During August 2023 I wrote of ProPublica’s investigation of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s creative moral and legal accounting on his yearly financial statements. His failure to disclose two all-expense paid trips during 2019 to Indonesia and to the Bohemian Grove, an all-male retreat in northern California, were each financed entirely by billionaire Harlan Crow, a cofounder of Club for Growth and a major donor to the GOP. Well, today the self-fashioned untouchable, unshakeable Supreme Court justice filed a financial disclosure document that (quite belatedly) described a come to Jesus change of attitude, if only for a moment.
This is quite a turnaround. Recall that at the time of ProPublica’s April 2023 exposé, Thomas characterized his trips – as did benefactor Crow – as “hospitality” which he maintained was not reportable on his 2019 financial disclosure report. I fact, he took high road that only lifetime tenure in one’s government job offers by maintaining that all of this was just Mr. Crow’s hospitable way of spending some of his billions. And apparently Justice Thomas was also hospitable enough to accept free hospitality. And, despite the many many thousand dollars spent by Crow, Thomas maintained that hospitality doesn’t count as income or as a gift, noe would it sully his judicial neutrality should a case come forth impacting Harlan Crow or his buddies. And, what are you going to do about it, he seemed to say, “impeach me?” Well, actually, some suggested it.
This has caused Thomas many headaches for the past two years. He wasn’t helped to escape the spotlight by his hospitable brethren Justice Sam Alito (who also got ensnared in the hospitality trap, see here). Moreover, lately, the upside down American flag catastrophe didn’t exactly cover Alito in a garland of roses. The public doesn’t seem to care for juvenile delinquents sitting on the highest court. Moreover, Rhode Island’s Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse has been incessantly irritating the Court to produce an enforceable code of ethics, finding no joy there. So, it’s possible that Thomas thought that disclosing, four years late, his 2019 antics now would lighten his load a bit despite how miffed he must be at having to carry a load at all. Regardless, whether what amounts to a confession of wrongdoing will actually lighten his load, his belated report is directly below (emphasis added).
Let’s see how this is received by us, the public. The fact that Thomas pleads “inadvertently” to his failure to file in 2019 – after having had a world class team of lawyers advising him – wouldn’t be accepted as a plea for mercy by a judge, for example, like Sam “Hang ’em High” Alito, arguably, Thomas’s Old Gangster crony. So, from a PR standpoint, it would have been helpful have issued a press release explaining that he “regrets” something, anything related to what I’d guess he still believes to be a small faux pas.
Perhaps, like Alito vis-a-vis the upside flag episode, he could simply blame his wife . . . Yes, Clarence, let’s try blaming Ginni.