Clarence Thomas and Other Crow Holdings

The Supreme Court is corrupt.

One of our nine Supreme Court Justices appears to be owned by a rightwing billionaire.

As Pro Publica’s Joshua Kaplan, Justin Elliott and Alex Mierjeski revealed in Thursday’s bombshell article, “Clarence and the Billionaire”—the most consequential investigative news story in recent memory—Clarence Thomas has enjoyed the largesse of said billionaire, Harlan Crow, for over 20 years. For most of the current century, he has not bothered to disclose the many, many lavish vacations he and his wife, Ginni Thomas, have taken with—and that were paid for by—Crow:

For more than two decades, Thomas has accepted luxury trips virtually every year from the Dallas businessman without disclosing them, documents and interviews show. A public servant who has a salary of $285,000, he has vacationed on Crow’s superyacht around the globe. He flies on Crow’s Bombardier Global 5000 jet. He has gone with Crow to the Bohemian Grove, the exclusive California all-male retreat, and to Crow’s sprawling ranch in East Texas. And Thomas typically spends about a week every summer at Crow’s private resort in the Adirondacks.

The extent and frequency of Crow’s apparent gifts to Thomas have no known precedent in the modern history of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Thomas has done this while presenting as a humble Man of the People who likes to drive across country in his RV, stopping at the occasional Walmart parking lot to rub elbows with the hoi polloi. In other words, he has deliberately, actively concealed the fact that he is sucking off the teat of an heir to a multi-billion-dollar real estate fortune.

The level of corruption here is so staggering, I’m having difficulty wrapping my brain around it. For all my work on Leonard Leo—another Crow crony; “Crow-ny,” if you will—I am frankly stunned at the egregiousness of the graft. It calls into question the very legitimacy of the Supreme Court. From the looks of things, SCOTUS has not just been captured; it is owned.

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Who is Clarence Thomas?

As Moscow Never Sleeps wrote on these pages two and a half years ago, Clarence Thomas has, in his three decades on SCOTUS,

performed three judicial functions: First, he is a reliable conservative vote who has rarely if ever swung to join a liberal foursome. Second, he has avoided anything remotely resembling original and persuasive legal writing that might ever be used by anyone in lower courts as precedent in any gray area of Constitutional law. And third, once he had confirmed his title as the dumbest reactionary on the Court in the Twentieth Century, he graciously stepped aside to allow Samuel Alito to claim that honor for the Twenty-First. In other words, he is a total load.

Thomas’s manifest unsuitability for the job was blatantly obvious during his confirmation hearing. In the years since, those first impressions were borne out, as Moscow Never Sleeps explains:

Clarence Thomas was a troglodyte long before people started paying his wife to cheer him on. In fact, he is quite possibly the most consistent jurist in the history of the Court: he always votes for the cops against the suspect, for the wealthy against the employee, for the Republican political machine against the disenfranchised voter, and for the church against taxpayers who don’t want to support parochial schools. (About the only surprise to come from three decades of Justice Thomas’s black-and-white judicial worldview is that he proves that there really is such a thing as antidisestablishmentarianism.)

But our correspondent ends that paragraph by giving the “total load” the benefit of the doubt. Thomas, he writes, “doesn’t rule this way because he’s getting paid off: this is already the best judge he was ever going to be.” That may be true, but there’s no way to know for sure. For that particular experiment, there is no control.

Thomas has, in effect, been paid off for many years. Crow may not have presented him with suitcases full of cash—at least, not that we know of; after reading that article, nothing would surprise me—but he did cover what Thomas would have done with the cash in the suitcase. I mean, what do people with lots of money do? They buy fancy cars and finer clothes; they dine at Michelin-starred restaurants and sip thousand-dollar bottles of French wine; they go on lavish vacations involving yachts and bucolic private retreats. Well, Clarence and Ginni did all of those things, over and over again, for years. And they did those things because Harlan Crow was buying.

Here is the statement Thomas felt compelled to release in the wake of the scandal:

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

Early in my tenure at the Court, I sought guidance from my colleagues and others in the judiciary, and was advised that this sort of personal hospitality from close personal friends, who did not have business before the Court, was not reportable. I have endeavored to follow that counsel throughout my tenure, and have always sought to comply with the disclosure guidelines.

Accountable.Us sent out a press release explaining how the “who did not have business before the Court” line is complete horseshit. The researcher UsHadrons sums it up neatly: “Crow served on the board of the American Enterprise Institute and Center for the Community Interest. AEI and CCI filed a total of eleven briefs with the court. Thomas either sided with AEI and CCI positions or took a position that was more extreme in all eleven cases.”

