From crooked judges who hand victories to those who appoint them to office, to corrupt bar prosecutors who are unable to protect the public from crooked lawyers, to sheriffs and police who declare themselves above the law, to congressional members who refuse to obey the laws they themselves enact, the nation is under attack. The courts have become a theater in which absurd results and outrageous consequences are routinely announced as normal. Here we consider and dismember these routine outrages that threaten to completely overwhelm the common, reasonable understanding of right and wrong.
Clarence Thomas Is On a Quest to Be the Most Corrupt Justice In the Court; The Supreme Court justice has reportedly spent decades accepting exorbitant gifts, luxury vacations, and yacht rides from a major GOP power-player—none of which were disclosed to the American public. by Eric Lutz Vanity Fair April 6, 2023
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WASHINGTON, DC - APRIL 23: Associate Justice Clarence Thomas sits during a group photo of the Justices at the Supreme Court in Washington, DC on April 23, 2021. (Photo by Erin Schaff-Pool/Getty Images) ERIN SCHAFF-POOL/GETTY IMAGES
Sitting on the Supreme Court—it’s good work if you can get it. Justices enjoy a lifetime appointment, extraordinary influence over the lives of their fellow Americans, and little to no formal oversight. But if you’re Clarence Thomas, the gig apparently comes with additional perks: lavish vacations, access to private jets and super-yachts, and other pricey gifts, all courtesy of a billionaire and GOP mega-donor.
According to ProPublica, the conservative justice has for decades accepted luxury vacations and other gifts from Harlan Crow, the Dallas real estate developer who has helped found the anti-tax conservative Club for Growth organization, poured millions into GOP campaigns, and provided the initial $500,000 donation to the lobbying outfit founded by the justice’s wife, Ginni Thomas. The vacations have included a week and a half of island-hopping in Indonesia on Crow’s super-yacht, an excursion that would have otherwise cost the Thomases upward of $500,000; trips to the all-male California retreat Bohemian Grove, where Crow is a member; and visits to Crow’s Texas ranch. Every summer, ProPublica reports, Thomas also spends a week at Crow’s private Adirondacks resort—hobnobbing with various corporate executives, lobbyists, and Federalist Society leader Leonard Leo, in accommodations that include a full-scale mock-up of Hagrid’s hut from Harry Potter.
As you might expect, Thomas did not report any of the vacations, private travel, or gifts on financial disclosures, in what appears to be clear, if brazen, violation of ethics laws.
“It’s incomprehensible to me that someone would do this,” retired federal judge Nancy Gertner told ProPublica. “When a justice’s lifestyle is being subsidized by the rich and famous, it absolutely corrodes public trust,” former government ethics lawyer Virginia Canter echoed, warning that Thomas “seems to have completely disregarded his higher ethical obligations.”
ProPublica Apr 6, 2023 @propublica Replying to @propublica 7/ The justice has gone with Crow to the Bohemian Grove, the exclusive California all-male retreat, and to Crow's sprawling Texas ranch. Every summer, Thomas typically spends about a week at Camp Topridge, Crow's private resort in the Adirondacks.
8/ Inside Topridge hangs a photorealistic painting of one of Thomas' visits to the 105-acre property in remote upstate NY. The painting shows Thomas enjoying a cigar alongside Crow and chatting with other conservative power brokers like Leonard Leo: 4:54 AM Apr 6, 2023
Lest we forget, Thomas has already shown, time and again, exactly what he thinks of those ethical obligations. After all, this is the justice who refused to recuse himself from cases related to the 2020 election, despite his wife supporting—and encouraging—Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn that year’s election results. But the lifestyle that Thomas' friendship with Crow has afforded him shine an even more glaring light on his indifference to the principles of judicial integrity and independence—and underscore the need for real accountability on the nation’s high court, a lack of which has called the court's legitimacy into question.
The Supreme Court's conservatives have steadfastly resisted such calls, lamenting the public's deteriorating trust while refusing to do anything to earn it. “All of our opinions are open to criticism,” Chief Justice John Roberts said last year, amid public outcry over its disastrous Dobbs decision—an activist ruling if there ever was one. “But simply because people disagree with an opinion is not a basis for criticizing the legitimacy of the court.”
Roberts, of course, was arguing with a straw man. Public trust hasn’t cratered because people “disagree” with one opinion. It has plummeted because its right-wing majority—strong-armed into existence by Mitch McConnell and the Republicans—has abandoned the pretense that it is much more than the enforcement arm of the GOP. The conservatives have run roughshod over precedent; reverse-engineered their legal rationales for seemingly ideological decisions; and, in the case of Dobbs’ author Samuel Alito, openly mocked critics.
As for Thomas, neither he nor the Supreme Court appear to have responded to the ProPublica report Thursday. But Crow, for his part, defended his “dear” friendship with the justice in a lengthy statement to the outlet. “We have never asked about a pending or lower court case, and Justice Thomas has never discussed one, and we have never sought to influence Justice Thomas on any legal or political issue,” Crow said. “More generally, I am unaware of any of our friends ever lobbying or seeking to influence Justice Thomas on any case, and I would never invite anyone who I believe had any intention of doing that.”
“These are gatherings of friends,” Crow added.
As always, we’re just supposed to take their word for it—but we shouldn’t. “This degree of corruption is shocking—almost cartoonish,” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wrote Thursday, renewing her call to impeach Thomas. “The revelation that Justice Thomas has been receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars in undisclosed gifts from a Texan billionaire over many years is more than troubling,” Representative Gerry Connolly added. “It is disqualifying.”
The case for impeaching Justice Clarence Thomas by Mehdi Hasan MSNBC Apr 13, 2023 #SCOTUS #SupremeCourt #ClarenceThomas
There’s new scrutiny on Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas after ProPublica revealed undisclosed luxury trips and property sale to a billionaire GOP mega-donor. It's just the latest in a long line of ethical and potentially legal controversies surrounding the Justice. With Thomas unlikely to step down, Mehdi looks at the case to be made for impeaching Justice Clarence Thomas.
Transcript
I want to start with the story of a Supreme Court Justice accused of taking money from a shady Source without the proper disclosures his reputation ruined and under pressure from colleagues on the court he's shamed into stepping down no this story is not about Justice Clarence Thomas unfortunately Thomas seems impervious to shame no sign that he'll resign after last week's bombshell report from propublica detailing the undisclosed luxury trips and vacations that Thomas took with conservative billionaire and mega donor Harlan Crowe but we'll come back to Justice Thomas in just a moment first let me tell you about the Justice I was referring to Justice Abe Fortis who was nominated to the court by President Lyndon Johnson back in 1965. he was a liberal leading Justice a Jewish judge who supported the Civil Rights Movement this approach the approach of Martin Luther King is not fanaticism Martin Luther King is not the definition of a fanatic leadership in a democracy cannot be vested in fanatics the two are antithetical as far as George santiana tells us a fanatic is one who redoubles his efforts when he has forgotten his ends in June of 1968 near the end of Johnson's presidency chief justice Earl Warren decided to step down from the court Johnson nominated Fortis to become the new chief justice but conservatives in the Senate backed by Richard Nixon's presidential campaign team were bent on halting the ascent of the two liberal forters not only did they filibuster his nomination but they tried to find negative stories to publish about the Justice it was discovered that forters had accepted a fifteen thousand dollar honorarium to teach summer classes at American University a salary paid for not by the university according to the Brennan Center for justice but by former clients of fortis's old law partner many of whom had cases before The Supreme Court according to the Washington Post this practice was not unheard of at the time but also and understandably not fully embraced either the Revelation though hardened opposition to Fortis in the Senate this combined with Johnson's weakened lame duck Powers forced Justice forces at hand causing him to withdraw his name from Chi if Justice consideration but that was just the start of fortis's troubles after Nixon took office his attorney General John Mitchell who would later himself be convicted for his role in Watergate continued to investigate Fortis and was able to dig up some more dubious Financial activity fortis's biographer laid it out Fortis had a personal and financial relationship with a financier named Lewis Wilson who eventually ran into trouble with the Securities and Exchange Commission and it was in fact true that Fortis had started on that relationship shortly after he came to the court and then ended the relationship not quite a year later but that timing coincided with wolfson's legal troubles yeah the Optics were bad in fact forties had accepted a 20 000 retainer to serve on the board of Wilson's charitable Foundation although Fort has returned the money things were messy Wolfson even asked Fortress to ask President Nixon for a pardon which there's no evidence to Justice ever did so Ford has stood strong at first resisting resignation and denying any wrongdoing but pressure continued to build the Nixon justice department decided to bring fortis's wife Carolyn agar into the mix that's right Fortis had a controversial spouse as well the doj reopened an old investigation into whether or not agar had obstructed Justice by withholding documents that were allegedly found in her office with agar facing a potential indictment fortis's own colleagues on the court including chief justice Warren himself urged Fortis to step down even President Nixon got involved applying pressure on Fortis to resign eventually the chorus of voices telling him to stand down became too loud Abe Fortis resigned on May 15 1969 the last Justice to resign from the Supreme Court in disgrace so today more than 50 years later why isn't there any pressure from lawmakers or fellow justices on Clarence Thomas to resign after all he isn't just accused of legal and ethical violations but he has single-handedly done more to undermine the legitimacy of the Supreme Court than arguably anyone else in living memory Abe Fortis included over the past couple of years it's been one Thomas scandal after another one Clarence controversy after the next and it's no doubt contributing to the crash in the Supreme Court's approval rating over the last few years according to Gallup only 47 percent of Americans now have a great deal or fair amount of trust in the Supreme Court that's the lowest level since Gallup started tracking that Trend in 1972 only 40 percent of Americans approve of the way the court is handling its job with 58 disapproving and a record 42 percent of Americans think that the court is too conservative that's compared with just 18 who say it's too liberal now there are many contributing factors here but when it comes to Clarence Thomas and his multiple controversies where is Chief Justice John Roberts how come he won't do uh what his predecessor did and urged Clarence Thomas to stand down for the sake of the Supreme Court and its reputation where's President Biden on this is he going to say anything strong about what Clarence Thomas has been up to what he's accused of how about Democrats in the house and the Senate they're doing the whole we're going to investigate routine but nothing stronger than that although after the pro-publica report came out last week congresswoman Alexander ocasio-cortez did say this on CNN I know that there are calls for chief justice to for the Chief Justice Roberts to initiate an investigation I do not think that this court any longer has the legitimacy it is The house's responsibility to pursue that investigation in the form of impeachment yes the I word impeachment since Clarence Thomas has so far chosen not to resign not to do a Fortis why aren't more Democrats joining AOC and calling for his impeachment because from my perspective there is a strong case for impeaching him in fact in my view there are three main reasons why Justice Thomas should be impeached and that's what we're going to examine today first off number one the financial case for impeaching Thomas as I mentioned explosive new reporting from propublica has revealed that Justice's undisclosed dealings with GOP Mega donor businessman Harlan Crowe the same island Crowe incidentally who it turns out owns an autographed copy of minecamp and a collection of Nazi Linens in his Library according to the Dallas Morning News he says he's just preserving history as you do but I digress according to propublica Clarence Thomas has vacation with Crow almost every year for 20 plus years traveling on Crow's private jet hobnobbing on Crow's super yacht and spending time at Crow's private Resort in Upstate New York on 21 2019 vacation to Indonesia is this estimated by propublica to have been worth around 500 000 to give you an idea of the alleged value-changing hands here according to propublica the extent and frequency of Crow's apparent gifts to Thomas have no known precedent in the modern history of the U.S Supreme Court I wonder what the late Abe Fortis would have made of all this by the way these lavish romps are certainly different than the vacations Thomas professed to enjoy in the 2020 Holland Crow funded documentary about Thomas's life you know I don't have any problem with going to Europe but I prefer the United States and I prefer seeing the regular parts of the United States I prefer going across the rural areas I prefer the RV parks I prefer the Walmart parking lots to the beaches and things like that there's something normal to me about it I've come from regular stock and I prefer that I prefer being around them what's worse sorry I'm still laughing about that clip I'm a regular kind