conduct how ludicrous um it's not even
self- policing it's it's Justice by
Justice policing with no alternative or
appeal
process so they hit him where they live
financially
finally it is foreseeable on the bottom
of page two of the letter that your
wife's earning capacity will be
positively impacted should the court
Grant the relief sought by the former
president in other words put him back on
the ballot and help him become president
again they then outline that before
Trump was President her consultancy at
an entity called Liberty Consulting made
up to less than $115,000 after he was
elected to try to file briefs and do
lobbying to help his uh Trump's policy
policies like the Muslim ban and things
related to covid it skyrocketed to up to
$250,000 uh Miss Thomas's professional
and financial interests the letter goes
on to say are aligned with Mr Trump
becoming president again and should he
be reelected it is likely that your
wife's income will be favorably impacted
your wife's income benefits your
household Therefore your family and by
extension you personally you Clarence
Thomas have a financial stake in the
outcome of this case which disqualifies
you from any involvement in it to
protect this is how the letter ends to
protect the Court's Integrity whatever's
left of it and the legitimacy of its
decision in this Monumental case you sir
must recuse yourself now we'll have to
sit back and watch it's up to Clarence
Thomas again it can only be where we do
a pressure campaign as led by the
Democrats in the house and the Senate
and by the midest touch network and on
legal AF where we shine the CLE light on
it and we don't let up with a ention or
pressure until he relents and if he
doesn't relent then we can call out the
United States Supreme Court and for the
illegitimate process by which they
render their decisions related to Donald
Trump can't ignore it they want to bury
their heads in the sand we can't we
don't have that luxury when our
constitutional republic and Liberty is
hanging by a thread in the balance
that's why we do hot takes like this
that's why we do legal AF at the
intersection of law politics and justice
to bring it to you to call out justices
that are conflicted to call out Donald
Trump when he takes inconsistent
positions in briefs hoping nobody will
notice we notice Jack Smith notices
prosecutors notices attorney general's
notice and judges notice and the public
at large who's going to make up that
jury notice and we're going to help
bring it to their attention one place on
the mightest touch Network this is uh
the only place exclusively don't turn
that dial as they used to say stay right
here help them get to 2 million they're
about 80,000 people away from turning
the do the odometer over to 2 million
free subscribers help them get there
this is the network you've been waiting
for and without you we're nothing it's
an independent Grassroots social media
platform devoted to this kind of
thinking this kind of analysis we don't
blow smoke or Sunshine especially when
it comes to law and politics so follow
us on Wednesdays and Saturdays at 8:00
p.m. eastern time on a show we call
legal AF and then on hot takes like this
one about every day if not every hour at
that same intersection law politics and
Justice give me a thumbs up if you like
what we're doing here helps keep me on
the air till my next hot take till my
next legal AF says Michael popac
reporting thanks so much for watching
******************************
Congress of the United States
Washington, DC 20515
December 15, 2023
The Honorable Clarence Thomas
Associate Justice
Supreme Court of the United States
1 First Street NE
Washington, DC 20543
Dear Justice Thomas,
This week, Special Counsel Jack Smith asked the Supreme Court to decide a key question in the case of United States of America v. Donald J. Trump, a case in which Mr. Trump is charged with conspiring to overturn the legitimate results of the 2020 presidential election, conspiring to obstruct the certification of the electoral vote, and actually obstructing the certification of the electoral vote.1 In this week’s filing, Mr. Smith asked the Supreme Court to grant certiorari to decide “Whether a former President is absolutely immune from federal prosecution for crimes committed while in office or is constitutionally protected from federal prosecution when he has been impeached but not convicted before the criminal proceedings begin.”2 The Supreme Court has directed Mr. Trump to file a response to the request for certiorari.3 For the reasons explained below, we strongly implore you to exercise your discretion and recuse yourself from this and any other decisions in the case of United States v. Trump.
