Clarence Thomas defense

Interesting opinion piece on Fox from Mark Paoletta alleging that the hit campaign against Clarence Thomas is riddled with inaccuracies, and that the authors don’t care. Let’s start with how Thomas supposedly received $4.2 million in gifts over the last few years. That’s 20 years, by the way, since 2003.

“He traveled to Dallas in 2022 to speak at a civil-rights conference hosted in part by the American Enterprise Institute. Fix the Court counts the plane travel provided by Mr. Crow, an AEI trustee, as a gift valued at $68,333,” Paoletta wrote. “But the group doesn’t count Justice Breyer’s more than 230 trips for events—63 of them outside the U.S.—including the 17 trips the Pritzker family’s Architecture Foundation paid for Justice Breyer to take to London, Paris, Beijing and Copenhagen.”

Paoletta wrote that Justice Kennedy frequently traveled to Europe to teach month-long summer seminars “but none of those trips are on the Fix the Court chart.”

What did Thomas fly on, a winged Biblical chariot? Almost seventy grand for a domestic plane trip – on a trip presumably the plane owner was already taking.

“The group counts two high-school scholarships established by the Horatio Alger Association in Justice Thomas’s son’s name as a $35,000 gift to Justice Thomas, even though none of the money went to him or any family member. But it doesn’t count as a gift the $1 million prize the Berggruen Institute awarded Ginsburg in 2019, which she distributed to her favored charities,” Paoletta wrote.

So a group funded a scholarship which went to third party students and the only contact Thomas had was that it was in his name. Right.

“It uses wildly inflated values for the ‘gifts’ to Justice Thomas. Most shocking, Fix the Court values the 2019 vacation Justice Thomas and his wife took to Indonesia with the Crows—which, again, wasn’t even subject to disclosure as a gift—at $500,000,” he continued. “That estimate is based on the assumption that Justice Thomas would have chartered Mr. Crow’s yacht and plane for himself. In reality he was a guest of the Crows, along with 14 other passengers, including my wife and me. Even under its own methodology, the group has dishonestly inflated the value of this trip by not factoring in the other passengers.”

It’s only overstated by 15:1  worst case. Oh, wait:

“In 2011, 20 Democratic lawmakers filed an ethics complaint regarding Justice Thomas not disclosing his trips with the Crows,” he continued. “In response, the U.S. Judicial Conference, which regulates judges’ financial disclosures, concluded in 2012 that Justice Thomas wasn’t required to report such trips and vacations.”

Plus they concentrate on Thomas – and ignore the other judges, such as Kennedy, above.

“Fix the Court imputes 101 ‘likely but not confirmed gifts’ worth nearly $1.8 million to Justice Thomas in 2004-23 but identifies no ‘likely gifts’ for any other justice,” he added. Fox News

Sounds like ‘likely but not confirmed’ is equivalent to ‘rumored.

Now, obviously Paoletta is a pretty close friend, and one can assume ProPublica and Fix the Court are definitely not – but it sure sounds like they should at least throw a few facts into the mix.

Fix the Court – surely I’m not the only one wondering how blatantly they are describing their goals?

Category: Supreme Court