of guy what's worse these lavish trips with Crow were not included on Thomas's Financial disclosures Supreme Court Justices and other federal judges are required by law to disclose gifts they've received though there are some exceptions for what's called personal Hospitality of course that's just what Justice Thomas cited in a statement released last week Justice Thomas says he was advised that this sort of personal Hospitality from close personal friends who did not have business before the court was not reportable he also says now that the guidance has been updated he'll follow this guidance in the future but I'm calling BS really Justice Thomas you needed it spelled out for you that it's inappropriate for a supposedly impartial public servant for a top judge to take extravagant trips with a republican Mega donor and here's the thing there is a strong case that the personal Hospitality exception does not apply to Thomas here propublica reports that Thomas would often meet with major Republican donors business Executives and even Federalist Society leaders at crows Mountain Retreat the American Prospect argues this amounts to government business and not personal Hospitality making Thomas's failure to disclose these gifts a direct violation of the post-watergate Ethics in Government Act and if you look at how the rules Define personal Hospitality they describe it as quote Hospitality extended for a non-business purpose at the personal residence of that person or facilities owned by that person or family and as Dahlia lithwick and Mark Joseph stone note in their piece on this issue for slate quote a person dead set on defending Thomas might be able to squeeze these yacht trips into this definition arguing that by hosting Thomas on his boat for food drink and sightseeing Crow extended Hospitality on his own property but lending out the private jet for Thomas's personal use come on letting somebody use your private jet to travel around the country is not extending Hospitality on your property it is lending out your property to someone else so they can avoid paying for a commercial flight what's more Crow's status as a close friend of Thomas is questionable as Indiana University professor Charles J pointed out to NBC News Thomas and Crowe were not childhood friends they met when Thomas was on the Supreme Court when the Justice had to understand that Crowe's interest in bringing Thomas into the fold a friend who enjoyed such lavish treatment was attributed was attributable excuse me to his status as a judge not to mention the fact that Crow gave half a million dollars to the justices now Infamous wife Ginny's right-wing lobbying pack Liberty Central back in 2009 according to Politico so again this isn't some old personal family friend who was only interested in hanging out with Thomas over the summer come on this is someone who befriended Justice Thomas and certainly has an interest in influencing a powerful conservative Justice on a whole host of issues oh and Crow's donations to Ginny's pack in particular look uncomfortably close to an attempt to Lobby Clarence an obvious No-No on that point Crow did tell propublica the hospital reality we've extended to the Thomases over the years is no different from the hospitality we've extended to our many other dear friends we have never sought to influence Justice Thomas on any legal or political issue but it doesn't end there on Thursday pro-publica dropped another bombshell report this time revealing that Holland Crowe bought property from Clarence Thomas including his mother's home for over a hundred and thirty three thousand dollars according to state tax documents and a house deed from 2014 and again Clarence Thomas did not disclose this Crow told propublica he purchased Thomas's mother's home to one day turn it into a museum Thomas did not respond to propublica but wait there's more this relationship with Harlan Crowe isn't Justice Thomas's only financial Scandal no it's just a moldy cheese on top of his financial impropriety Pizza let's not forget the New Yorker report on one of Ginny's other brushes with Lobby including her undisclosed paid Consulting work for the center for security policy founded by far right activist Frank Gaffney Gaffney submitted an amicus brief to the Supreme Court in 2017 in support of the Trump administration's Muslim travel ban while Ginny was on their payroll not only did Justice Clarence Thomas fail to recuse himself from that case he actually voted in favor of the Trump ban surprise but he also didn't declare the two hundred thousand dollars his wife earned in 2017 and 2018 from gaffney's group which judges are supposed to do so that is the financial case for impeaching Thomas to Lavish undisclosed gifts the wife's paid undisclosed lobbying the likely violation of the law then number two there's the small D Democratic case for impeachment because back in January 2021 American democracy was literally on the line and Ginny Thomas played a role in fact eventually she was called to testify in front of the January 6 committee last September thank you for being here could you speak with your husband with both your beliefs of the election being stolen thank you very much that testimony followed reports that Ginny Thomas had been in touch with key figures during the plot to overturn the 2020 election including State lawmakers in Arizona and in Wisconsin urging them to go against the will of the people and choose their own slate of trump electors she was even in touch with Trump's Chief of Staff Mark Meadows urging him not to let the then president concede to Joe Biden not only that just two days after the election she sent Meadows crazy right-wing conspiracy theories that the Biden crime family would be arrested and living in barges of gitmo to face military tribunals for sedition totally normal in her testimony before the January 6 committee Thomas said she regretted those texts but said she still had her own concerns objections over alleged 2020 voter fraud despite all the evidence to the contrary now you might say why should Clarence Thomas be punished impeached for something his wife said or did Fair Point except number one according to Ginny herself while the two of them apparently don't discuss their work with one another quote like so many married couples we share many of the same ideals principles and aspirations for America the same aspirations for America like I don't know overturning Democratic elections doing coup plots we're expected to believe Clarence Thomas doesn't share those views with his wife and didn't know she was at the ellipse in DC listening to Donald Trump incite a mob on January the 6th really but the second and bigger reason why Ginny's anti-democratic activities disqualified Clarence Thomas from the bench is because he had the opportunity to recuse himself from January the sixth related and trump-related cases and he didn't he refused to in fact he has never recused himself from a case involving his spouse even though other justices including conservative justices have in January of 2022 the Supreme Court rejected Trump's bid to block documents from being released to the January 6 committee it was an eight to one ruling and you will never ever guess who the sole Justice siding with Trump was yeah Clarence Thomas I bet you're shocked he didn't say why he dissented but just weeks later we learned about Ginny Thomas's text messages that's a pretty huge coincidence and it's not just that given that ruling critics would later call on Thomas to recuse himself from the Trump Mar-A-Lago case where the former president asked the justices to intervene in his legal fight over classified documents seized from his Florida Resort home and again Thomas refused he didn't recuse himself and the court ultimately did reject Trump's request though it gave us no indication of what individual justices made of that request I'd love to know what Clarence Thomas made of that request so let's look to the near future let's say Trump becomes the GOP Presidential nominee and let's say he loses the general election again if he brings a court case up to the Supreme Court as he did in 2020 and this time the court agrees to hear it do you really think Justice Clarence Thomas is going to recuse himself and if he doesn't can he really be objective in such a case no of course not so that's another major reason to impeach him and finally the third reason for impeaching Clarence Thomas is a pretty simple moral one he isn't morally fit to sit on the court and he should never have been appointed in the first place you remember Thomas's confirmation hearings back in 1991 don't you today the Senate Judiciary Committee is meeting to hear evidence on sexual harassment charges that have been made against judge Clarence Thomas who has been nominated to be an associate judge of the Supreme Court he talked about pornographic materials depicting individuals with large penises or large breasts involved in various sex acts on several occasions Thomas told me graphically of his own sexual prowess because I was extremely uncomfortable talking about sex with him at all and particularly in such a graphic way I told him that I did not want to talk about these subjects and from my standpoint as a black American as far as I'm concerned it is a high-tech lynching yes Thomas's confirmation hearings were marked by sexual harassment allegations from Anita Hill who used to work with Thomas in the 1980s she described as you heard there in explicit detail what Thomas allegedly said to her and endured hours of excruciating and deeply personal questions from that all-white all-male committee then Senator Joe Biden led the hearings back in 1991 as chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee and he has long been criticized rightly criticized for his treatment of Anita Hill and for suppressing the testimony of other women who wanted to come forward with their own allegations of harassment against it soon to be Justice they were other women Biden has since expressed regret over his handling of that case but in the end Thomas who denied the allegations was narrowly confirmed in a way setting the stage for Brett Kavanaugh who nearly 30 years later was also confirmed despite allegations of sexual misconduct that critics say were also not fully investigated but I digress the point is there is a valid argument that people like Thomas and Kavanaugh are illegitimate justices to begin with given the serious claims against them that were never fully scrutinized or investigated I know conservatives don't want to hear this and get mad whenever it's raised but the truth is impeachment would correct the original sin of Thomas's 1991 confirmation now I know what you're thinking Democrats don't control the house and don't have enough votes in the Senate to impeach or convict Clarence Thomas I know but that doesn't mean the impeachment can't be on the table it's one tool that the constitution gives the legislature to keep a Judiciary full of Lifetime appointees in check I mean why can't Democrats run on impeaching him in 2024 it's what the Republicans would do if the situation was reversed and the case against Thomas is clear he's accused of violating the law with his undisclosed gifts from his billionaire pal he's a threat to democracy because of his wife's behavior and his refusal to recuse and he's morally unfit to sit on our Supreme Court given the Anita Hill allegations I mean Abe Fortis quit for much less but if Thomas won't resign and he's not going to then what will Democrats do what will his fellow justices do because calls for investigations that go nowhere are not enough and without accountability Thomas remains Untouchable thumbing his nose at the rest of us from his lifetime position on the highest court in the land [Music] foreign
Justice Thomas: SCOTUS ‘should reconsider’ contraception, same-sex marriage rulings: Democrats warned that the court would seek to undo other constitutional rights if it overturned Roe v. Wade, as it did on Friday. by Quint Forgey and Josh Gerstein Politico 06/24/2022 11:24 AM EDT Updated: 06/24/2022 01:45 PM EDT https://www.politico.com/news/2022/06/2 ... s-00042256
[x] Abortion rights advocate Sadie Kuhns holds a sign outside the U.S. Supreme Court after the court announced its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson to overturn Roe v. Wade on June 24, 2022. | Francis Chung/E&E News/POLITICO
Justice Clarence Thomas argued in a concurring opinion released on Friday that the Supreme Court “should reconsider” its past rulings codifying rights to contraception access, same-sex relationships and same-sex marriage.
The sweeping suggestion from the current court’s longest-serving justice came in the concurring opinion he authored in response to the court’s ruling revoking the constitutional right to abortion, also released on Friday.
In his concurring opinion, Thomas — an appointee of President George H.W. Bush — wrote that the justices “should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell” — referring to three cases having to do with Americans’ fundamental privacy, due process and equal protection rights.
Since May, when POLITICO published an initial draft majority opinion of the court’s decision on Friday to strike down Roe v. Wade, Democratic politicians have repeatedly warned that such a ruling would lead to the reversal of other landmark privacy-related cases.
“If the rationale of the decision as released were to be sustained, a whole range of rights are in question. A whole range of rights,” President Joe Biden said of the draft opinion at the time. “And the idea [that] we’re letting the states make those decisions, localities make those decisions, would be a fundamental shift in what we’ve done.”
The court’s liberal wing — Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan — echoed those concerns in a dissenting opinion released on Friday, writing that “no one should be confident that this majority is done with its work.”
The constitutional right to abortion “does not stand alone,” the three justices wrote. “To the contrary, the Court has linked it for decades to other settled freedoms involving bodily integrity, familial relationships, and procreation.”
The court’s past rulings in Roe, Griswold v. Connecticut, Lawrence v. Texas, Obergefell v. Hodges and other cases “are all part of the same constitutional fabric,” the three justices continued, “protecting autonomous decisionmaking over the most personal of life decisions.”
The court’s majority opinion, written by Justice Samuel Alito, repeatedly insists that the justices’ decision to abandon Roe poses no threat to other precedents.
“Our decision concerns the constitutional right to abortion and no other right,” Alito wrote. “Nothing in this opinion should be understood to cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion.”
