US Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas received lavish trips from billionaire Republican, report says
- The travel and gifts, possibly worth up to half a million dollars, included a yacht adventure in New Zealand and a private flight to Indonesia
- Tycoon Harlan Crow says he and Thomas didn’t discuss cases, and the gifts were ‘no different from the hospitality’ he’d extended to ‘many other dear friends’
US Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has accepted years of luxury travel trips from a billionaire Republican, according to a report on Thursday, including a yacht adventure in New Zealand and a private flight to Indonesia.
Staunch conservative Thomas, the longest-serving justice on the court, may have received more than half a million dollars’ worth of travel and other gifts from real estate tycoon Harlan Crow, according to the non-profit ProPublica news outlet.
The investigation, based on interviews and reviews of photographs and other documents, showed “the Supreme Court is the least accountable part of our government”, legal reform action group Fix the Court said in a statement.
“Nothing is going to change without a wholesale, lawmaker-led reimagining of its responsibilities when it comes to basic measures of oversight,” the group’s director Gabe Roth said.
The 74-year-old Thomas also joined Crow – whose friendship with the justice The New York Times in 2011 called “unusual and ethically sensitive” – for trips to an exclusive all-male wilderness resort in California and to properties in Texas and New York state over the past two decades.