Faith in the Supreme Court has plummeted, and fewer than half of all Americans trust the Supreme Court.4 Public perception is growing that the Supreme Court flouts the rules, in large part due to your recently reported ties to and luxury travel with billionaire Republican donors that you hid for decades.5 The public pressure has grown so intense, that last month the Supreme Court announced a formal—though unenforceable—Code of Conduct.6 You signed the Code, publicly proclaiming that you subscribe to it. In Cannon 3B, the Code states that “A Justice should disqualify himself or herself in a proceeding in which the Justice’s impartiality might reasonably be questioned, that is, where an unbiased and reasonable person who is aware of all relevant circumstances would doubt that the Justice could fairly discharge his or her duties.”7 The Code details such instances, including those in which “The Justice or Justice’s spouse…is known by the Justice:…(iii) to have an interest that could be substantially affected by the outcome of the proceeding; or (iv) likely to be a material witness in the proceeding.”8
We know through public reporting and through Congressional investigations that your wife, Virginia (“Ginni”) Thomas was intimately involved in Mr. Trump’s alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 election and to obstruct its certification – the very conspiracies at issue in this case. Your wife not only attended the pro-Trump rally that preceded the January 6th attack on the United States Capitol, she was one of nine board members for a conservative political group that helped lead the “Stop the Steal” movement.9 She traded at least 29 text messages with Mr. Trump’s Chief of Staff (Mark Meadows) in which she urged him to “pursue unrelenting efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election,” starting immediately after Election Day 2020 and ending only days after the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol.10 In these text messages, your wife pleaded with Mr. Meadows to continue the fight to overturn the election results, calling the election a “heist” and saying in one message: “Sounds like Sidney and her team are getting inundated with evidence of fraud. Make a plan. Release the Kraken and save us from the left taking America down.”11 Your wife also pressed Arizona and Wisconsin lawmakers to overturn President Biden’s 2020 victory, urging them to set aside President Biden’s popular-vote victory and to choose their own presidential electors, despite state law to the contrary.12 These details about your wife’s activities raise serious questions about your ability to be or even to appear impartial in any cases before the Supreme Court involving the 2020 election and the January 6th insurrection.
If you want to show the American people that the Supreme Court’s recent Code of Conduct is worth more than the paper it is written on, you must do the honorable thing and recuse yourself from any decisions in the case of United States v. Trump.
Sincerely,
Henry C. "Hank" Johnson, Jr.
Member of Congress
Jamie Raskin
Member of Congress
Madeleine Dean
Member of Congress
Sheila Jackson Lee
Member of Congress
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
Member of Congress
Gerald E. Connolly
Member of Congress
Dan Goldman
Member of Congress
Jasmine Crockett
Member of Congress
_______________
Notes:
1 Indictment, United States v. Trump, (D.D.C. Aug 01, 2023), available at: https://www.justice.gov/storage/US_v_Tr ... cr_257.pdf.
2 Petition for Writ of Certiorari, United States v. Trump, __U.S. __ (2023), available at: https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/ ... Donald%20J. %20Trump%20Petition.pdf.
3 ABC News, “Supreme Court will consider special counsel’s request to rule on Trump’s immunity in Jan. 6 case,” Katherine Faulders and Alexander Mallin, December 11, 2023, https://abcnews.go.com/US/special-couns ... limmunity/ story?id=105556211.
4 Gallup, “Approval of U.S. Supreme Court Down to 40%, a New Low,” Jeffrey M. Jones, September 23, 2021, https://news.gallup.com/poll/354908/app ... w-low.aspx.
5 See collection of 2023 stories at ProPublica, “Friends of the Court: SCOTUS Justices’ Beneficial Relationships with Billionaire Donors, https://www.propublica.org/series/supreme-court-scotus.
6 ABC News, “Under ethics pressure, Supreme Court announces it’s adopting code of conduct,” Devin Dwyer, November 12, 2023, https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/ethics- ... 104856337; U.S. Supreme Court, Code of Conduct for Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States, available at: https://www.supremecourt.gov/about/Code ... 3_2023.pdf.
7 Code of Conduct for Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States, Cannon 3B(2).
8 Id. Cannon 3B(2)(d).
9 CNN Politics: “January 6 committee has text messages between Ginni Thomas and Mark Meadows, Ryan Nobles, Annie Grayer, Zachary Cohen, and Jamie Gangel, March 25, 2022, https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/24/politics ... tmessages/ index.html; New York Times, “The Long Crusade of Clarence and Ginni Thomas,” Danny Hakim and Jo Becker, February 22, 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/22/maga ... homas.html.
10 Washington Post, “Virginia Thomas urged White House chief to pursue unrelenting efforts to overturn the 2020 election, texts show,” Bob Woodward and Robert Costa, March 24, 2022, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics ... ows-texts; CBS News, “Ginni Thomas, Justice Clarence Thomas’ wife, exchanged texts with Mark Meadows about efforts to overturn the 2020 election,” March 24, 2022, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ginni-thom ... n-overturn.