However, the court’s liberal wing argued that assurance was unsatisfactory, given Thomas’ simultaneous invitation on Friday to open up numerous other precedents for review.
“The first problem with the majority’s account comes from [Thomas’] concurrence — which makes clear he is not with the program,” Breyer, Sotomayor and Kagan wrote, adding: “At least one Justice is planning to use the ticket of today’s decision again and again and again.”
Still, no other justice joined Thomas’ concurring opinion, which largely reiterated his long-stated views on the legal theories behind many of those decisions.
Furthermore, it appears doubtful that many of Thomas’ conservative colleagues would be eager to revisit issues like contraception and same-sex marriage anytime soon, considering the claims in Alito’s majority opinion that the court’s ruling on Friday casts no doubt on those decisions.
Still, by declining to explicitly repudiate Thomas’ stance, his conservative colleagues provided fodder to the court’s liberal members and left-leaning critics to warn that more overrulings of precedent are on the way.
Of those in the majority on Friday, Justice Brett Kavanaugh came closest to rejecting Thomas’ position, although without mentioning him by name. In a solo concurring opinion, Kavanaugh wrote: “Overruling Roe does not mean the overruling of those precedents, and does not threaten or cast doubt on those precedents.”
Speaking from the White House shortly after the decision was released, Biden directly invoked Thomas’ concurring opinion and reasserted that the ruling “risks the broader right to privacy for everyone.”
“Roe recognized the fundamental right to privacy that has served as a basis for so many more rights that we’ve come to take for granted, that are ingrained in the fabric of this country,” Biden said. “The right to make the best decisions for your health. The right to use birth control. A married couple in the privacy of their bedroom, for God’s sake. The right to marry the person you love.”
With his concurring opinion, Thomas “explicitly called to reconsider the right of marriage equality [and] the right of couples to make their choices on contraception,” Biden continued. “This [is an] extreme and dangerous path the court is now taking us on.”
Is Ginni Thomas a Threat to the Supreme Court?: Behind closed doors, Justice Clarence Thomas’s wife is working with many groups directly involved in controversial cases before the Court. by Jane Mayer The New Yorker January 21, 2022
In December, Chief Justice John Roberts released his year-end report on the federal judiciary. According to a recent Gallup poll, the Supreme Court has its lowest public-approval rating in history—in part because it is viewed as being overly politicized. President Joe Biden recently established a bipartisan commission to consider reforms to the Court, and members of Congress have introduced legislation that would require Justices to adhere to the same types of ethics standards as other judges. Roberts’s report, however, defiantly warned everyone to back off. “The Judiciary’s power to manage its internal affairs insulates courts from inappropriate political influence,” he wrote. His statement followed a series of defensive speeches from members of the Court’s conservative wing, which now holds a super-majority of 6–3. Last fall, Justice Clarence Thomas, in an address at Notre Dame, accused the media of spreading the false notion that the Justices are merely politicians in robes. Such criticism, he said, “makes it sound as though you are just always going right to your personal preference,” adding, “They think you become like a politician!”
The claim that the Justices’ opinions are politically neutral is becoming increasingly hard to accept, especially from Thomas, whose wife, Virginia (Ginni) Thomas, is a vocal right-wing activist. She has declared that America is in existential danger because of the “deep state” and the “fascist left,” which includes “transsexual fascists.” Thomas, a lawyer who runs a small political-lobbying firm, Liberty Consulting, has become a prominent member of various hard-line groups. Her political activism has caused controversy for years. For the most part, it has been dismissed as the harmless action of an independent spouse. But now the Court appears likely to secure victories for her allies in a number of highly polarizing cases—on abortion, affirmative action, and gun rights.
Many Americans first became aware of Ginni Thomas’s activism on January 6, 2021. That morning, before the Stop the Steal rally in Washington, D.C., turned into an assault on the Capitol resulting in the deaths of at least five people, she cheered on the supporters of President Donald Trump who had gathered to overturn Biden’s election. In a Facebook post that went viral, she linked to a news item about the protest, writing, “love maga people!!!!” Shortly afterward, she posted about Ronald Reagan’s famous “A Time for Choosing” speech. Her next status update said, “god bless each of you standing up or praying.” Two days after the insurrection, she added a disclaimer to her feed, noting that she’d written the posts “before violence in US Capitol.” (The posts are no longer public.)
Later that January, the Washington Post revealed that she had also been agitating about Trump’s loss on a private Listserv, Thomas Clerk World, which includes former law clerks of Justice Thomas’s. The online discussion had been contentious. John Eastman, a former Thomas clerk and a key instigator of the lie that Trump actually won in 2020, was on the same side as Ginni Thomas, and he drew rebukes. According to the Post, Thomas eventually apologized to the group for causing internal rancor. Artemus Ward, a political scientist at Northern Illinois University and a co-author of “Sorcerers’ Apprentices,” a history of Supreme Court clerks, believes that the incident confirmed her outsized role. “Virginia Thomas has direct access to Thomas’s clerks,” Ward said. Clarence Thomas is now the Court’s senior member, having served for thirty years, and Ward estimates that there are “something like a hundred and twenty people on that Listserv.” In Ward’s view, they comprise “an élite right-wing commando movement.” Justice Thomas, he says, doesn’t post on the Listserv, but his wife “is advocating for things directly.” Ward added, “It’s unprecedented. I have never seen a Justice’s wife as involved.”
Clarence and Ginni Thomas declined to be interviewed for this article. In recent years, Justice Thomas, long one of the Court’s most reticent members, has been speaking up more in oral arguments. His wife, meanwhile, has become less publicly visible, but she has remained busy, aligning herself with many activists who have brought issues in front of the Court. She has been one of the directors of C.N.P. Action, a dark-money wing of the conservative pressure group the Council for National Policy. C.N.P. Action, behind closed doors, connects wealthy donors with some of the most radical right-wing figures in America. Ginni Thomas has also been on the advisory board of Turning Point USA, a pro-Trump student group, whose founder, Charlie Kirk, boasted of sending busloads of protesters to Washington on January 6th.
Stephen Gillers, a law professor at N.Y.U. and a prominent judicial ethicist, told me, “I think Ginni Thomas is behaving horribly, and she’s hurt the Supreme Court and the administration of justice. It’s reprehensible. If you could take a secret poll of the other eight Justices, I have no doubt that they are appalled by Virginia Thomas’s behavior. But what can they do?” Gillers thinks that the Supreme Court should be bound by a code of conduct, just as all lower-court judges in the federal system are. That code requires a judge to recuse himself from hearing any case in which personal entanglements could lead a fair-minded member of the public to question his impartiality. Gillers stressed that “it’s an appearance test,” adding, “It doesn’t require an actual conflict. The reason we use an appearance test is because we say the appearance of justice is as important as the fact of justice itself.”
The Constitution offers only one remedy for misconduct on the Supreme Court: impeachment. This was attempted once, in 1804, but it resulted in an acquittal, underscoring the independence of the judicial branch. Since then, only one Justice, Abe Fortas, has been forced to step down; he resigned in 1969, after members of Congress threatened to impeach him over alleged financial conflicts of interest. Another Justice, William O. Douglas, an environmental activist, pushed the limits of propriety by serving on the board of the Sierra Club. In 1962, he resigned from the board, acknowledging that there was a chance the group would engage in litigation that could reach the Court. The historian Douglas Brinkley, who is writing a book about the environmental movement, told me, “I think Bobby and Jack Kennedy told Douglas to cool his jets.”
In recent years, Democrats have been trying to impose stronger ethics standards on the Justices—a response, in part, to what Justice Sonia Sotomayor has described as the “stench” of partisanship on the Court. In 2016, Republicans in Congress, in an unprecedented act, refused to let President Barack Obama fill a vacancy on the Court. Trump subsequently pushed through the appointment of three hard-line conservative Justices. Last summer, Democrats in Congress introduced a bill that would require the Judicial Conference of the United States to create a binding code of conduct for members of the Supreme Court. They also proposed legislation that would require more disclosures about the financial backers behind amicus briefs—arguments submitted by “friends of the court” who are supporting one side in a case.
So far, these proposals haven’t gone anywhere, but Gillers notes that there are extant laws circumscribing the ethical behavior of all federal judges, including the Justices. Arguably, Clarence Thomas has edged unusually close to testing them. All judges, even those on the Court, are required to recuse themselves from any case in which their spouse is “a party to the proceeding” or is “an officer, director, or trustee” of an organization that is a party to a case. Ginni Thomas has not been a named party in any case on the Court’s docket; nor is she litigating in any such case. But she has held leadership positions at conservative pressure groups that have either been involved in cases before the Court or have had members engaged in such cases. In 2019, she announced a political project called Crowdsourcers, and said that one of her four partners would be the founder of Project Veritas, James O’Keefe. Project Veritas tries to embarrass progressives by making secret videos of them, and last year petitioned the Court to enjoin Massachusetts from enforcing a state law that bans the surreptitious taping of public officials. Another partner in Crowdsourcers, Ginni Thomas said in her announcement, was Cleta Mitchell, the chairman of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, a conservative election-law nonprofit. It, too, has had business before the Court, filing amicus briefs in cases centering on the democratic process. Thomas also currently serves on the advisory board of the National Association of Scholars, a group promoting conservative values in academia, which has filed an amicus brief before the Court in a potentially groundbreaking affirmative-action lawsuit against Harvard. And, though nobody knew it at the time, Ginni Thomas was an undisclosed paid consultant at the conservative pressure group the Center for Security Policy, when its founder, Frank Gaffney, submitted an amicus brief to the Court supporting Trump’s Muslim travel ban.
Bruce Green, a professor at Fordham specializing in legal ethics, notes, “In the twenty-first century, there’s a feeling that spouses are not joined at the hip.” He concedes, though, that “the appearance” created by Ginni Thomas’s political pursuits “is awful—they look like a mom-and-pop political-hack group, where she does the political stuff and he does the judging.” It’s hard to imagine, he told me, that the couple doesn’t discuss Court cases: “She’s got the ear of a Justice, and surely they talk about their work.” But, from the technical standpoint of judicial ethics, “she’s slightly removed from all these cases—she’s not actually the legal director.” Green feels that the conflict of interest is “close, but not close enough” to require that Thomas recuse himself.
David Luban, a professor of law and philosophy at Georgetown, who specializes in legal ethics, is more concerned. He told me, “If Ginni Thomas is intimately involved—financially or ideologically tied to the litigant—that strikes me as slicing the baloney a little thin.”
When Clarence Thomas met Ginni Lamp, in 1986, he was an ambitious Black conservative in charge of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission—and she was even more conservative and better connected than he was. Her father ran a firm that developed housing in and around Omaha, and her parents were Party activists who had formed the backbone of Barry Goldwater’s campaign in Nebraska. The writer Kurt Andersen, who grew up across the street from the family, recalls, “Her parents were the roots of the modern, crazy Republican Party. My parents were Goldwater Republicans, but even they thought the Lamp family was nuts.” Ginni graduated from Creighton University, in Omaha, and then attended law school there. Her parents helped get her a job with a local Republican candidate for Congress, and when he won she followed him to Washington. But, after reportedly flunking the bar exam, she fell in with a cultish self-help group, Lifespring, whose members were encouraged to strip naked and mock one another’s body fat. She eventually broke away, and began working for the Chamber of Commerce, opposing “comparable worth” pay for women. She and Thomas began dating, and in 1987 they married. As a woman clashing with the women’s movement, she had found much in common with Thomas, who opposed causes supported by many Black Americans. At Thomas’s extraordinarily contentious Supreme Court confirmation hearings, in 1991, Anita Hill credibly accused him of having sexually harassed her when she was working at the E.E.O.C. Ginni Thomas later likened the experience to being stuck inside a scalding furnace. Even before then, a friend told the Washington Post, the couple was so bonded that “the one person [Clarence] really listens to is Virginia.”