I am not a lawyer, so I don’t know if the legal definition of bribery is as narrowly defined as the legal definition of collusion or treason. But colloquially speaking, this looks a hell of a lot like bribery. Even if it’s legal—and isn’t Thomas ultimately one of the arbiters who determine what is and is not legal?—it’s certainly unethical.

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Who is Harlan Crow?

Like most rightwing billionaires who pump dark money into the political system, like Charles Koch and so on, Harlan Crow inherited his wealth. Crow Holdings, one of the privately-held companies founded by his successful old man, manages some $19 billion in assets. His personal net worth is, we think, north of $2 billion.

And while he has certainly not run the family business into the ground, or squandered his inheritance like Donald Trump, at the end of the day, he’s Connor Roy with an aw-shucks accent. Harlan Crow is a nepo baby who has dedicated his wealth and energy to make sure that the federal government does not provide ordinary Americans with a small fraction of the benefits he has enjoyed his entire life simply by being born to Mrs. Trammell Crow. He not only donates generously to rightwing causes; he also contributes to monkeywrench Democrats like Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema. In short, he is a noxious political force.

Crow was an early adopter of dark money in politics. As the researcher Aaron Harris points out: “With $550K from Harlan Crow, Ginni Thomas founded what may have been the very first dark money group with Leonard Leo, Liberty Central, in late 2009—weeks or months before the Citizens United ruling. Leo registered it in VA one week before” the ruling that opened the spigot to political dark money.

Ginni Thomas, needless to say, is the wife of Clarence Thomas. She and Leonard Leo, the radical Catholic puppetmaster behind the Federalist Society and a web of other non-profits, are chummy with Harlan Crow. Leo is one of the five dudes in the “School of Athens”-style oil painting commissioned by Crow that was cited in the ProPublica article.

Do we really believe that those lavish vacations the Thomases enjoyed had nothing to do with politics? That Crow, Clarence Thomas, and Leonard Leo gathered at Crow’s private resort to talk about baseball? Does anyone believe that Crow would have cultivated a friendship with Thomas at all, if he were not a Supreme Court Justice? It’s not like they were buddies before Thomas was sworn in.

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Did John Roberts know?

The Roberts Court has already established itself among the worst assemblages of Supreme Court Justices in U.S. history. Now we are left to wonder what the Chief Justice knew and when he knew it.

If Roberts was aware that Clarence Thomas was enjoying all the perquisites of billionairehood and turned a blind eye, that’s bad. If Thomas pretended to do the RV-across-the-States thing while actually vacationing in locales far more exclusive than Walmart parking lots, that’s worse. That Thomas walked around with an embroidered shirt from Crow’s yacht suggests that he wasn’t mum about his summer vacations.

Is this sort of thing a commonplace among SCOTUS justices? Does Roberts also have a sugar daddy who underwrites his private jet travel and yacht rides? How about Sam Alito? How can the Thomas-Crow relationship possibly be shrugged off as totally normal?

If Roberts had even a shred of shame, he would resign. But he doesn’t, and he won’t.

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Is Crow a Nazi?

As has been widely reported, Crow is an avid collector of historical artifacts, including Nazi memorabilia. He explained this unusual hobby in a letter written in 2019, when visitors to his library were freaked out by all the swastikas on display:

For forty of [sic] fifty years now, I have collected mostly books and manuscripts but a few artifacts that relate to American history. It seems reasonably obvious to me that materials on American history would relate to the good and the bad of American history, so I do have books and manuscripts that relate to American slavery, Indian genocide, to people such as Benedict Arnold or James Earl Ray, and I have things that relate to some American opponents such as Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan and the communist states, the Soviet Union, and the Republic of China. . . .

I would very much hope it would be completely obvious that having anything that related to Nazis or slavery could not possibly be interpreted as support or glorification for those evils. 

Plenty of people who are not Nazis collect World War II memorabilia, true. But when the collector in question is in bed with political activists who supported the attempt to overthrow the government (Ginni Thomas) or who seek to impose their own religious and ideological beliefs on everyone at the expense of democracy (Leonard Leo), it’s harder to make the “I actually hate fascists” claim. Nothing about Crow is “completely obvious”—except for the audacity of his gifts to Clarence Thomas.

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Photo credit: Thomas Cizauskas. Normally reticent at Supreme Court hearings, Justice Clarence Thomas administers the Vice-Presidential oath-of-office to Mike Pence (not pictured). Justice Anthony Kennedy looks on. January, 2017.