11 CNN Politics: “January 6 committee has text messages between Ginni Thomas and Mark Meadows, Ryan Nobles, Annie Grayer, Zachary Cohen, and Jamie Gangel, March 25, 2022, https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/24/politics ... tmessages/ index.html
12 Washington Post, “Ginni Thomas pressed Wisconsin lawmakers to overturn Biden’s 2020 victory,” Emma Brown, September 1, 2022, https://www.washingtonpost.com/investig ... r-tauchen/.
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Re: Clarence Thomas’s Billionaire Benefactor Collects Hitler
by admin » Tue Feb 20, 2024 1:29 am
John Oliver Offers Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas $1 Million a Year to Resign
by Colby Hall
MediaIte
Feb 19th, 2024, 7:17 am
https://www.mediaite.com/tv/john-oliver ... to-resign/
John Oliver made Justice Clarence Thomas an offer too good to refuse, but he has 30 days to take a cool million a year — plus a sweet bus — or it goes away.
Oliver made the stunning offer at the end of Sunday evening’s Last Week Tonight, referencing numerous reports that Thomas never declared lavish vacations with mega-wealthy Republican donors to luxurious resorts.
As the show ended, Oliver addressed Thomas and said, “Lot on your plate right now. From stripping away women’s rights to hearing January 6th cases, you definitely shouldn’t be hearing two potentially helping rollback decades of federal regulations.”
“And you deserve a break, you know, away from the meanness of Washington so you can be surrounded by the regular folks whose lives you made demonstrably worse for decades. Now. The good news is, I think we can help you with that because since your favorite mode of travel might be in need of an upgrade, we are excited to offer you this brand new top-of-the-line cray boat marathon motor coach!”
Oliver then touted the $2 million touring bus, complete with king-sized bed, fireplace, and four televisions, before returning to address the Supreme Court justice’s inner dialog.
“I think you’re thinking, what would my friend say if I take this offer? Will they judge me as they sit in their boardrooms and mega yachts and Hitler shrines? Will they still treat me to luxury vacations and sing songs about me off their phones?” he asked rhetorically. “Well, that’s the beauty of friendship, Clarence. If they’re real friends, they’ll love you no matter what your job is. So I guess this might be the perfect way to find out who your real friends actually are. ”
“So that’s the offer. $1 million a year, Clarence. And a brand new condo on wheels. And all you have to do to return is sign the contract and get the fuck off the Supreme Court. Talk it over with your totally best friend in the whole world. Because the clock starts now. Thirty days, Clarence,” Oliver concluded.” Let’s do this!”
by Colby Hall
MediaIte
Feb 19th, 2024, 7:17 am
https://www.mediaite.com/tv/john-oliver ... to-resign/
John Oliver made Justice Clarence Thomas an offer too good to refuse, but he has 30 days to take a cool million a year — plus a sweet bus — or it goes away.
Oliver made the stunning offer at the end of Sunday evening’s Last Week Tonight, referencing numerous reports that Thomas never declared lavish vacations with mega-wealthy Republican donors to luxurious resorts.
As the show ended, Oliver addressed Thomas and said, “Lot on your plate right now. From stripping away women’s rights to hearing January 6th cases, you definitely shouldn’t be hearing two potentially helping rollback decades of federal regulations.”
“And you deserve a break, you know, away from the meanness of Washington so you can be surrounded by the regular folks whose lives you made demonstrably worse for decades. Now. The good news is, I think we can help you with that because since your favorite mode of travel might be in need of an upgrade, we are excited to offer you this brand new top-of-the-line cray boat marathon motor coach!”
Oliver then touted the $2 million touring bus, complete with king-sized bed, fireplace, and four televisions, before returning to address the Supreme Court justice’s inner dialog.
“I think you’re thinking, what would my friend say if I take this offer? Will they judge me as they sit in their boardrooms and mega yachts and Hitler shrines? Will they still treat me to luxury vacations and sing songs about me off their phones?” he asked rhetorically. “Well, that’s the beauty of friendship, Clarence. If they’re real friends, they’ll love you no matter what your job is. So I guess this might be the perfect way to find out who your real friends actually are. ”
“So that’s the offer. $1 million a year, Clarence. And a brand new condo on wheels. And all you have to do to return is sign the contract and get the fuck off the Supreme Court. Talk it over with your totally best friend in the whole world. Because the clock starts now. Thirty days, Clarence,” Oliver concluded.” Let’s do this!”
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