Ginni Thomas had wanted to run for Congress, but once her husband was on the Supreme Court she reportedly felt professionally stuck. She moved through various jobs, including one at the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank. In 2010, she launched her lobbying firm, Liberty Consulting. Her Web site quotes a client saying that she is able to “give access to any door in Washington.”
Four years ago, Ginni Thomas inaugurated the Impact Awards—an annual ceremony to honor “courageous cultural warriors” battling the “radical ideologues on the left” who use “manipulation, mobs and deceit for their ends.” She presented the awards at luncheons paid for by United in Purpose, a nonprofit that mobilizes conservative evangelical voters. Many of the recipients have served on boards or committees with Ginni Thomas, and quite a few have had business in front of the Supreme Court, either filing amicus briefs or submitting petitions asking that the Justices hear cases. At the 2019 event, Ginni Thomas praised one of that year’s recipients, Abby Johnson, a former Planned Parenthood employee who became an anti-abortion activist, for her “riveting indictment of Planned Parenthood’s propagation of lies.” That year, Thomas also gave a prize to Mark Meadows, then a hard-line Republican in Congress, describing him as the leader “in the House right now that we were waiting for.” Meadows, in accepting the award, said, “Ginni was talking about how we ‘team up,’ and we actually have teamed up. And I’m going to give you something you won’t hear anywhere else—we worked through the first five days of the impeachment hearings.”
Thomas’s decision to bestow prizes on Johnson and Meadows underscores the complicated overlaps between her work and her husband’s. In 2020, Johnson, a year after receiving an Impact Award, filed with the Court an amicus brief supporting restrictions on abortion in Louisiana. Last year, Johnson participated in the January 6th protests, and the insurrection has since become the object of much litigation, some of which will likely end up before the Court. Last month, she went on Fox News and said that “a couple of the liberal Justices”—she singled out Justice Sotomayor by name—had been “idiotic” during oral arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Mississippi abortion case now under consideration by the Supreme Court. (Johnson didn’t respond to requests for comment.)
Soon after Ginni Thomas gave Mark Meadows an Impact Award, he became Trump’s chief of staff. This past December, he refused to comply with a subpoena from the House select committee that is investigating the Capitol attack. Cleta Mitchell, who advised Trump on how to contest Biden’s electoral victory, received an Impact Award in 2018. She has moved to block a committee subpoena of her phone records. The House of Representatives recently voted to send the Justice Department a referral recommending that it charge Meadows with criminal contempt of Congress. The same thing may well happen to Mitchell. It seems increasingly likely that some of Ginni Thomas’s Impact Award recipients will end up as parties before the Supreme Court.
The Justice Department has so far charged more than seven hundred people in connection with the insurrection, and Attorney General Merrick Garland has said that the federal government will prosecute people “at any level” who may have instigated the riots—perhaps even Trump. On January 19th, the Supreme Court rejected the former President’s request that it intervene to stop the congressional committee from accessing his records. Justice Thomas was the lone Justice to dissent. (Meadows had filed an amicus brief in support of Trump.) Ginni Thomas, meanwhile, has denounced the very legitimacy of the congressional committee. On December 15th, she and sixty-two other prominent conservatives signed an open letter to Kevin McCarthy, the House Minority Leader, demanding that the House Republican Conference excommunicate Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger for their “egregious” willingness to serve on the committee. The statement was issued by an advocacy group called the Conservative Action Project, of which Ginni Thomas has described herself as an “active” member. The group’s statement excoriated the congressional investigation as a “partisan political persecution” of “private citizens who have done nothing wrong,” and accused the committee of serving “improperly issued subpoenas.”
A current member of the Conservative Action Project told me that Ginni Thomas is part of the group not because of her qualifications but “because she’s married to Clarence.” The member asked to have his name withheld because, he said, Ginni is “volatile” and becomes “edgy” when challenged. He added, “The best word to describe her is ‘tribal.’ You’re either part of her group or you’re the enemy.”
Ginni Thomas has her own links to the January 6th insurrection. Her Web site, which touts her consulting acumen, features a glowing testimonial from Kimberly Fletcher, the president of a group called Moms for America: “Ginni’s ability to make connections and communicate with folks on the ground as well as on Capitol Hill is most impressive.” Fletcher spoke at two protests in Washington on January 5, 2021, promoting the falsehood that the 2020 election was fraudulent. At the first, which she planned, Fletcher praised the previous speaker, Representative Mary Miller, a freshman Republican from Illinois, saying, “Amen!” Other people who heard Miller’s speech called for her resignation: she’d declared, “Hitler was right on one thing—he said, ‘Whoever has the youth has the future.’ ” At the second protest, not far from the Trump International Hotel, Fletcher declared that, when her children and grandchildren one day asked her, “Where were you when the Republic was on the verge of collapse?,” she would answer, “I was right here, fighting to my last breath to save it!”
Vivian Brown, who returned a call to Moms for America, said that she would not discuss Fletcher’s testimonial for Ginni Thomas or clarify whether Fletcher had been Thomas’s business client. But the record suggests that the two have been political associates for more than a decade. A program from Liberty xpo & Symposium, a 2010 convention that has been described as the “largest conservative training event in history,” indicates that Fletcher and Thomas co-hosted a Remember the Ladies Banquet. A list of other speakers at the symposium includes Stewart Rhodes, the founder of the Oath Keepers, an extremist militia group. Rhodes was arrested earlier this month and charged, along with ten associates, with seditious conspiracy for allegedly plotting to halt the congressional certification of Biden’s electoral win by storming the Capitol.(Rhodes has pleaded not guilty.)
Another organizer of the January 6th uprising who has been subpoenaed by the congressional committee, Ali Alexander, also has long-standing ties to Ginni Thomas. Like Fletcher, Alexander spoke at a rally in Washington the night before the riot, leading a chant of “Victory or death!” A decade ago, Alexander was a participant in Groundswell, a secretive, invitation-only network that, among other things, coördinated with hard-right congressional aides, journalists, and pressure groups to launch attacks against Obama and against less conservative Republicans. As recently as 2019, Ginni Thomas described herself as the chairman of Groundswell, which, according to documents first published by Mother Jones, sees itself as waging “a 30 front war seeking to fundamentally transform the nation.” As Karoli Kuns, of the media watchdog Crooks and Liars, has noted, several Groundswell members—including Steve Bannon and Sebastian Gorka, the fringe foreign-policy analyst—went on to form the far-right flank of the Trump Administration. (Both Bannon and Gorka were eventually pushed out.) According to Ginni Thomas’s biography in the Council for National Policy’s membership book, she remains active in Groundswell. A former participant told me that Thomas chairs weekly meetings.
Norman Eisen, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who, between 2009 and 2011, served as the special counsel and special assistant to the President for ethics and government reform, told me that “it is hard to understand how Justice Thomas can be impartial when hearing cases related to the upheaval on January 6th, in light of his wife’s documented affiliation with January 6th instigators and Stop the Steal organizers.” He argues that “Justice Thomas should recuse himself, given his wife’s interests in the outcome of these cases.”
Gillers, of N.Y.U., and other legal scholars say that there is little chance of such a recusal. Justice Thomas has recused himself at least once before, from a 1996 case involving a military academy that his son was attending. But, as Eisen observed, though Ginni Thomas’s activism has attracted criticism for years, Clarence Thomas has never acknowledged it as a conflict of interest.
Recusals on the Supreme Court are extremely rare, in part because substitutes are not permitted, as they are for judges on lower courts. Yet several other Justices have stepped aside from cases to avoid even the appearance of misconduct. Justice Stephen Breyer recuses himself from any case that has been heard by his brother, Charles Breyer, a federal judge in the Northern District of California. “It’s about the appearance of impropriety,” Charles Breyer told me. “Laypeople would think you would favor your brother over the merits of the case. It’s [done] to make people believe that the Supreme Court is not influenced by relationships.” Justice Breyer also recused himself from a case involving the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, because his wife had previously worked there.
Charles Breyer told me that, although Justices sometimes “might have a right not to recuse, that doesn’t change the question, which is: How does that affect the appearance of impropriety?” When I asked him whether the Justices confront one another about potential conflicts of interest, he said, “My guess is that they don’t discuss it. They leave it entirely up to the independent judgment. They wouldn’t dare suggest recusal—it’s part of the way they get along with one another.”
In 2021, Justice Brett Kavanaugh recused himself, without explanation, from a case apparently related to a family member. According to Gabe Roth, the executive director of Fix the Court, a nonprofit advocating for reforms to the federal judiciary, an amicus brief had been filed by a cosmetics trade association that Kavanaugh’s father used to run.
The spouses of other Justices have taken steps to avoid creating conflicts of interest in the first place. When Ruth Bader Ginsburg joined the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, her husband, Martin Ginsburg—then one of the country’s most successful tax lawyers—left his law firm and turned to teaching. After John Roberts was nominated to be a Justice, his wife, Jane Sullivan Roberts, retired from practicing law and resigned from a leadership role in Feminists for Life, an anti-abortion group.
In 2004, Justice Antonin Scalia famously defended his decision to continue presiding over a case that involved former Vice-President Dick Cheney after it was revealed that the two men had gone duck hunting together while the case was in the Court’s docket. Scalia argued, in essence, that Washington is a small town where important people tend to socialize. But in 2003 Scalia recused himself in a case addressing whether the mention of God in the Pledge of Allegiance violated the Constitution’s separation of church and state—because, several months before oral arguments began, he’d given a speech belittling the litigant’s arguments.
Ginni Thomas has complained that she and her husband have received more criticism than have two well-known liberal jurists with politically active spouses: Marjorie O. Rendell continued to serve on the appeals court in Pennsylvania while her husband at the time, Ed Rendell, served as the state’s governor; Stephen Reinhardt, an appeals-court judge in California, declined to recuse himself from cases in which the American Civil Liberties Union was involved, even though his wife, Ramona Ripston, led a branch of the group in Southern California.
Ethics standards may be changing, however. Cornelia T. L. Pillard, a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, currently handles a spousal conflict of interest more rigorously. She is married to David Cole, the national legal director for the A.C.L.U., and recuses herself from any case in which the A.C.L.U. has been involved, whether at a national or local level—and regardless of whether her husband worked on the case.
Roth, of Fix the Court, told me that there is an evident need “for a clearer and more exacting recusal standard at the Supreme Court—especially now, as it’s constantly being thrust into partisan battles, and as the public’s faith in its impartiality is waning.”
Traditionally, judges have not been particularly fastidious about potential conflicts of interest connected to amicus briefs. But that standard may be changing, too. As the number of partisan political issues facing the judicial branch has grown, so has the number of these briefs. Many of them are being filed by opaquely funded dark-money groups, whose true financial sponsors are concealed, thus enabling invisible thumbs to press on the scales of justice. Paul Collins, a political scientist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, who has studied the use of amicus briefs, told me, “There’s been an almost linear increase in the number of them since the World War Two era. Now it’s the rare case that doesn’t have one.” The reason, he said, is that, “more and more, the courts are seen as a venue for social change.” He explained that political groups, many with secret donors, are “using the courts the way they used to use Congress—basically, amicus briefs are a means of lobbying.”
