This story originally appeared in The Washington Post Aug. 10, 2023
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/08/10/clarence-thomas-luxury-vacation-rv/?utm_source=pocket_saves

Opinion Clarence Thomas’s luxury vacations? That’s what friends are for.

By Ruth Marcus
Associate editor
August 10, 2023 at 6:18 p.m. EDT

“As friends do.”

That’s what Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas had to say in April, after ProPublica reported on the travel benefits lavished on the justice and his wife by Texas billionaire Harlan Crow.

“Harlan and Kathy Crow are among our dearest friends, and we have been friends for over twenty-five years,” Thomas said in a statement. “As friends do, we have joined them on a number of family trips during the more than quarter century we have known them.”

It turns out that Thomas is a man of many friends. And these friends — ultrawealthy friends mostly acquired after Thomas joined the court — do quite a bit for the justice and his family.

For instance, Anthony Welters, a health-care tycoon whose private financing enabled the Thomases to purchase in 1999 the $267,230 motor coach in which they tooled around the country. (Welters, whom Thomas met when they were both congressional staffers, played an essential role because there isn’t much of a commercial financing market for high-end recreational vehicles of the type the Thomases bought.)

Roughly nine years later, the loan was “satisfied,” according to Welters — a fuzzy term that might mean Thomas repaid Welters or that Welters forgave all or part of the debt.

As the New York Times reported, “He would not say how much he had lent Justice Thomas, how much the justice had repaid and whether any of the debt had been forgiven or otherwise discharged. He declined to provide The Times with a copy of a loan agreement — or even say if one existed. Nor would he share the basic terms of the loan, such as what, if any, interest rate had been charged or whether Justice Thomas had adhered to an agreed-upon repayment schedule. And when asked to elaborate on what he had meant when he said the loan had been ‘satisfied,’ he did not respond.”

There’s no way for the public to know, because Thomas never reported the arrangement on his annual financial disclosure forms. Thomas was characteristically unresponsive when the Times submitted questions about the loan to the Supreme Court’s public information office.

Was Thomas obligated to report the loan? The Times explained: “Vehicle loans are generally exempt from those reporting requirements, as long as they are secured by the vehicle and the loan amount doesn’t exceed its purchase price. But private loans like the one between Mr. Welters and Justice Thomas can be deemed gifts or income to the borrower under the federal tax code if they don’t hew to certain criteria: Essentially, experts said, the loan must have well-documented, commercially reasonable terms along the lines of what a bank would offer, and the borrower must adhere to those terms and pay back the principal and interest in full.”

Now, a new ProPublica report offers the most exhaustive accounting yet of how Thomas parlayed his position into a mechanism for subsidizing vacations out of “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.” The report — “almost certainly an undercount,” ProPublica noted — details at least 38 “destination vacations, including a previously unreported voyage on a yacht around the Bahamas; 26 private jet flights, plus an additional eight by helicopter; a dozen VIP passes to professional and college sporting events, typically perched in the skybox; two stays at luxury resorts in Florida and Jamaica; and one standing invitation to an exclusive golf club overlooking the Atlantic coast.”

In other words, Thomas has any number of Harlan Crows to help make his life more exceptional, including oil executive Paul Novelly; David Sokol, a former Berkshire Hathaway executive; the late billionaire H. Wayne Huizenga, founder of AutoNation and Waste Management.

Other justices, past and present, have accepted hospitality including luxury travel, but we know about those trips because the justices disclosed the gifts. But the extent of Thomas’s travel appears extraordinary. As former federal judge Jeremy Fogel, who served on the committee that reviews the justices’ financial disclosure forms, told ProPublica, “In my career I don’t remember ever seeing this degree of largesse given to anyone.”

It is conduct unbecoming any public official, no less a Supreme Court justice. “It’s just the height of hypocrisy to wear the robes and live the lifestyle of a billionaire,” Don Fox, former general counsel of the Office of Government Ethics, told ProPublica.

Perhaps some of the benefits could be deemed “personal hospitality” and therefore not subject to the reporting requirements, although that exception does not seem to apply to private jet travel, such as Huizenga’s dispatch of one of his personal 737 jets to ferry Thomas to South Florida — at least twice.

But this isn’t — or shouldn’t be — a game of what an individual justice can get away with not disclosing. The federal courts’ “Guide to Judiciary Policy” prohibits judges from accepting gifts “from the same or different sources on a basis so frequent that a reasonable person would believe that the public office is being used for private gain.” What would any reasonable person conclude about Thomas’s behavior? This isn’t just a problem for him — it’s a stain on the court.

I wrote four months ago — without any expectation that this would happen — that Thomas needs to provide a full accounting of the benefits he received, or that Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. should insist on it. Since then, we have learned not just about the travel described above but also about Crow’s purchase of the house where Thomas’s mother was living and his tuition payments for Thomas’s grandnephew.

Thomas partisans may convince themselves that this is all part of a liberal plot to discredit the court’s most conservative member. But it is Thomas who is doing the discrediting — not just of himself but of the institution on which he serves. If he won’t wake up to that reality, his colleagues must.

Opinion by Ruth Marcus
Ruth Marcus is an associate editor and columnist for The Post.