Justice Clarence Thomas' many scandals

Negligent public accounting incidents "have raised questions about how seriously Thomas views his responsibility to accurately report details about his finances to the public"

(Image credit: Illustrated/Getty Images)

By Peter Weber, The Week US

published 12 January 2024

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has reportedly been sloppy with his mandatory financial disclosure paperwork for the past two decades — and that's probably the most generous way to summarize a series of errors and questionable omissions that have put the longest-serving member of the current court in the headlines.

Taken together, The Washington Post wrote, these acts of negligent public accounting "have raised questions about how seriously Thomas views his responsibility to accurately report details about his finances to the public." There is disagreement about whether Thomas actually broke any laws, notably the Ethics in Government Act of 1978, or merely exploited a legal gray area — but which court would ever adjudicate that argument or pass judgment on a Supreme Court justice?

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Her partisan activism was always a discomfiting situation, since the spouses of Supreme Court justices typically aim for apolitical, but it became especially awkward after former President Donald Trump lost in 2020 and Ginni Thomas sent GOP state lawmakers and Trump's White House chief of staff Mark Meadows emails and text messages imploring them to fight to overturn President Biden's victory. She also attended — briefly, she said — Trump's rally outside the White House on Jan. 6, 2021, that bled into the Capitol riot.

In fact, Thomas wrote a dissent criticizing the majority of his colleagues who declined in February 2021 to hear a case from Pennsylvania Republicans seeking to disqualify mail-in ballots, among other rejected challenges from Trump and his allies. And Thomas cast the lone dissenting vote in January 2022 when the Supreme Court ordered that Trump White House insurrection-related documents be turned over to the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 siege.

Since his ascension to the Supreme Court 30 years ago, "Thomas has enjoyed steady access to a lifestyle most Americans can only imagine," including "at least 38 destination vacations," 26 private jet flights, voyages on luxury yachts, "two stays at luxury resorts in Florida and Jamaica," and other luxury vacations, all of it "underwritten by benefactors who share the ideology that drives his jurisprudence," ProPublica reported in August.

The value of these trips "is difficult to measure" but "likely in the millions," ProPublica said. "In my career I don't remember ever seeing this degree of largesse given to anybody," former federal judge Jeremy Fogel, who served for years on the judicial committee that reviews judges' financial disclosures, told ProPublica. "I think it's unprecedented." And Thomas disclosed none of it on his financial disclosure forms, as required.

Along with decades of opulent vacations paid for by Dallas billionaire Harlan Crow — including a 2019 island hopping trip to Indonesia on Crow's private jet and 162-foot yacht that would have reportedly cost Thomas and his wife more than $500,000, as ProPublica reported in April — Thomas was treated to a lifestyle way beyond his means by David Sokol, former heir apparent to Warren Buffett at Berkshire Hathaway; the late billionaire H. Wayne Huizenga; and oil baron Paul "Tony" Novelly.

"Each of these men — Novelly, Huizenga, Sokol, and Crow — appears to have first met Thomas after he ascended to the Supreme Court," ProPublica said. He met most of them when he was inducted into the Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans soon after being sworn in as a justice in 1991, The New York Times reported. He now invites the organization, which awards college scholarships, inside the Supreme Court each year for its annual fundraiser.

Even before ProPublica's reporting, Thomas had "engaged in a yearslong pattern of behaving in ways that other justices, and many elected politicians, do not," David Leonhardt wrote at the Times. "From 1998 through 2003, Thomas accepted $42,200 in gifts, making him the top gift recipient on the court at the time" by about $36,000. After the Los Angeles Times highlighted these gifts in 2004, Thomas just stopped reporting them on his financial disclosure forms.

Even if Crow and Thomas' other billionaire benefactors didn't personally have a direct case in front of the court, and "I certainly take the parties at their word" on that, the reason they desire "a friendship with Clarence Thomas is not principally for his hearty laugh or his storytelling," Mona Charen wrote at The Bulwark. "It's because he's a justice on the Supreme Court who rules in ways Crow finds congenial," and if Thomas "were ever tempted to stray from the doctrinaire views the two share," the risk of losing "access to the Bombardier Global 5000 and the private fishing guide" might just cause Thomas to "hesitate, if only unconsciously."

Thomas also failed to report in 2014 that Crow bought three properties in Savannah, Georgia, he owned with his mother and the family of his late brother — including the house Thomas' 94-year-old mother still lives in, ProPublica reported. As part of the deal, the mother, Leola Williams, "was given an occupancy agreement to be able to live in the home for the rest of her life," CNN reported. "She lives rent-free but is responsible for paying the property taxes and insurance."

Thomas believed he didn't need to disclose the deal because, he said, he lost money on the deal, and he plans to now amend his 2014 disclosure form, a source close to the justice told CNN. Crow told The Dallas Morning News he "assumed [Thomas'] mother owned the home," and he approached Thomas "with the idea that I might purchase that home for the purpose that in due course it could be the boyhood home of a great American," a museum honoring Thomas.