The problem has become so widespread that in 2018 the rules for appellate-court judges were amended to make it possible for judges to strike any amicus brief that might force them to recuse themselves. There has been no such reckoning at the Supreme Court—not even when close political associates of Ginni Thomas’s have filed amicus briefs. One such associate is Frank Gaffney, a defense hawk best known for having made feverish claims suggesting that Obama is a Muslim and that Saddam Hussein’s regime was involved in the Oklahoma City bombings. Leaked documents show that Gaffney was a colleague of Ginni Thomas’s at Groundswell as far back as 2013. Gaffney was a proponent of Trump’s reactionary immigration policies, including, most vociferously, of the Administration’s Muslim travel ban. As these restrictions were hit by lawsuits, Gaffney’s nonprofit, the Center for Security Policy, signed the first of two big contracts with Liberty Consulting. According to documents that Gaffney’s group filed with the I.R.S., in 2017 and 2018 it paid Ginni Thomas a total of more than two hundred thousand dollars.
It’s not entirely clear where Gaffney’s nonprofit got the funds to hire Liberty Consulting. (Gaffney didn’t respond to interview requests.) But, according to David Armiak—the research director at the Center for Media and Democracy, which tracks nonprofit political spending—one of the biggest donors to Gaffney’s group in 2017 was a pro-Trump political organization, Making America Great, whose chairman, the heiress Rebekah Mercer, was among Trump’s biggest backers. While two hundred thousand dollars was being passed from Trump backers to Gaffney to Ginni Thomas, the Supreme Court agreed to hear legal challenges to Trump’s travel restrictions. In August, 2017, Gaffney and six other advocates submitted an amicus brief to the Court in support of the restrictions, arguing that “the challenge of Islam must be confronted.”
That December, as the case was still playing out, Ginni Thomas bestowed one of her Impact Awards on Gaffney, introducing him “as an encourager to me and a great friend” but giving no hint that his group was paying her firm. The Impact ceremony was held at the Trump International Hotel, and, according to another guest, Jerry Johnson, Justice Thomas was in attendance. Johnson later recalled that the Justice sat in front of him and was a “happy warrior,” pleased to be watching his wife “running the meeting.” Throughout the 2017 and 2018 sessions, as various challenges to the travel restrictions were considered by the Court, Justice Thomas consistently took a hard pro-Trump line. Finally, in June, 2018, Thomas and four other Justices narrowly upheld the final version of the restrictions.
It’s impossible to know whether Thomas was influenced by his wife’s lucrative contract with Gaffney, by Gaffney’s amicus brief, or by her celebration of Gaffney at the awards ceremony. Given the Justice’s voting history, it’s reasonable to surmise that he would have supported the travel restrictions no matter what. Nevertheless, the lawyers on the losing side of the case surely would have wanted to know about Ginni Thomas’s financial contract with Gaffney. Judges, in their annual financial disclosures, are required to report the source of their spouses’ incomes. But Justice Thomas, in his disclosures in 2017 and 2018, failed to mention the payments from Gaffney’s group. Instead, he put down a curiously low book value for his wife’s lobbying firm, claiming in both years that her company was worth only between fifteen and fifty thousand dollars.
Roth, of Fix the Court, told me that, at the very least, Justice Thomas should be asked to amend his financial statements from those years—as he did in 2011, after it became public that he hadn’t disclosed the six hundred and eighty-six thousand dollars that his wife had earned at the Heritage Foundation between 2003 and 2007. Beyond that, Roth said, “the Justices should, as a rule, disqualify themselves from cases in which a family member or the family member’s employer has filed an amicus brief.” In Congress, the Democratic senator Sheldon Whitehouse, of Rhode Island, is pushing for reform. Amicus briefs, he told me, are “a form of lobbying that has two terrible aspects—the interests behind them are hidden, and they are astonishingly effective in terms of the win rate.” He added, “They open up real avenues for secret mischief.”
In January, 2019, Ginni Thomas secured for Gaffney the access that her Web site promises. As Maggie Haberman, of the Times, and Jonathan Swan, of Axios, have reported, not long after Clarence and Ginni Thomas had a private dinner at the White House with Donald and Melania Trump, the President’s staff gave in to a months-long campaign by Ginni to bring her, Gaffney, and several other associates to the White House to press the President on policy and personnel issues. The White House was not informed that Gaffney’s group had been paying Liberty Consulting for the previous two years. (Gaffney’s group did not report signing a contract with Liberty Consulting for 2019.)
The White House meeting was held in the Roosevelt Room, and by all accounts it was uncomfortable. Thomas opened by saying that she didn’t trust everyone in the room, then pressed Trump to purge his Administration of disloyal members of the “deep state,” handing him an enemies list that she and Groundswell had compiled. Some of the participants prayed, warning that gay marriage, which the Supreme Court legalized in 2015, was undermining morals in America.
One participant told me he’d heard that Trump had wanted to humor Ginni Thomas because he was hoping to talk her husband into retiring, thus opening up another Court seat. Trump, given his manifold legal problems, also saw Justice Thomas as a potentially important ally—and genuinely liked him. But the participant told me that the President considered Ginni Thomas “a wacko,” adding, “She never would have been there if not for Clarence. She had access because her last name was Thomas.”
Ginni Thomas rarely speaks to mainstream reporters, but she often gives speeches in private forums. The Web site of the watchdog Documented has posted a video of her speaking with striking candor. In October, 2018, she led a panel discussion during a confidential session of the Council for National Policy. At the time, the Senate was caught up in the fight over the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh, who had been accused of sexual assault. “I’m feeling the pain—Clarence is feeling the pain—of going through false charges against a good man,” she said. “I thought it couldn’t get worse than Clarence’s, but it did.” America, she said, “is in a vicious battle for its founding principles,” adding, “The deep state is serious, and it’s resisting President Trump.” She declared twice that her adversaries were trying “to kill people,” and drew applause by saying, “May we all have guns and concealed carry to handle what’s coming!”
This warlike mentality is shared by Groundswell, the political group that Thomas has chaired. In a 2020 session of the Council for National Policy, Rachel Bovard, the senior director of policy at the Conservative Partnership Institute, described meeting weekly with Groundswell members to “vet” officials for disloyalty, saying, “Ginni has been very instrumental in working with the White House. . . . She really is the tip of the spear in these efforts.” Bovard lamented Groundswell’s failure to weed out the whistle-blower Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman before he gave testimony at Trump’s first impeachment trial. “We see what happens when we don’t vet these people,” Bovard said. “That’s how we got Lieutenant Colonel Vindman, O.K.?” Vindman, then the director for European affairs on Trump’s National Security Council, testified that the President had tried to pressure Ukraine’s leaders into producing dirt on Joe Biden’s family. In retaliation, a smear campaign was mounted against Vindman. He suddenly found himself fending off false claims that he had created a hostile work environment at the N.S.C., and fighting insinuations that, because he was born in Ukraine and had been invited to serve in its government, he had “dual loyalty.” (Vindman had self-reported Ukraine’s offer, which he had rejected.) The Defense Department conducted an internal investigation of the accusations and exonerated him. But, Vindman told me, the attacks “harmed my career.” He went on, “It’s un-American, frankly, that a sitting Justice of the Supreme Court, who is supposed to be apolitical, would have a wife who is part of a political vendetta to retaliate against officials who were dutifully serving the public interest. It’s chilling, and probably has already had an effect on silencing other whistle-blowers.”
Another target of Groundswell members was Trump’s former national-security adviser H. R. McMaster, who was deemed insufficiently supportive of the President. According to the Times, in 2018 Barbara Ledeen, a Republican Senate aide who had reportedly developed Groundswell’s enemies list with Ginni Thomas, participated in a plot to oust McMaster by secretly taping him bad-mouthing Trump. Ledeen, who is a close friend of Ginni Thomas’s, told the Times that she’d merely acted as a messenger in the scheme. The plan was to send an undercover female operative to snare McMaster at a fancy restaurant. But McMaster quit before the sting was executed. The Times also reported that another undercover operation—which targeted government employees, including F.B.I. agents, suspected of trying to thwart Trump’s agenda—involved operatives from Project Veritas, the undercover-video group led by James O’Keefe. Ginni Thomas has given O’Keefe an Impact Award, too.
It’s unclear whether the Crowdsourcers project that Thomas said she was launching with O’Keefe’s help ever got off the ground. There’s little public trace of Crowdsourcers, other than a tax filing from 2019, showing that it was developed under the oversight of the Capital Research Center, a right-wing nonprofit that does opposition research. Project Veritas’s chief legal officer sent The New Yorker a statement saying that O’Keefe’s “schedule does not permit such extracurricular activities” as Crowdsourcers. But, in a PowerPoint presentation on the effort, in 2019, Thomas said that “James O’Keefe wanted to head up” a part of the group aimed at “protecting our heroes.” The purpose of Crowdsourcers, she said, was nothing less than saving America. “Our house is on fire!” she went on. “And we are stomping ants in the driveway. We’re not really focussed on the arsonists who are right around us!”
Last year, Project Veritas asked the Supreme Court to hear its challenge to the Massachusetts ban on surreptitiously taping public officials. The Court turned down Project Veritas’s petition, as it does with most such requests. Nevertheless, David Dinielli, a visiting clinical lecturer at Yale Law School, told me that Ginni Thomas’s proclaimed political partnership with O’Keefe, and her awarding of a prize to him, appeared to be unethical. “That’s what the code of conduct is supposed to control,” he said.
Ginni Thomas has held so many leadership or advisory positions at conservative pressure groups that it’s hard to keep track of them. And many, if not all, of these groups have been involved in cases that have come before her husband. Her Web site lists the National Association of Scholars—the group that has filed an amicus brief in the lawsuit against Harvard—among her “endorsed charities.” The group’s brief claims that the affirmative-action policies used by the Harvard admissions department are discriminatory. Though the plaintiffs have already lost in two lower courts, they are counting on the Supreme Court’s new conservative super-majority to side with them, even though doing so would reverse decades of precedent. Peter Wood, the president of the N.A.S., is another Impact Award recipient. So, too, is Robert George, a legal scholar at Princeton who, according to the N.A.S.’s Web site, serves with Ginni Thomas on its advisory board. (He says that he has “not been active” on the board.) He received a “Lifetime” Impact Award from Ginni Thomas in 2019, and recently filed an amicus brief before the Supreme Court, in support of Mississippi’s ban on nearly all abortions after fifteen weeks of pregnancy.
In April, 2020, when Ginni Thomas was serving as one of eight members on the C.N.P. Action board, it was chaired by Kelly Shackelford, the president and C.E.O. of First Liberty, a faith-based litigation group that is currently involved in several major cases before the Court. Last week, to the surprise of many observers, the Court agreed to hear a case in which First Liberty is defending a football coach at a public high school in Washington State who was fired for kneeling and praying on the fifty-yard line immediately after games. Richard Katskee, the legal director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, who is defending the school board, told me that the case was “huge,” and could overturn fifty years of settled law. Shackelford’s group is also the co-initiator of another case before the Court: a challenge to a Maine law prohibiting the state from using public funds to pay parochial-school tuition for students living in areas far from public schools. In addition to these cases, First Liberty has filed lawsuits that challenge covid-19 restrictions on religious grounds—an issue that has come before the Court—and Ginni Thomas and Shackelford have served together on the steering committee of the Save Our Country Coalition, which has called covid-19 health mandates “unconstitutional power grabs.” In a phone interview, Shackelford told me that he couldn’t see why Ginni Thomas’s work with him posed a conflict of interest for Justice Thomas. “It’s no big deal, if you look at the law on this,” he said. It would be different, he argued, if there were a financial interest involved, or if she were arguing First Liberty’s cases before the Court herself—but, he said, “almost everyone in America is connected through six degrees of separation.”
