WASHINGTON — Justice Clarence Thomas failed to disclose two additional trips from a billionaire patron that had not previously come to light, Senate Democrats revealed Saturday after conducting a 20-month investigation into ethics practices at the Supreme Court.
The findings were part of a 93-page report released by Democratic staff members of the Judiciary Committee along with about 800 pages of documents. It said the two trips, both of which had been previously unknown to the public, took place in 2021 and were provided by Harlan Crow, a real estate magnate in Texas and a frequent patron of Thomas’.
One trip took place that July by private jet from Nebraska to Saranac, New York, where Thomas stayed at Crow’s upstate retreat for five days. The other came in October, when Crow hosted Thomas overnight in New York on his yacht after flying him from the District of Columbia to New Jersey for the dedication of a statue.
The disclosures were one of the few new revelations in a report that otherwise largely summarized information about largesse accepted by justices — and failures to disclose it — that had already become public. Thomas had not disclosed the trips, even after refiling some of his past financial forms, and the committee learned about them after threatening to issue a subpoena to Crow, the report said.
In a statement after the report became public Saturday, Michael Zona, a spokesperson for Crow, emphasized that his client had turned over the information “voluntarily” and denounced the inquiry as “political, partisan, and unconstitutional from the start.”
And in a posting on social platform X on Saturday, Mark Paoletta, a friend of Thomas’, dismissed the report as “pathetic.” Paoletta, a former top lawyer for the White House budget office in the last Trump administration who is set to reprise that role in the next one, has offered public defenses of the justice amid scrutiny of his ties to Crow.
The committee did issue a subpoena to Leonard Leo, a conservative power broker who had helped organize a fishing trip to a remote part of Alaska in 2008 for Justice Samuel Alito, with private jet travel provided by a billionaire hedge fund manager. Alito had not disclosed that trip — and later said he was not required to by the rules as they then existed.
Leo has refused to comply with the subpoena, the report said. The appendix included a letter from his lawyer calling it “unlawful and politically motivated,” a portrayal the Democrats rejected.
For most of its history, the Supreme Court had no formal ethics code, unlike lower-court judges, and resisted pressure to adopt one for itself. For constitutional reasons, it is difficult to impose enforceable rules on the justices, who have life tenure and answer only to themselves on ethical matters like whether to recuse from cases.
The death of Justice Antonin Scalia in 2016 during a free stay at a Texas businessperson’s hunting lodge brought attention to the more than 250 privately funded trips he had accepted over a 10-year period, many to luxurious destinations.
In March 2023, the Judicial Conference of the United States, the policymaking body for the federal courts, adopted rules to clarify what counts as “personal hospitality” that judges need not reveal on judicial disclosure forms. They explicitly required judges to disclose certain free travel by private jet and stays at commercial hotels, resorts and hunting lodges.
But the Supreme Court did not consider those rules binding on itself, and there was no clear way to enforce them on justices. And critics said the conference has still defined the personal hospitality exemption in a way that gives judges and justices too much latitude to keep other gifts of luxury vacations hidden.
Soon after, a series of reports from ProPublica revealed the extent of undisclosed gifts to Thomas by Crow and financial arrangements between them. Among them were lavish trips and Crow’s paying the private school tuition for a relative Thomas had raised like a son.
That November, the Supreme Court for the first time adopted a binding ethics code, although critics said it remained toothless and had significant gaps.
Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee were investigating ethics at the Supreme Court while pushing a bill to impose a tighter ethics code on the court, sponsored by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I. Republicans largely resisted, defending Thomas and portraying the broader effort as nothing more than a bid by liberals to delegitimize the rulings of the conservative-controlled court.
In June, Democrats had brought to light three other previously undisclosed gifts of private jet travel to Thomas from Crow. The report reprised those as well as other episodes that have attracted ethics-related controversy, including the decisions by Thomas and Alito not to recuse themselves from cases involving the attempt by former President Donald Trump and his supporters to overturn his loss of the 2020 election.
Text messages have shown that Thomas’ wife, a conservative activist, helped shape the legal effort to overturn the election. An upside-down flag associated with supporting that so-called Stop the Steal movement had been displayed at the time at Alito’s home — a decision he attributed to his own wife.
The release of the report is most likely the end of Democrats’ efforts for now given that next month, Republicans will take control of the Senate.
Still, Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., the chair of the Judiciary Committee, said there was a need for a continued push for “a legislative solution to this crisis to restore trust in the highest court.”
“Whether failing to disclose lavish gifts or failing to recuse from cases with apparent conflicts of interest,” Durbin said in a statement, “it’s clear that the justices are losing the trust of the American people at the hands of a gaggle of fawning billionaires.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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