GOP Defends Clarence Thomas Amid Disclosure Failures

WASHINGTON- republicans defended Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas on Monday after he reportedly failed to disclose gifts and a real estate transaction from a billionaire Republican donor.

“Judge Thomas has been attacked and criticized since his confirmation hearing, and I suspect this is just a continuation of that,” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, told HuffPost on Monday.

“Ask how many senators have had to do that, ask how many senators have embraced personal hospitality. I think it would be an interesting story,” Cornyn added.

Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.), another member of the panel, said he was not concerned about the loopholes in conservative justice disclosure forms.

“It happens all the time,” Kennedy said. “Judges… have the right to have friends.”

Thomas has been criticized for failing to report on more than two decades of luxury trips he and his wife, Ginni Thomas, took with Texas real estate mogul Harlan Crow, including trips on the donor’s yacht and private plane. Thomas has said that he and Crow are friends.

Last week, ProPublica revealed that Thomas also failed to disclose a 2014 real estate deal to sell Georgia property to the billionaire. Thomas’s mother still lives on one of the properties and does not pay rent. Federal law appears to require any real estate business to be reported on financial disclosure forms.

Takes is supposedly planning to modify your financial disclosure forms to include the real estate transaction, according to CNNin an implicit acknowledgment that he should have reported it in the first place.

“To the extent that this latest real estate transaction has not been disclosed, it will amend its disclosure statement, which I think is the right thing to do,” Cornyn said Monday.

But the Texas Republican, who once served on the Texas Supreme Court, said he opposes efforts to pass legislation that would require US Supreme Court justices to adopt and follow a code of ethics, as well as establish additional standards of transparency in gifts and travel. The court, he said, is “capable of changing its own” code of ethics.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), meanwhile, accused democrats of racism in targeting Thomas for failing to report financial ties to a billionaire Republican donor, although there is no evidence that other Supreme Court justices failed to report such deals.

“The left has always especially despised Judge Thomas because he is a black man who dares to be conservative,” Cruz said.

Only one Republican senator, Mitt Romney of Utah, told HuffPost on Monday that he was concerned that Thomas would not disclose his ties to Crow.

“If the reports are accurate, it sucks,” Romney said. When pressed for more details, he added: “I don’t have to explain more than that.”

Democrats have vowed to respond to Thomas’ revelations, but their power, in this case, is limited. The Supreme Court polices itself.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (DR.I.), a vocal critic of dark money and the GOP’s efforts to install conservative judges on the judiciary, laughed off Republican attempts to steer the controversy away from Thomas on Monday.

“You know he’s a billionaire, right?” Whitehouse said of Crow. “They know that he is politically active. They know that he has filed briefs in the Supreme Court. This is a guy who is interested on the court, and not as a casual observer. So I think that puts the extraordinarily rococo extravagance of these gifts in a very different category than the tremendously generous personal hospitality.”

added. “A lot more happens when you mix the cocktail of right-wing billionaires, black money, docile judges, and the law.”