Another of Ginni Thomas’s fellow-directors on the C.N.P. Action board in 2020 was J. Kenneth Blackwell, a former Ohio secretary of state who is tied to one of the most consequential gun cases currently under consideration by the Supreme Court. In 2020, he was on the National Rifle Association’s board of directors, and at the time the gun group’s official affiliate in New York was challenging the state’s restrictions on carrying firearms in public spaces. Earlier this term, the Court heard a related challenge, and a decision is expected later this year. (Blackwell didn’t respond to an interview request.) Meanwhile, the Web site friendsofnra.org currently boasts that a winner of its youth competition had the opportunity to meet with “the wife of current Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.”
For lawyers involved in cases before the Supreme Court, it can be deeply disturbing to know that Ginni Thomas is an additional opponent. In 2019, David Dinielli, the visiting lecturer at Yale Law School, was a deputy legal director of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which had submitted an amicus brief in a gay-rights case before the Court. He told me he was acutely aware that Ginni Thomas and other members of the Council for National Policy loathed the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks right-wing hate groups. In 2017, C.N.P. Action directed its members to “commit to issuing one new post on Facebook and Twitter each week about the Southern Poverty Law Center to discredit them.” In Thomas’s leaked 2018 speech to the Council for National Policy, she denounced the S.P.L.C. for calling the Family Research Council—which is militantly opposed to L.G.B.T.Q. rights—a hate group.
For Dinielli, the idea that a Justice’s spouse belonged to a group that had urged its members to repeatedly attack his organization was “counter to everything you’d expect if you want to get a fair shake” before the Court. He explained, “These activities aren’t just political. They’re aimed at raising up or denigrating actors specifically in front of the Supreme Court. She’s one step away from holding up a sign in front of her husband saying ‘This person is a pedophile.’ ”
Dinielli went on, “The Justices sit literally above where the lawyers are. For these people to do the job they were tasked with, they have to maintain that level. But this degrades it, mocks it, and threatens it.” He warned, “Since the Court doesn’t have an army, it relies on how it behaves to command respect. Once the veneer cracks, it’s very hard to get it back.”
Published in the print edition of the January 31, 2022, issue, with the headline “Ginni Thomas’s Crusades.”
Clarence Thomas Sole Dissenter as SCOTUS Allows Trump's Docs to Be Seen by 1/6 Committee by Justin Klawans Newsweek 1/19/22 AT 6:41 PM EST
The U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday paved the way for the presidential records of former President Donald Trump to be transferred to the House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack.
This all but ends a bid by Trump to keep his administration's documents out of Congress' hands.
The court handed down an 8-1 majority decision, with Justice Clarence Thomas—often considered among the most conservative members of the court—the lone dissenting vote.
With their decision, the court agreed with a prior ruling that the former president was unable to exert executive privilege, blocking an appeal by Trump's lawyers that would have prevented the documents from being released.
This ruling all but puts a bookend on Trump's appeal, which had been ongoing in an effort to prevent the U.S. National Archives from turning over his records. The former president's use of executive privilege was denied by President Joe Biden, and Trump then sued to prevent the documents from being released.
The first to deny Trump's motion was a federal District Court. The former president then appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals, which also struck down the assertion of executive privilege, causing Trump to further appeal to the highest court.
However, by blocking Trump's appeal, the final ruling of the appeals court will now stand as the final word on the matter.
A statement accompanying the majority decision stated that "the questions whether and in what circumstances a former President may obtain a court order preventing disclosure of privileged records from his tenure in office, in the face of a determination by the incumbent President to waive the privilege, are unprecedented and raise serious and substantial concerns."
"Because the Court of Appeals concluded that President Trump's claims would have failed even if he were the incumbent, his status as a former President necessarily made no difference to the court's decision."
A dissenting opinion was not published by Justice Thomas.
Trump's lawyers had previously argued that "Congress may not rifle through the confidential, presidential papers of a former president to meet political objectives or advance a case study."
"These sweeping requests are indicative of the committee's broad investigation of a political foe, divorced from any of Congress's legislative functions," his lawyers continued.
However, the Court of Appeals disagreed, ruling in a 3-0 majority opinion against the former president in December.
Judge Patricia A. Millett, writing the majority opinion, stated that "former President Trump has provided no basis for this court to override President Biden's judgment and the agreement and accommodations worked out between the Political Branches over these documents."
"Both Branches agree that there is a unique legislative need for these documents and that they are directly relevant to the Committee's inquiry into an attack on the Legislative Branch and its constitutional role in the peaceful transfer of power," Millett continued.
That opinion listed a number of legal standings for Trump's appeal to be denied, among them: The fact that President Biden's administration concluded executive privilege was not in the interest of the country, and that Congress had a "uniquely vital interest" in going through the documents.
As a result of the Supreme Court's order to uphold the Court of Appeals' decision, there appear to be no further roadblocks for the January 6 Committee to receive Trump's records. Approximately 700 documents related to the events of January 6 will be turned over to the committee for review.
These documents are reportedly related to the Trump administration's actions leading up to the attack on the U.S. Capitol Building, as well as potentially the efforts of Trump to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
Included within these 700 pages are reportedly schedules for the president and his top officials, as well as notes and activity logs. Three handwritten pages of notes from Trump's former chief of staff, Mark Meadows, are said to be among the contents.
In a statement following the ruling, the January 6 Committee called the Supreme Court's decision "a victory for the rule of law & American democracy."
"The Select Committee has already begun to receive records that the former President had hoped to keep hidden & we look forward to additional productions regarding this important information," the statement continued.
Newsweek has reached out to former President Trump's team for comment.
Update (1/19/2022, 9:30 p.m. ET): This story has been updated with additional information and a new headline reflecting that Justice Thomas was the sole dissenting vote.
The Supreme Court has a Clarence Thomas (and Ginni Thomas) problem: If anything can awaken Americans from our stupor of exhaustion, it must be the news that the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas attended the Jan. 6 populist rally. by Wayne Batchis NBC News March 19, 2022, 3:30 AM MDT / Updated March 25, 2022, 8:36 AM MDT UPDATE (March 25, 2022, 10:30 a.m. ET): https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/s ... cna1292351
[x] Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and Virginia Thomas arrive for the state dinner at the White House on Sept. 20, 2019.Paul Morigi / Getty Images file
On Thursday, news broke that the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot had obtained many text messages between Ginni Thomas and former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows. In the messages, Thomas urged Meadows to help overturn the 2020 election results and shared election fraud conspiracy theories.
Many Americans have grown increasingly numb from a seemingly endless stream of dispiriting stories highlighting our political leaders’ fading commitment to democracy. However, if anything has the potential to awaken us from our stupor of exhaustion, it must be the recent news that Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, attended the Jan. 6 populist rally at the Ellipse in Washington, which preceded that day's Capitol riot. Not to diminish voters’ very legitimate concerns about America’s elected officials, but politicians and political movements come and go. Without trust in the courts, American democracy does not stand a chance.
It is rare, if not unheard of, for the spouse of a justice to play such a prominent and active role in partisan politics.
As the spouse of a Supreme Court justice, Thomas and her political activities have long raised eyebrows. Thomas is a conservative activist, with close ties to organizations that support many causes and positions that parallel cases that have appeared, and will continue to appear, before the court. It is rare, if not unheard of, for the spouse of a justice to play such a prominent and active role in partisan politics, if only because this might create the potential appearance of impropriety. A judge, of course, is expected to objectively apply the law, without a preconceived commitment to a particular outcome.
The American people, however, are not fools. While we may hope, and believe, that judges make their best effort to remain fair and impartial, people likely understand that the modern Supreme Court decides many issues that overlap with our most deeply held beliefs — whether it is gun rights or abortion, LGBTQ rights or religious freedom. Jan. 6, however, is entirely different terrain.
It turns out that Thomas not only sat on the board of an organization that promoted the dangerous fiction that the 2020 election was “stolen” from former President Donald Trump through fraud, she also attended the rally attempting to vindicate this paranoid propagandistic fantasy (and said she left before Trump took the stage). All the while, in what might resemble the coordinated efforts of synchronized swimmers, husband and wife seemingly sought to thwart the investigation into the democratically perilous events of Jan. 6. Ginni Thomas signed on to a letter seeking the expulsion of Republican Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger from the Republican conference for joining the House Jan. 6 investigation committee; Clarence Thomas was the sole dissenter — standing in opposition to the rest of the court, including its three Trump appointees — in a decision allowing for the release of Jan. 6-related documents to said committee.
From our earliest days as a nation, politicians have elicited well-deserved eye rolls from the American people. Representative democracy and cynicism go hand in hand. Especially in a country as diverse as our own, elected officials have no choice but to seek favor from a multitude of constituencies. Staying in power means telling us what we want to hear, holding a finger to the political winds and shapeshifting when necessary. The framers of the Constitution understood this all too well. It is why they gave us the gift of Article III.
Article III of the Constitution establishes the federal judiciary. Sure, the imposition of federal judges, with their lifetime appointments and freedom from electoral accountability, might appear shockingly undemocratic. But there is enormous power in such freedom: the power to stand as a bulwark of democracy when the other political branches falter. As we look around the world and see the tragic consequences of autocracy, we want to believe the Supreme Court will be there to defend our democratic values, even in times when “the people” seem to be demanding something very different.
No doubt, we also need to be realistic about the limits of our judiciary. Judges, despite being shielded from the political vulnerabilities that make our elected officials so notoriously slippery, are only human. They naturally will have their own outlooks, biases, political preferences and, yes, family members. This is not news. Justice Antonin Scalia, the longtime conservative judicial icon who died in 2016, would frequently stress how important it was for judges to resist the temptation to impose their own personal preferences on the American people, to in effect become mini-legislators.
While hardly perfect, the Supreme Court’s record of defending democracy, even in the face of countervailing political pressures, has been impressive. Whether it was turning back President Harry Truman’s overreach when he attempted to take over the nation’s steel mills during the Korean War, rejecting President Richard Nixon’s efforts to hide his corruption from the American people or resisting President Bill Clinton’s attempt to delay accountability when he was sued over an allegation of sexual harassment, the court has stood up for democratic values. And while a popular narrative on the left may suggest that those days are over, the court — even with its new Republican appointees — did the very same with Trump. It did not agree that Trump’s financial documents should be shielded from judicial scrutiny, nor did it play along with the former president’s meritless efforts to challenge the 2020 election results.
Partisans on both the left and the right will always take issue with many of the court’s decisions. Ideology has always informed constitutional interpretation, and it always will, because we all have a different vision for how we should understand, as Justice Robert Jackson famously put it, the Constitution’s “majestic generalities.”
True, many of the Supreme Court’s election law decisions have rightfully garnered passionate disapproval. Decisions such as Citizens United, which afforded corporations “free speech” rights to make unlimited campaign-related expenditures, or Shelby County, which undermined a large piece of the Voting Rights Act, offer much fodder for criticism. But they were based on good faith disagreements over how the Constitution tells us democracy should function.
As the retiring Justice Stephen Breyer warned us in his wise dissent in Bush v. Gore, a rare decision that diverged from the court’s democracy-sustaining record, the public’s confidence in the court is a hard-earned “public treasure” that we can’t afford to take for granted. For the sake of preserving that confidence, Justice Clarence Thomas should commit to recusing himself from any matters relating to the events of Jan. 6.
Wayne Batchis, J.D. and Ph.D, is an associate professor of political science at the University of Delaware where he serves as the director of the Legal Studies Program.
A look back at Harlan Crow's jaw-droppingly rich library: The library itself, built near the Crow home four years ago, is a perfect realization of a rich man's library: two-story wooden columns. by Michael Merschel The Dallas Morning News 12:07 PM on Apr 3, 2014 CDT https://www.dallasnews.com/arts-enterta ... h-library/
[x]
This weekend, the Texas Institute of Letters will gather in San Marcos to hand out awards for the state's best writing. You can see the nominees here, and we expect to publish the winners on Sunday.
