Supreme Court Corruption (Formerly Clarence Thomas and the Billionaire) (1 Viewer)

[cuddlemonkey]

It seems that a billionaire GOP donor has spent a small fortune on vacations for Ginni and Clarence Thomas.

Clarence Thomas and the Billionaire

Island-hopping on a superyacht. Private jet rides around the world. The undisclosed gifts to Thomas have no known precedent in the modern history of the Supreme Court. “It’s incomprehensible to me that someone would do this,” says one former judge.

www.propublica.org

 

[superchuck500]

He bought Thomas' mother's house, renovated it. and began to pay her property taxes. This is batshit crazy.

Definitely no longer “personal hospitality”.

 

[J-DONK]

There was a time when politicians had the integrity and guts to call for a resignation that could hurt their party but was essential for the good of the nation. Democrats with Abe Fortas and Republicans with Richard Nixon. Sadly, I don’t expect any - zero - Republicans to support his resignation. They easily could do it and it would go a ways towards restoring a bit of respectability to the court. But they will not.

You don't even have to go that far back. Al Franken, and Elliot Spitzer both resigned for crimes comparable to Trump's own.

 

[cuddlemonkey]

Definitely no longer “personal hospitality”.

"You know, Clarence, a vote for my friend here would be great. Just thought I would mention that as I look at the deed to your mother's house..."

 

[superchuck500]

"You know, Clarence, a vote for my friend here would be great. Just thought I would mention that as I look at the deed to your mother's house..."

Rank and file federal employees cannot accept gifts except for token trinkets and cannot accept a meal valued for anything more than like $20 or something silly.

Because it looks bad and raises potential for conflict of interest. It doesn’t matter if the person is a “friend” - and Thomas has been doing this shirt for decades.

 

[GrandAdmiral]

Rank and file federal employees cannot accept gifts except for token trinkets and cannot accept a meal valued for anything more than like $20 or something silly.

Because it looks bad and raises potential for conflict of interest. It doesn’t matter if the person is a “friend” - and Thomas has been doing this shirt for decades.

Bruh, HRSA, a division of HHS, just hit us with a huge compliance finding because our conflict of interest policy omitted a gifts clause. Mind you, we are a private organization. But because we receive some federal funding, they came at us hard.

 

[superchuck500]

Justice Abe Fortas resigned in 1969 over receipts of funds while on the Court. But it just feels like it doesn’t matter anymore - if this doesn’t gain any traction it’s going to be truly a mark of our decline as a nation.

The Cautionary Tale of Abe Fortas

Neil Gorsuch has a lot of friends in Washington. He should manage these relationships carefully.

www.brennancenter.org

 

[MT15]

It’s been going on for a while, I just read that when Scalia died he was at the posh hunting lodge of a wealthy donor. They’re all corrupt now and have been for a while. It’s just that due to McConnell packing the court the way he did, we can see the total tilt away from fairly considering the law and toward pleasing their donors.

 

[cuddlemonkey]

Thomas' disclosure report from the year he sold the property to Harlan Crow. He listed everything from a $10,000 teaching fee to the $530 value of an award from Yale, but he somehow forgot about the $100,000+ property sale.

 

[MT15]

 

[Optimus Prime]

Over the last two decades, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has reported on required financial disclosure forms that his family received rental income totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars from a firm called Ginger, Ltd., Partnership.


But that company — a Nebraska real estate firm launched in the 1980s by his wife and her relatives — has not existed since 2006.


That year, the family real estate company was shut down and a separate firm was created, state incorporation records show. The similarly named firm assumed control of the shuttered company’s land leasing business, according to property records.

Since that time, however, Thomas has continued to report income from the defunct company — between $50,000 and $100,000 annually in recent years — and there is no mention of the newer firm, Ginger Holdings, LLC, on the forms.
The previously unreported misstatement might be dismissed as a paperwork error.

But it is among a series of errors and omissions that Thomas has made on required annual financial disclosure forms over the past several decades, a review of those records shows.

Together, they have raised questions about how seriously Thomas views his responsibility to accurately report details about his finances to the public………

https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2023/04/16/clarence-thomas-ginger-financial-disclosure/

 

[MT15]

 

[MT15]

 

[MT15]

it seems when it involves poor people accused of crimes, Thomas doesn’t believe they should be allowed any relief for mistakes made by their lawyers. No do-overs for them, only for him:

 

[GrandAdmiral]

Stuff like this makes me want to advocate for the ability to add more than one reaction to a post.

 

[zztop]

ah yes, the good ol' deflection tactic

Harlan Crow: There’s nothing wrong with my friendship with Clarence Thomas

Harlan Crow: There’s nothing wrong with my friendship with Clarence Thomas

www.dallasnews.com

“But I think that the media, and this ProPublica group in particular, funded by leftists, has an agenda to destabilize the [Supreme] Court. What they’ve done is not truthful. It lacks integrity. They’ve done a pretty good job in the last week or two of unfairly slamming me and more importantly than that, unfairly slamming Justice Thomas.”

 

[MT15]

Nobody with 2 brain cells to rub together should pay any mind to what the SCOTUS groomer says.

 

[FullMonte]

Rank and file federal employees cannot accept gifts except for token trinkets and cannot accept a meal valued for anything more than like $20 or something silly.

Because it looks bad and raises potential for conflict of interest. It doesn’t matter if the person is a “friend” - and Thomas has been doing this shirt for decades.

Tell me about it. I work in a shop with 3 other civilians, our supervisor (civilian), and about 6 active duty airmen. Every year at Christmas we do a silly White Elephant gift exchange with a limit of $20. Our supervisor doesn't participate because of the potential issue of him receiving a gift from someone he supervises.

 

[Optimus Prime]

During his much-too-long tenure on the Supreme Court, Justice Clarence Thomas has been totally, tragically wrong about almost everything. But for a long time, I tried to convince myself that he was at least sincere in his deplorable ideology.


Silly me.


I was never sympathetic. I believed Anita Hill, who testified at Thomas’s confirmation hearing in 1991 that he had sexually harassed her when she worked for him at two government agencies.

And for Thomas, a far-right Republican apparatchik, to take the seat on the nation’s highest court vacated by the retirement of Thurgood Marshall, an icon of the civil rights movement, was always an abomination.

But I did understand how a Black man born in Pin Point, Ga., in 1948 might have a great big chip on his shoulder. I understood how growing up under the jackboot of Jim Crow might lead him to the philosophy of Black self-sufficiency articulated by Malcolm X, which Thomas espoused in his youth.

And I almost — but not quite — understood how a deep distrust of government, perhaps along with some personal issues involving self-image and self-worth, might have produced his tear-it-all-down judicial nihilism.

It was hard for me to believe that Thomas could be as much of a puppet of the most reactionary forces in American society as he seemed. But now, there is overwhelming evidence that that’s exactly what he is.


Thanks to reporting this month by ProPublica, we now know that Thomas and his wife, Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, a hard-right Republican activist, have been treated to lavish vacations worth hundreds of thousands of dollars by Harlan Crow, a politically active Texas billionaire.

These jaunts included a vacation in Indonesia in 2019 that involved flights on Crow’s private jet and an island-hopping tour on a superyacht — a nine-day trip that alone would have cost the couple more than $500,000. If they had paid for it themselves. Which they did not………

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/04/17/clarence-thomas-disclosures-harlan-crow-respect/