There have been shocking revelations that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, has accepted luxury trips virtually every single year from from billionaire GOP megadonor Harlan Crow, including international travel on his private jet and yacht and annual retreats at his plush Adirondacks resort. It was revealed that the value of a 2019 trip to Indonesia could have cost Thomas more than $500,000 if he had chartered the yacht and jet himself, and that his failure to disclose such gifts appeared to violate federal gift and travel disclosure requirements.
"The extent and frequency of Crow’s apparent gifts to Thomas have no known precedent in the modern history of the U.S. Supreme Court," ProPublica reported.
Since 2004, such trips and other gifts from Crow appeared nowhere on Thomas’ financial disclosure reports, according to a USA TODAY review of the annual forms on Friday.
A staunch conservative, Thomas was appointed to the nation's highest court by Republican President George H. W. Bush and has served since 1991. In a public statement, Thomas said he was "advised that this sort of personal hospitality from close personal friends, who did not have business before the court, was not reportable." Ethics experts have said the hospitality exemption was actually intended for the receipt of small personal gifts from longtime friends, not lavish gifts like week-long resort stays and international jet and yacht trips.
Furthermore, legal experts and Democratic lawmakers have said that Thomas' explanation raises a lot more questions than answers. "And these are questions that he should answer under oath, under penalty of perjury," said Lisa Graves, the former deputy assistant attorney general in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Policy.
"He needs to name every person he spoke with who gave him such advice, and whether they're in government or outside the government," Graves told USA TODAY. "Because I would be shocked if he actually told any official the specifics of what he was doing and that they said it was okay not to disclose it."
On the heels of those disclosures, comes even more shocking news-- that Thomas' billionaire buddy Harlan Crow is a sick Nazi lover who is obsessed with fascist rulers.
The Washingtonian on Friday resurfaced a 2014 article by the Dallas Morning News where a tour of Crow’s Dallas-area mansion revealed the billionaire’s historical collection includes a startling amount of Nazi memorabilia, including a copy of Mein Kampf signed by the author himself, a pair of the failed artist-turned-dictator’s cityscape paintings, Nazi medallions, swastika-embossed linens and more.
Even stranger (and more alarming) is the “Garden of Evil” in Crow’s backyard, where statues of infamous despots like Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, Yugoslav dictator Josip Broz Tito, and Russia’s Joseph Stalin and Vladimir Lenin reside.
Crow’s vast historical collection features paintings by Norman Rockwell and George W. Bush which are adjacent to those done by Hitler. “I still can’t get over the collection of Nazi memorabilia,” a visitor of Crow’s home told the Washingtonian. “It would have been helpful to have someone explain the significance of all the items. Without that context, you sort of just gasp when you walk into the room.”
Following all of the latest disclosures of Nazi-lover Crow’s showering of Thomas with lavish
gifts-- the Supreme Court Justice said in a statement that he didn’t see what all the fuss was about.
“Harlan and Kathy Crow are among our dearest friends, and we have been
friends for over twenty-five years. As friends do, we have joined them
on a number of family trips during the more than quarter century we have
known them,”
No comments:
Post a Comment