When the TIL gathered in Dallas several years ago, I tagged along, to what turned out to be the most spectacular private library I have ever seen, at least in terms of net worth.
That library, Harlan Crow's, was in the news lately as he wrangled with Highland Park officials about converting it to a museum. For the moment, he has backed off. (I would have put my money on the billionaire with Supreme Court connections in such a fight, but this is why I don't gamble.)
We've since published a lovely tour of the library, with photos much nicer than the ones I shot with what I think was a then-new iPhone 3, but it seemed like a good moment to revive a lost blog post from my visit, courtesy of the Wayback Machine.
Inside the Harlan Crow library with the Texas Institute of Letters
(Originally posted April 18, 2008.)
When the members of the Texas Institute of Letters gather, it's always a remarkable collection of people. I doubt they've ever gathered amid a collection as remarkable as the one tonight.
Tomorrow, the venerable institution's annual awards will be given; you'll be able to find a list of winners right here. Tonight, their reception was held at the private library of businessman Harlan Crow.
I was aware of Mr. Crow's interesting taste in statuary -- he owns a collection of fallen communist leaders that he has arranged along an tree-shaded walkway. It's known as the "Garden of Evil." (A massive head of Winston Churchill stands in a sunny space near the garden -- "On the high ground," Mr. Crow noted to me.)
And I was prepared to see some interesting historic bric-a-brac befitting a zillionaire. Dallas historian Darwin Payne wrote in the TIL newsletter that the library contains artifacts such as Eisenhower's five-star helmet, a silver tankard created by Paul Revere, the deed to George Washington's Mount Vernon estate and paintings by Gilbert Stuart, John Singleton Copley, Rembrandt Peale and more.
[x]
But that was just the beginning.
The library itself, built near the Crow home four years ago, is a perfect realization of a rich man's library: two-story wooden columns. Alcoves and shelves filled with custom-bound materials, statuary and historical materials. I would not have been surprised to see Bruce Wayne walk in, clutching a cocktail in one hand, deftly closing the secret entrance to the Batcave with his other.
I saw no comic books, actually. Nor did I see the Stradivarius -- it was on loan for the evening. But librarian Sam Fore did show me a letter -- the letter -- Harry Truman wrote to Washington Post critic Paul Hume, who had disdained daughter Margaret's singing. The president wrote, "Some day I hope to meet you. When that happens you'll need a new nose, a lot of beefsteak for black eyes, and perhaps a supporter below!"
That letter is worth an entire chapter in a Truman biography.
James Donovan (pictured) pulled a volume of correspondence from George Armstrong Custer off another shelf. Mr. Donovan did some of his research for "A Terrible Glory" in this library. In the letter he showed me, the young soldier is telling a young woman that he hopes the thing they talked about doing the next time they met is something they will still get to do.
And we're not even to the "rare books" shelf yet.
The "rare" books I saw included first editions by Benjamin Franklin and Isaac Newton. I missed the copy of the first U.S. Census, signed by Thomas Jefferson, and Vasco de Gama's original report on the New World.
I noted the autographed "Mein Kampf," and found Hitler's placesettings and linens in the cabinet upstairs -- discretely kept in a closed cabinet, so the swastikas are not on display.
[x]
There was also a handwritten letter of thanks from Justice Clarence Thomas (displayed next to the official Senate roll call card showing his confirmation) and a miniature model of the "Little Boy" atomic bomb, signed by the pilot of the Enola Gay, Col. Paul W. Tibbets.
"I'm a conservative," Mr. Crow told me, early in the evening. That may be an understatement.
If you prefer fiction to history or biography, this would not be your dream library. I did note a complete collection of Mark Twain's works, but that was all I saw. Of course, I was too busy studying the cannonball embedded in the tree removed from Gettysburg, and the two life masks of Abraham Lincoln, to take a full inventory. [UPDATE 4/21: A reliable source tells me he witnessed some Dickens volumes as well -- and one of Dickens' own dining room chairs.]
Still, it's a remarkable collection, which the delighted TIL crowed pored over for their entire time. Mr. Fore told me that the collection, which Mr. Crow started seriously working on about 10 years ago, is being built with an eye toward opening it to the public after Mr. Crow and his wife have died.
I can only imagine what he will have amassed by then.
For all the treasures, though, the company of intelligent, engaging people is always just as valuable as whatever relics might be nearby. So I also enjoyed a few priceless moments with journalist and JFK assassination witness Hugh Aynesworth as he described his firsthand encounters with Jack Ruby. And hearing Bryce Milligan of San Antonio's Wings Press describe the pleasure he gets (and money he loses) making custom-bound books.
And then there are remarks from the likes of Mary Specht, current holder of a Dobie Paisano Writing Fellowship, which allows her to spend six months writing -- alone, on a 254-acre spread west of Austin, where wildlife plays and Barton Creek flows. It's the exact opposite of the Mr. Crow's estate.
"I think I like my life there better," she said.
She paused for a moment.
"But he does have his own librarian. How cool would that be?"
Michael Merschel. Michael Merschel edits coverage of books and performing arts. A graduate of the University of Kansas School of Journalism, he's edited award-winning narrative features and was a fellow at the NEA Arts Journalism Institute in Theater and Musical Theater. He's also contributed to "A Prairie Home Companion," and his first novel, "Revenge of the Star Survivors," was published by Holiday House in April 2017. [email protected] @mmerschel
[x] Michaela Rose Yacht • Owner Harlan Crow Name: Harlan Crow Country: USA Net Worth: $500 million Company: Crow Holdings Born: October 10, 1949 Age: 73 Wife: Kathy Crow Residence: Dallas, TX Jet Registration: N900GX Jet Type: Bombardier Global 5000 Yacht: Michaele Rose Yacht Builder: Schweers Yacht Value: $10 million
Harlan Crow: A Billionaire Philanthropist and Real Estate Mogul
Introduction
[x]
Harlan Crow is a prominent American businessman and philanthropist, known for his success in real estate and investments. With a net worth of $500 million, he has made significant contributions to various fields and causes throughout his career.
Early Life and Career
Born in Dallas, Texas in 1949, Harlan Crow is the son of Trammell Crow, the founder of Trammell Crow Company. After graduating from Southern Methodist University with a degree in business administration, Harlan Crow joined his father’s company and quickly climbed the ranks to become its president in 1988. He played a vital role in the company’s growth and success, leading it to become one of the largest real estate firms in the world.
Philanthropy and Public Service
Harlan Crow is focused on philanthropy and public service. He is the founder of the Crow Family Foundation, which supports various causes and organizations, such as education, healthcare, and the arts. His foundation has donated millions of dollars to improve the lives of countless people around the world.
Luxurious Lifestyle
Harlan Crow is also known for his extravagant lifestyle, owning a luxurious yacht named Michaela Rose and a private jet with registration N900GX. T The jet is a Bombardier Global 5000, known for its range and comfort, capable of non-stop flights from New York to Tokyo.
Conclusion
In conclusion, Harlan Crow is a self-made billionaire who has dedicated his wealth and resources to making a positive difference in the world. Through his philanthropy and public service, he has supported various causes and organizations, improving the lives of countless people. Despite his luxurious lifestyle, he remains grounded and committed to his efforts to make the world a better place.
If the Law Is Legitimate, Clarence Thomas Must Stand Trial: The Supreme Court justice repeatedly broke the law for two decades. But do the laws even apply to the leaders on our judicial branch? by Max Moran The American Prospect April 10, 2023 https://prospect.org/justice/2023-04-10 ... and-trial/
[x] ProPublica reported last week that for two decades, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has secretly taken luxury global vacations at the expense of conservative mega-donor Harlan Crow. CLIFF OWEN/AP PHOTO
Americans are taught in high school civics classes that our laws are legitimate because they apply to everyone equally. This has never been true. But if we even want to pretend that we believe in this ideal, then Congress must immediately investigate Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.
Recent reporting indicates that Thomas has broken the law, knowingly and repeatedly, for two decades. If an investigation corroborates this reporting, then Thomas must immediately be impeached and removed from the bench.
If Congress instead greets these allegations with a perfunctory shrug, then this country can no longer claim to even theoretically believe in equal justice under law. Congressional inaction would set a precedent that the Supreme Court appointees need not abide by the laws they interpret. “When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal,” Richard Nixon said 46 years ago. Congress would be extending that pathology to the Supreme Court if they do nothing.
On Thursday, ProPublica reported that for two decades, Thomas has secretly taken luxury global vacations at the expense of conservative mega-donor Harlan Crow, a patron of right-wing political influence groups including the Club for Growth, American Enterprise Institute, and Hoover Institution. Thomas also accepted expensive gifts from Crow, such as a $19,000 Bible once owned by Frederick Douglass, and regularly vacationed at Crow’s retreat in the Adirondacks. There, Thomas held court, so to speak, with conservative luminaries like Leonard Leo, the architect of the right-wing Federalist Society and dark-money financier of other conservative projects.
Thomas’s failure to disclose these gifts directly violates the post-Watergate Ethics in Government Act. He claims that this all falls under an exception for “personal hospitality” from friends, a reading so tortured it would make the statute pointless. That exception doesn’t apply if the “personal hospitality” involves official government business. How can regular meetings with the leading legal minds of the conservative movement, whose organizations regularly appear before the Court or file amicus briefs in major cases, not be considered “official business”? Thomas once swore in a federal judge in Crow’s personal library, almost certainly taking Crow’s private jet to and from D.C. in the process. Thomas is asking the public to ignore what their lying eyes are showing them.
This is not even the first time he has been caught in this exact scandal. In 2004, the Los Angeles Times reported that Thomas was receiving these same gifts from Crow, down to the Douglass Bible detail, without disclosing them. According to ProPublica, he simply went right back to accepting these gifts without disclosure. Thomas’s fix for the ethical violation, then, was to try to make it harder to track.
There is no reasonable ambiguity about this. If the ProPublica reporting is accurate, Thomas has knowingly and brazenly violated federal ethics law for decades.
Nor is this even Thomas’s only disclosure scandal. In 2011, Thomas was forced to amend 20 years’ worth of disclosure forms after Common Cause “questioned the omission of his wife’s place of employment.” He lied, under penalty of perjury, for decades when asked if his spouse had an income. Congress and then-President Obama did absolutely nothing in response.
If the ProPublica reporting is accurate, Thomas has knowingly and brazenly violated federal ethics law for decades.
No one should have ever believed that Thomas observed an ethical code in the first place. During his confirmation hearings, legal scholar Anita Hill famously testified to Thomas’s serial sexual harassment. She was vilified and slandered for it, which then-Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Joe Biden allowed to stand before cutting the hearings short and denying three other women who had prepared to testify to Thomas’s behavior the chance to speak.
Since then, Thomas has made it as plain as humanly possible that he is a purely partisan tool. Over decades of Supreme Court proceedings, he has barely asked any questions. He is there to rule in favor of the maximally conservative position, and he has no interest in maintaining any illusion otherwise. See, for example, his spiteful concurrence in last year’s Dobbs ruling, where he makes clear that he’d like to invalidate other privacy-derived rights, such as same-sex marriage and contraceptive access. Being relentlessly partisan on the Court isn’t illegal. Consistently violating the law is.
Speaking of which, the January 6th Committee revealed that Thomas’s wife Ginni repeatedly urged Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows to help overturn the results of the 2020 election. Later, Justice Thomas refused to recuse himself from hearing Donald Trump’s petition to prevent the House of Representatives from gaining access to January 6th–relevant documents. The Court ultimately ruled against Trump. Thomas was the lone dissenter.
Thomas’s latest scandal is not even that unusual for this right-wing Court. Shortly after destroying Americans’ rights to control their own bodies last year, Justice Samuel Alito enjoyed an ostensibly academic trip to Rome on the dime of the Religious Liberty Initiative at Notre Dame University, which files frequent amicus briefs before the Court.
