Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas went on two more trips provided by Texas billionaire and conservative donor Harlan Crow than he previously disclosed, according to a Senate Democrat-led 20-month investigation into ethics practices at the Supreme Court released on Saturday. Thomas didn’t include the trips in his past financial forms, and, according to the committee, they only heard about them after threatening to subpoena Crow.
Democratic staff members of the Judiciary Committee concluded their investigation with a 93-page report—along with about 800 pages of documents—that delves into what they describe as an “ethical crisis” of the court’s own making.
In a statement after the report became public on Saturday, Michael Zona, a spokesman for Crow, denounced the inquiry as “political, partisan, and unconstitutional from the start” and held that his client had turned over the information “voluntarily.”
The additional trips on Crow’s dime were one of the “few new revelations in a report that otherwise largely summarized information about largess accepted by justices — and failures to disclose it — that had already become public,” the New York Times’ Charlie Savage reports.
The two previously undisclosed trips—one where Thomas flew on Crow’s private jet from Nebraska to Saranac, NY for a five-day retreat at one of the billionaire’s residences and another where the justice spent the night on Crow’s yacht after being flown from Washington, DC to New Jersey for the dedication of a statue—both took place in 2021. The recently unveiled itinerary is the latest revelations against Thomas, who has come under fire for reportedly accepting millions of dollars in gifts.
According to the Judiciary Committee report, Thomas has accepted lavish gifts from wealthy benefactors, “several of whom had business before the Court, and nearly all of whom first met Thomas after he joined the Court,” since his confirmation in 1991.
“The number, value, and extravagance of the gifts accepted by Justice Thomas,” the report reads, “have no comparison in modern American history.”
Following the death of Justice Antonin Scalia in 2016 during a free stay at another Texas businessman’s hunting lodge, members of the Supreme Court have come under increased scrutiny about how they disclose—or don’t—these kinds of gifts. That scrutiny grew exponentially when, in the spring of 2023, ProPublica released a series of investigations into Justice Thomas and Crow’s decades-long relationship.
Drawing from flight records, internal documents distributed to Crow’s employees, and interviews with dozens of people “ranging from his superyacht’s staff to members of the secretive Bohemian Club to an Indonesian scuba diving instructor,” ProPublica found that “Crow’s access to the justice extends to anyone the businessman chooses to invite along” including “corporate executives and political activists.” (Following ProPublica’s reporting, this past summer, Thomas amended his financial disclosure for 2019 to include other trips involving Crow, writing that he “inadvertently omitted” them on his previous reports.)
In November of 2023, the Supreme Court adopted a code of conduct for the first time in its history. Yet, the nine-page code, with an accompanying five pages of commentary, includes no enforcement mechanism.
“Indeed,” Vanity Fair’s Eric Lutz wrote after the new code was signed by all nine justices, “by providing no means of clear external oversight, the code fails to address one of the most significant ethical vulnerabilities at the high court: that its justices are left to police themselves.”
This lack of accountability can lead to an environment where justices are in charge of deciding if they have conflicts of interest and need to recuse themselves, rather than that decision being made by a third party.
Justices Thomas and Samuel Alito—another member of the court with a history of accepting trips from conservative billionaires—chose not to recuse themselves from cases involving President-elect Donald Trump and his supporters’ attempt to overturn his loss of the 2020 election despite potential conflicts of interest. Both of the justice’s wives reportedly acted in ways that led people to question whether the pair could rule impartially on Trump’s case.
According to reporting from the Washington Post based on text messages from Ginni Thomas, the justice’s wife “repeatedly pressed White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows to pursue unrelenting efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election in a series of urgent text exchanges in the critical weeks after the vote.”
An upside-down flag associated with the Stop the Steal movement was flown outside the Alitos’ Virginia home just over a week after the January 6 attack on the Capitol—an act that the justice has since claimed was orchestrated by his wife, Martha-Ann Alito.
The new investigation from Senate Democrats found that “Contrary to their legal obligations, justices have repeatedly failed to recuse themselves from cases involving conflicts of interest due both to inadequate conflict screening processes and willful refusal.” “These failures,” the authors continued, “demonstrate the need for less subjectivity and more transparency in recusal determinations.”
In a September broadcast interview, her first since joining the highest court, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson expressed support for adding an enforcement mechanism to the code of conduct, saying, “People are entitled to know if you’re accepting gifts as a judge, so that they can evaluate whether or not your opinions are impartial.”
“A binding code of ethics is pretty standard for judges,” Jackson told CBS Evening News anchor and managing editor Norah O’Donnell. “So I guess the question is, ‘is the Supreme Court any different?’ And I guess I have not seen a persuasive reason as to why the court is different than the other courts,”
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