Senate Democrat reveals another disclosure lapse by Justice Thomas

WASHINGTON (CN) — Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has still not fully disclosed the extent of hospitality lavished on him over the years by wealthy benefactors, the Senate Finance Committee’s top Democrat said Monday.

Thomas, a central figure in the ongoing debate over ethical misconduct at the high court, has for months ducked criticism that he failed to report opulent gifts and travel bankrolled by a cast of conservative figures including real estate mogul Harlan Crow. The jurist recently updated his legally mandated financial disclosure documents to reflect some of this hospitality, but congressional investigations have shown that even these new reports have been sporadic at best.

And on Monday, Oregon Senator Ron Wyden added yet another unreported flight to the list of information Thomas has yet to make public.

Writing in a letter to Crow’s attorney, Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher partner Michael Bopp, the chair of the Senate Finance Committee said that international flight records obtained by the panel revealed that Thomas and his wife Ginni flew to New Zealand from Hawaii and back on the real estate magnate’s private jet in 2010. Those flights, on which Wyden said Crow was a passenger, still have not appeared on the justice’s financial reports.

But new details of Crow’s gifts to Thomas raise questions beyond ethical malfeasance at the Supreme Court, Wyden said.

“I am deeply concerned that Mr. Crow may have been showering a public official with extravagant gifts, then writing off those gifts to lower his tax bill," Wyden wrote to Bopp.

Wyden argued that Crow’s lawyers have been “evasive” on questions from lawmakers about whether the billionaire wrote off trips with Thomas on his private jet or superyacht on the pretense that they were for business purposes. Mischaracterizing personal hospitality as business expenses to reduce taxes is “a run of the mill tax scam, plain and simple,” he said.

The lawmaker also suggested that Rochelle Charter, the company through which Crow charters his yacht, lacks a profit motive. Wyden pointed to reports that Rochelle Charter posted as much as $8 million in losses from 2003 to 2015, which he said were used to offset Crow’s income and help him sidestep millions of dollars in taxes.

“Simply put, a business owner with a genuine profit motive would not operate a business at a loss for more than a decade with no potential for growth and no discernible effort to turn a profit,” he told Bopp.

The Oregon Democrat, unsatisfied with previous information provided by Crow’s attorneys, said the billionaire could easily clarify whether tax deductions were claimed on yacht and private jet travel involving Thomas but has so far refused to do so.

“This is unfortunately a situation without precedent in our nation’s history,” Wyden wrote. “For decades, Justice Thomas has failed to disclose complimentary use of Mr. Crow’s superyacht and private jet(s), concealing from the American people millions of dollars’ worth of gifts in a manner that likely violated federal law. These trips may also have been used to help Mr. Crow avoid or evade paying a substantial amount of federal income taxes.”

A spokesperson for Crow told Courthouse News Monday that his attorneys had already addressed Wyden’s inquiry, contending that the probe has no legal basis because Congress has no role in enforcing tax law.

Arguing that Crow and his businesses are in good standing with the Internal Revenue Service, the spokesperson added that the inquiry is merely designed to harass a private citizen.

“It’s concerning that Senator Wyden is abusing his committee’s powers as part of a politically motivated campaign against the Supreme Court,” he said.

Crow employed a similar defense last year as he rebuffed efforts by the Senate Judiciary Committee to obtain financial records of his relationship with Thomas. The real estate magnate, after being served a subpoena, eventually struck a deal with lawmakers.

The billionaire and his attorneys consider issues of his gifts to the justice to be “settled” following that compromise, his spokesperson said Thursday.

As part of its deal with Crow, the Judiciary Committee reviewed a tranche of documents detailing trips and other hospitality he provided for Thomas over the span of several years. A review of that information uncovered three other previously unreported private jet trips between 2017 and 2021.

Initial reports of Thomas’s ethically questionable behavior sparked a year of scrutiny on the high court, which until recently had no formal code of conduct for its justices.

Lawmakers, particularly Democrats, have for months demanded that the Supreme Court adopt a binding code of ethics and have pushed for legislation that would institute term limits for justices and expand the bench.

That effort got the White House seal of approval last month, as President Joe Biden for the first time came out publicly for court reform.

Follow @BenjaminSWeiss

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