The difference here is that Thomas may have somehow managed to knowingly break one of the vanishingly few ethics laws for Supreme Court justices that do exist. These allegations demand an investigation and trial.
The conservative movement will, of course, immediately mobilize not only to prevent Thomas from facing any accountability, but to destroy anyone who even attempts to do otherwise. Conservatives have developed a full victim complex on Ginni Thomas’s behalf, and Republicans responded to the arraignment of former President Donald Trump by calling to starve the agencies that investigated him of funds. Defund policing for me, but not for thee.
House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan (R-OH) is leading that particular charge. Jordan will almost certainly not do the right thing and draft articles of impeachment. Democratic representatives should fight the noble fight to draft their own articles—Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) rightly called for impeachment within hours of the ProPublica story’s publication—but the Republican Party hates equality under the law too much for anyone to have much faith in the success of that project.
That means Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Dick Durbin (D-IL) now has an extraordinary responsibility. He must immediately begin a thorough investigation to determine if ProPublica’s reporting is accurate. Thomas should testify as part of that investigation.
Figuring out the facts will not be difficult. According to the story, Crow literally hung a kitschy painting in his Adirondacks resort of Thomas smoking cigars with the masterminds of the conservative legal movement. One of ProPublica’s photos of the Thomases vacationing with the Crows came from a public Instagram account.
The difficult part will be getting Congress to treat this investigation with the urgency it deserves, and perhaps more important, ending the perverse way leading liberal scholars think about the Court of their dreams.
For decades, ostensible liberals, often anticipating potential future business before the Court, have treated conservative jurists like Thomas as walking gods on Earth, simply because of their job title. Originalism, the Federalist Society’s go-to tool to shoot down any government intervention, has been mythologized as some high-minded theory, even though it’s not consistently applied, and has now given way to the “major questions doctrine,” which suggests that even textual basis for a policy is not enough if it’s not specific. (Does Thomas actually think it was Congress’s original intent for judges to take multimillion-dollar gifts from political activists who appear before their court, so long as they called them “personal hospitality” when anyone asked questions?)
The unspoken assumption is that, by definition, Supreme Court justices cannot be unethical, partisan cynics. It is an absurd, self-serving mythos propagated by legal elites who have earned the American people’s abhorrence.
Thomas’s ethical quagmire exposes the Supreme Court’s self-mythology for the lie that it is. “Public trust in SC is already bad. A big circus would destroy it completely,” one Democratic congressperson apparently texted a Democratic strategist. Then let it be destroyed.
If the highest justices in the country regularly violate the laws they interpret, then they do not deserve to be arbiters of legality. Failing to act on something this clear means Democrats accept that regular people have no guaranteed rights, and those with power and prestige can do no wrong. Refusing to create “a big circus” might maintain congressional Democrats’ personal delusions of bipartisan comity, which has never been reciprocated. The cost of this self-serving fantasy, though, would be any fleeting claim that the United States government has legitimacy in the first place.
Anyone who does not endorse vigorous, unflinching congressional action believes one or both of the following: that powerful conservatives have an absolute right to do whatever the hell they want, and that keeping a pleasant atmosphere between Democrats and Republicans at D.C. cocktail hours matters more than the consent of the public to their being ruled. It’s as simple as that.
Copyright 2023 | The American Prospect, Inc. | All Rights Reserved
Clarence Thomas Broke the Law and It Isn’t Even Close: It probably won’t matter. But it should. by Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph stern Slate April 06, 20234:26 PM https://slate.com/news-and-politics/202 ... -crow.html
[x] Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas speaks at the Heritage Foundation on Oct. 21, 2021, in Washington. Drew Angerer/Getty Images
ProPublica’s scrupulously reported new piece on Justice Clarence Thomas’ decadeslong luxury travel on the dime of a single GOP megadonor will probably not shock you at all. Sure, the dollar amounts spent are astronomical, and of course the justice failed to report any of it, and of course the megadonor insists that he and Thomas are dear old friends, so of course the superyacht and the flights on the Bombardier Global 5000 jet and the resorts are all perfectly benign. So while the details are shocking, the pattern here is hardly a new one. This is a longstanding ethics loophole that has been exploited by parties with political interests in cases before the court to curry favor in exchange for astonishing junkets and perks. It is allowed to happen.
We will doubtless spend a few news cycles expressing outrage that Harlan Crow has spent millions of dollars lavishing the Thomases with lux vacations and high-end travel and barely pretended to separate business and pleasure, giving half a million dollars to a Tea Party group founded by Ginni Thomas in 2011 (which funded her own $120,000 salary). But because the justices are left to police themselves and opt not to do so, we will turn to other matters in due time. Before the outrage dries up, however, it is worth zeroing in on two aspects of the ProPublica report that do have lasting legal implications. First, the same people who benefited from the lax status quo continue to fight against any meaningful reforms that might curb the justices’ gravy train. Second, the rules governing Thomas’ conduct over these years, while terribly insufficient, actually did require him to disclose at least some of these extravagant gifts. The fact that he ignored the rules anyway illustrates just how difficult it will be to force the justices to obey the law: Without the strong threat of enforcement, a putative public servant like Thomas will thumb his nose at the law.
If there is a single image that captures this seedy state of affairs, it is a painting of Thomas hanging out with Leonard Leo (Federalist Society co-chair and judicial power broker) and Mark Paoletta (who has served as chief counsel to former Vice President Mike Pence and general counsel of Donald Trump’s Office of Management and Budget). Both are political operatives, though Crow assures us that they would never dare talk about Thomas’ work. This image should be enough to shock anyone into taking action against the spigot of dark money that flows directly from billionaire donors into the court, its justices, and their spouses’ pockets. Continuing to live as though there is nothing to be done about any of this is a choice. We make it every day.
In addition to working in the Trump-Pence administration, Paoletta serves as the Thomases’ longtime fixer, attack dog, and booster. He represented Ginni Thomas when she spoke to the Jan 6. committee about her support for overturning the 2020 election. He also edited a biography of Clarence Thomas based on an almost comically obsequious documentary (in which he was also involved). So it should not be a surprise that Paoletta has also testified against any ethics reform measures for the Supreme Court, dismissing the reform movement as part of “the coordinated campaign by some Democrats and their allies in the corporate media to smear conservative Justices with the goal of delegitimizing the court.”
The lack of a binding ethics code for justices redounds to Paoletta’s benefit: ProPublica reports that he joined the Thomases on a trip through Indonesia’s Lesser Sunda Islands on the Crows’ yacht. At the time, Paoletta was serving in the Trump administration, and was therefore subject to far stricter ethics rules than the justice; he told ProPublica that he reimbursed Crow for the trip, although he would not give a price tag. (It is an extraordinary feat for a public servant to be able to afford a private international yacht adventure; it also proves that even in government posts that actually have enforceable ethics rules, those rules may not be up to the job of policing corruption.)
This story is a perfect example, in miniature, of how Thomas’ network of benefactors ensure the justice’s billionaire lifestyle stays off the books. Paoletta testifies before Congress that ethics reforms are evil; Crow funds the Republican lawmakers who ensure ethics reforms don’t pass; and nobody knows the extent of Thomas’ unceasing stream of gifts until ProPublica reporters wrangle the details from yacht crews and flight records.
We should pause here to note that the situation is not entirely hopeless: Just last month, the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts issued new guidance directing justices to disclose the kind of gifts that Thomas has enjoyed for decades. Indeed, in retrospect the guidance almost seems designed to force Thomas into reporting trips, flights, vacations, and other opulent presents from his pals. These rules have long exempted “personal hospitality” from disclosure requirements. But the new guidance clarifies that “personal hospitality” does not include “gifts other than food, lodging or entertainment, such as transportation that substitutes for commercial transportation.” And it explicitly states that stays at “property or facilities” owned by an entity (like the private resorts Thomas frequents) must be disclosed, even if they’re owned “wholly or in part by an individual.”
There is some dispute about whether the new guidance captures Thomas’ conduct for the first time ever, or if it merely bolds, italicizes, and underlines what should’ve already been obvious. ProPublica cites ethics experts who say that at least some of Thomas’ behavior was prohibited under the old guidance. NBC News cites an ethics expert who says the justice’s behavior was arguably permissible, even if it rested on an interpretation that was, at best, “a stretch.” This question is not academic: The answer determines whether Thomas’ conduct prior to the promulgation of the new rule was outright illegal or simply unseemly.
We align ourselves with the former view: Clarence Thomas broke the law, and it isn’t particularly close. The best argument in his defense is that the old definition of “personal hospitality” did not require him to disclose transportation, including private flights. This reading works only by torturing the English language beyond all recognition. The old rule, like the statute it derives from, defined the term as hospitality that is “extended” either “at” a personal residence or “on” their “property or facilities.” A person dead-set on defending Thomas might be able to squeeze these yacht trips into this definition, arguing that, by hosting Thomas on his boat for food, drink, and sightseeing, Crow “extended” hospitality “on” his own property. But lending out the private jet for Thomas’ personal use? Come on. There’s no plausible way to shoehorn these trips into the old rule—which quotes the statute verbatim—even under the most expansive interpretation imaginable. Letting somebody use your private jet to travel around the country is not “extend[ing]” hospitality “on” your property. It is lending out your property to someone else so they can avoid paying for a commercial flight. Thomas broke the law, a law which contains serious civil penalties, though the bogus technicality on which he relies, in addition to his political clout, will be more than enough to ensure that he never faces any actual legal consequences.
If you need further evidence, there’s another, equally clear indication about the nature of the hospitality exception to the disclosure requirement in a neighboring provision of the statute. This section explains which gifts, exactly, a justice must include in their annual report. It reiterates the exception for “personal hospitality,” but provides an even clearer definition of the types of hospitality at issue: “any food, lodging, or entertainment received as personal hospitality of an individual need not be reported.” (Emphasis added.) This language confirms the narrow scope of the hospitality exception: It covers housing, meals, and activities provided during a visit. It does not cover transportation. And even if you read an implied inclusion of transportation to reach the “lodging”—which is implausible, but whatever—that does not cover Crow lending Thomas his jet to fly around for the justice’s personal adventures.
For years we have been hearing from the justices that it’s not their fault so many parties with business before the court are also their best friends. We’ve heard that it’s not on them to stop generous pals from lavishing gifts upon them. We have been given to understand—as Justice Antonin Scalia explained in justifying his own travels with parties litigating before him—that justices need to hang out with fabulous and wealthy movers and shakers because who else is there to hang out with. Oh, and for years we have swallowed the pablum that these trips are so intrinsically fun and interesting that Clarence Thomas, Leonard Leo, Mark Paoletta, and a megadonor can sit around for hours chatting about sports, and not talking about any past, present, or future matter that may come before the court.
Within the legal community, this state of affairs is all justified on the grounds that no justice can retire to become a millionaire lobbyist or general counsel (because, naturally, they must protect the seat). And so unlike regular politicians—as well as other life-tenured judges who step down to take lucrative positions in private practice—the justices are tragically trapped in jobs that don’t pay what they think they are worth. The logic that allows interested parties to buy access by funneling cash to the Supreme Court Historical Society, or judicial spouses, or to million-dollar luxury travel is seen as perfectly acceptable. Indeed, it’s somehow seen as reasonable compensation for lost opportunities—a more dignified alternative to the revolving door. And so long as we believe Supreme Court justices are quasi-monarchs who are entitled to live like lords, they will find ways to live like lords. Those who can afford to purchase their lordliness will pony up whatever it takes. And we will all say that it’s awful. Until we learn about the next one, and the next one, and the one after that.
