The difficult questions surrounding Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and Republican megadonor Harlan Crow are not altogether new. The New York Times reported 12 years ago, for example, on the men’s “ethically sensitive friendship,” and the fact that Crow had showered Thomas with lucrative gifts, including a generous check to the justice’s wife to start a lobbying organization, despite the fact that Crow’s company had multiple cases in the federal court system.
But by any fair measure, those questions have become far more serious over the past month. ProPublica reported nearly a month ago on the extent to which the far-right jurist has spent the last couple of decades accepting gifts and luxury trips from Crow, which Thomas failed to disclose. The outlet ran a second report soon after, noting that the real estate magnate also bought property from Thomas, which the justice also failed to disclose.
The story grew even more serious with the latest ProPublica report, published Thursday morning.
In 2008, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas decided to send his teenage grandnephew to Hidden Lake Academy, a private boarding school in the foothills of northern Georgia. The boy, Mark Martin, was far from home. For the previous decade, he had lived with the justice and his wife in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. Thomas had taken legal custody of Martin when he was 6 years old and had recently told an interviewer he was “raising him as a son.” Tuition at the boarding school ran more than $6,000 a month. But Thomas did not cover the bill. A bank statement for the school from July 2009, buried in unrelated court filings, shows the source of Martin’s tuition payment for that month: the company of billionaire real estate magnate Harlan Crow.
According to the report, which has not been independently verified by MSNBC or NBC News, when the teenager attended a second boarding school, Crow picked up that tab as well. That also went undisclosed.
ProPublica added, “The exact total Crow paid for Martin’s education over the years remains unclear. If he paid for all four years at the two schools, the price tag could have exceeded $150,000, according to public records of tuition rates at the schools.”
While Thomas hasn’t yet commented on the latest revelations, Crow told the outlet that he has “long been passionate about the importance of quality education and giving back to those less fortunate, especially at-risk youth.” He called it “disappointing that those with partisan political interests would try to turn helping at-risk youth with tuition assistance into something nefarious or political.”
Richard Painter, former chief White House ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush, didn’t quite see it that way. Reflecting on his White House tenure, Painter told ProPublica that an official who had taken what Thomas had would have been fired: “This amount of undisclosed gifts? You’d want to get them out of the government.”
For their part, Thomas’ Republican allies continue to rally behind him, even as they struggle to come up with cogent defenses. Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, for example, argued via social media Wednesday that when “this chapter of American history is written, those who attack Justice Thomas today will be justly dismissed as intolerant bigots.”
To the extent that reality still has any meaning, neither Lee nor any of his fellow Thomas supporters have discredited, debunked or even contested a single detail from the justice’s ongoing ethics mess. By all appearances, everything the public has learned about Thomas and Crow has been entirely accurate.
But we’re supposed to see the scrutiny as unfair and unwarranted because … well, just because. A reader yesterday told me about a worthwhile thought experiment. Let’s imagine if Justice Sonia Sotomayor struck up a friendship with a Democratic megadonor — perhaps someone like George Soros — after joining the Supreme Court. In time, as part of this entirely fictional scenario, the wealthy donor wrote a generous check to help a member of Sotomayor’s family start a lobbying organization. In the years that followed, the megadonor — who had cases in the federal court system — spent decades providing Sotomayor with gifts and luxury trips, buying property from the justice, and even paying the private school tuition for another member of Sotomayor’s family. The justice, for unstated reasons in this thought experiment, chose not to disclose any of this. Would Republicans shrug their shoulders with indifference? If GOP lawmakers raised concerns, and Democrats — unable to challenge any of the substantive details — condemned them as “intolerant bigots,” would Republicans see such pushback as reasonable? I don’t think there’s any great mystery about the answers.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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