Senator Sheldon Whitehouse Calls for Justice Department to Investigate Clarence Thomas’ Hidden Gifts

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (DR.I.), a ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, called on the body that oversees the federal judiciary to refer Judge Clarence Thomas to the Justice Department to investigate his failure to properly report on the gifts of a billionaire. benefactor.

“It would be better if the Chief Justice launched a proper investigation, but after a week of silence from the Court and this latest disturbing report, I urge the Judicial Conference to intervene and refer Judge Thomas to the Attorney General for investigation. . Whitehouse said in a statement released Thursday night.

Whitehouse, along with others democrats, including Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), previously called on Chief Justice John Roberts to investigate Thomas’ failure to disclose hundreds of thousands of dollars in gifts from billionaire Harlan Crow . those gifts, discovered by ProPublica, included multiple expensive luxury vacations on Crow’s superyacht for Thomas and his wife, Ginni Thomas, and regular use of Crow’s private jet. Thomas did not disclose these gifts in his required annual personal financial reports.

In addition to luxury vacations and the use of private jets, Crow purchased Thomas’s ancestral home in Georgia, where his mother still resides, for an inflated price. ProPublica reported Thursday. Although Thomas had listed his interest in the home on his financial reports in the past, he did not disclose the sale to Crow as required by law.

Supreme Court justices are required to disclose certain gifts and sales under federal ethics laws. In the past, some lodging and hospitality gifts from friends were exempt from disclosure. Thomas claims that he believed he was not required to disclose the travel, lodging, and food provided by Crow.

In March, the Judicial Conference, the rule-setting body for the federal judiciary, updated its disclosure guidelines to clarify that judges must report lodging and hospitality gifts that are not provided at a personal residence directly owned by the person giving the gift and private travel to such locations.

The financial disclosure law that Thomas is alleged to have violated requires judges to “knowingly and willfully” fail to report gifts that should have been disclosed. Such a violation can result in fines of up to $50,000 or, if the offender falsifies a report, not more than one year in prison.

The Judicial Conference is the body designated by ethics law to refer members of the judiciary to the Attorney General for investigation.

Whitehouse’s call for a referral to the Thomas investigation follows a similar letter to the Judicial Conference. submitted by ethics watchdog group Campaign Legal Center. That letter noted that Thomas had previously disclosed similar travel gifts from Crow, but stopped disclosing them after the Los Angeles Times reported about her relationship with the billionaire in 2004. This sudden change in disclosure “demonstrated awareness of the requirement” that she disclose such gifts, a precondition for culpability under ethics law.

The CLC letter also notes that Thomas has a long history of not disclosing donations and income. In 2011, Thomas amended 20 years of its financial reports to account for his failure to disclose his wife’s income at various conservative political and educational institutions despite previously properly disclosing such income.

It’s been 54 years since the Justice Department opened an investigation into a sitting Supreme Court justice.

In 1968, President Lyndon Johnson nominated Justice Abe Fortas to replace the retiring Earl Warren as Chief Justice. He began a bitter campaign to defeat the liberal judge’s nomination to head the court, fueled in part by the anti-Semitism (Fortas was Jewish) of southern segregationists like Republican Strom Thurmond and Democrat James Eastland.

Fortas’s nomination was ultimately blocked by a filibuster, but he remained in the dock as Associate Justice. In the process, Thurmond attacked Fortas for receiving $15,000 paid by his former corporate clients and legal partners for nine speeches at American University.

In 1969, news reports revealed that Fortas received an annual advance of $20,000 from financier Louis Wolfson’s family foundation beginning in 1966. Wolfson had been convicted of illegal stock trading and appealed his conviction to the Supreme Court. The court did not take up the case and Fortas did not participate in its consideration, but the payments created an appearance of corruption.

The Justice Department opened an investigation into Fortas after Assistant Attorney General and future Chief Justice William Rehnquist convinced President Richard Nixon that it would be legal to do so. Fortas eventually resigned from him after Attorney General John Mitchell threatened to charge him with tax fraud if he didn’t. The ethics law Thomas is alleged to have violated was expanded to cover judges following disclosures of payments to Fortas and other judges.

The campaign against Fortas was the beginning of the conservative push to take over the Supreme Court. He provided Nixon with two open seats on the court, first Warren vacating the chief justice seat and then Fortas. Nixon appointed Warren Burger to replace Warren as he tried to fill Fortas’s seat with a southern conservative segregationist to fulfill a campaign promise to Thurmond, but was twice blocked by the Democratic Senate.

This episode kicked off the court wars that culminated in a conservative win after President Donald Trump replaced the late liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg with conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett.

The court shift to the right elevated Thomas from the fringes to the center of a court bloc aimed at rolling back 20th-century decisions handed down by liberals like Fortas. But he now faces a similar controversy for violating a law passed in the wake of Fortas.