The same week that former President Donald Trump appeared in a Manhattan court room for the first time, ProPublica reported that for years Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has accepted luxury trips from Republican businessman Harlan Crow without disclosing them. At first glance, those two stories may seem to overlap little, beyond two leading figures on the right being caught up again in scandal. But both Trump and Thomas are under fire as much for their record keeping as their actions — a sad sign of how ill-equipped our political system is to punish corruption.
Remarkably, amid the stories of lavish resorts, private jets and all-male retreats, the two most telling details about Thomas’s story aren’t even in ProPublica’s reporting. The first is Thomas’s statement. While Crow affirmed his “generosity” to “Justice Thomas and Ginni” to ProPublica, Thomas himself declined comment. Only after a day-long firestorm did Thomas issue his own statement Friday, claiming that “colleagues and others in the judiciary…advised that this sort of personal hospitality from close personal friends, who did not have business before the Court, was not reportable.”
If the justice felt his actions were proper, then he would never have hid them — or obscured why he hid them.
If Thomas’s claim that borrowing a private jet counts as “hospitality” stretches credulity, the second detail blows it up. This isn’t the first exposé of Crow’s “generosity” to the Thomases. Nearly 20 years ago, the Los Angeles Times reported that Thomas had accepted gifts and trips from Crow, including a bust of Frederick Douglass valued at $19,000. As that newspaper’s David G. Savage wrote Thursday, Thomas responded to that story, not by swearing off gifts, but by not disclosing those gifts. If the justice felt his actions were proper, then he would never have hid them — or obscured why he hid them.
Which brings us to Donald Trump. The former president has turned…
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