This is a big deal, and the Justice Department should open an investigation, as should Chief Justice John Roberts and Congress, former White House ethics lawyers Virginia Canter, Norman Eisen and Richard Painter wrote at Slate. Thomas' behavior "calls his ethics into question and casts a shadow over the Supreme Court," and "he cannot cure that by simply amending his financial disclosures" now that he's been caught. "That might be sufficient if this were his first transgression," they add, "but it is not," and his myriad financial disclosure omissions have burned up all benefit of the doubt.

In 2011, he went back and changed his forms from 1998 to 2003 to reflect Ginni Thomas' $686,589 in income from the Heritage Foundation, plus two years of income from Hillsdale College in Michigan, saying the information was "inadvertently omitted due to a misunderstanding of the filing instructions" — even though in some previous years he had correctly reported his wife's income, the Post noted.

In 2020 Thomas amended his 2017 and 2018 disclosure forms to include reimbursements from his own teaching stint at Creighton University and speeches at the University of Kansas and the University of Georgia. And he has been reporting between $50,000 to $100,000 a year in rental income from a Nebraska real estate company in Ginni Thomas' family that hasn't existed since 2006, the Post reported. The company was dissolved, then re-established under a similar name, with the same address and Ginni Thomas' sister listed as the manager.

Thomas and his wife became legal guardians of his grandnephew Mark Martin in 1998 and raised him "as a son," as Thomas has said, from age 6 to 19. And when Thomas decided to send his ward to private boarding school for high school, Crow picked up the tab for at least two years, at a cost of more than $100,000, ProPublica reported. A longtime Thomas friend, Mark Paoletta, confirmed that Crow paid a year of Martin's tuition at Randolph-Macon Academy in Virginia and another year at Hidden Lake Academy in Georgia.

"This story is another attempt to manufacture a scandal about Justice Thomas," Paoletta said in a statement. "But let's be clear about what is supposedly scandalous now: Justice Thomas and his wife devoted 12 years of their lives to taking in and caring for a beloved child — who was not their own." Crow said he "has long been passionate about the importance of quality education" and has "supported many young Americans" at a "variety of schools," including Randolph-Macon, his alma mater.

Conservative judicial activist Leonard Leo arranged $80,000 to $100,000 in secret consulting payments for Ginni Thomas in 2011 and 2012, telling GOP pollster Kellyanne Conway the billing paperwork should have "no mention of Ginni, of course," the Post reported. Leo told Conway to bill a nonprofit he advised, the Judicial Education Project, and funnel the money to Thomas' business, Liberty Consulting.

Leo told the Post that Ginni Thomas' "long history of working on issues within the conservative movement" is "no secret," and her work for him "did not involve anything connected with either the [Supreme] Court's business or with other legal issues." He kept her name off the paperwork, he said, because "knowing how disrespectful, malicious, and gossipy people can be, I have always tried to protect the privacy of Justice Thomas and Ginni."

NYU's Gillers said Clarence Thomas would probably not have been required to recuse himself in cases where the Judicial Education Project had formally weighed in. But "the idea that Leonard Leo, who has a passionate ideological interest in how the court rules and who has worked hard for years to advance that interest, could pick up the phone and generate substantial compensation to Virginia Thomas, which also benefits Clarence Thomas — that idea is bad for the country, the court and the rule of law," he told the Post. "It's not the way the Supreme Court should do its business or allow its business to be done."

Clarence Thomas bought his dream recreational vehicle, a used Prevost Le Mirage XL Marathon, for $267,230 in 1999 — but he didn't pay for it, The New York Times reported in August 2023. Instead, he borrowed the money from a longtime friend, Anthony Welters, and there's no record he ever paid back anything but interest on the loan, or paid the taxes necessary if Welters forgave the quarter-million dollars.

In a November 2008 handwritten note to Thomas, the committee's Democratic staff wrote, Welters indicated he "would no longer seek further payments" on the loan because he "believed that Thomas had paid interest greater than the purchase price of the bus" and he "did not feel it was appropriate to continue to accept payments even though he had the right to them." None of the provided documents "indicated that Thomas ever made payments to Welters in excess of the annual interest on the loan," the staff added, and Thomas did not disclose the forgiven debt on his 2008 financial disclosure report.

The "puzzle" with this scandal is that "there doesn't seem to be any ethical problem with the underlying loan," Ruth Marcus wrote at The Washington Post. "So why not repay the loan — or, if not, pay the taxes due on the benefit thereof?" Thomas is "entrusted with interpreting the nation's tax laws" and he "should be capable of following them," she added, and if he hasn't, "we are entitled to know."

Thomas' private advocacy for Congress raising judges' salaries and lifting a ban on paid speeches came "just as he was developing his relationships with a set of wealthy benefactors" from whom "Thomas accepted a stream of gifts" apparently "unparalleled in the modern history of the Supreme Court," ProPublica reported. "There's no evidence the justice ever raised the specter of resigning with Crow or his other wealthy benefactors," but "around 2000, chatter that Thomas was dissatisfied about money circulated through conservative legal circles and on Capitol Hill."

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Peter has worked as a news and culture writer and editor at The Week since the site's launch in 2008. He covers politics, world affairs, religion and cultural currents. His journalism career began as a copy editor at a financial newswire and has included editorial positions at The New York Times Magazine, Facts on File, and Oregon State University.