Clarence Thomas Responds To Ethics Concerns: Get F*cked, Haters, Says Clarence Thomas

Yeah that's both my hands in the goddamn cookie jar, what are you gonna do about it?

Justice of the Supreme Court and grubby Veruca Salt impersonator Clarence Thomas finally released his 2022 financial disclosure forms this week, after presumably spending the 90-day extension from the deadline he had requested wearing out a few dozen erasers while mumbling mean things about ethics laws to himself.

But at least he’s making an effort to put this whole controversy behind him, and by extension the rest of the country. Ha ha, just kidding, he had his partisan hack of a lawyer release a snarling, whiny, defensive statement that would embarrass everyone involved if any of them was genetically or emotionally capable of shame:

For several months now, left wing “watchdog” groups have been attacking Justice Thomas for alleged ethical violations largely stemming from his relationships with personal friends who happen to be wealthy.

Oh sure, Harlan Crow would be friends with Clarence Thomas even if he was still a low-level federal bureaucrat running the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and not one of the nation’s most powerful people whose decisions can affect Harlan Crow’s vast fortune. Corruption? Isn’t that what a volcano does?

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Thomas’s 2022 financial filings address a couple of particular issues raised by the initial Pro Publica investigation that kicked off this whole blowup. One was Thomas and wife QAnon McGillicutty — sorry, wife Ginni — accepting rides on Crow’s private jet, trips on Crow’s private yacht, and relaxing vacations at Crow’s private resort in the Adirondacks for years, all without revealing them in his financial disclosure forms.

Now Thomas has categorized the flights he took in 2022 as reimbursements, not gifts. Which, as Slate explains, does not clear things up:

The difference in categories is significant because gift reports must include their “value” while reimbursements need not. Although Thomas claims that this unusual categorization is “consistent with previous filings by other filers,” he gives no examples. The other justices’ reported reimbursements were all for teaching or speaking engagements at law schools[.]

Hey, Clarence Thomas probably socialized with some of Crow’s other guests at his Adirondacks resort, that’s a kind of speaking engagement. As in, was he speaking? Yes, checkmate, libs.

No other justice listed an expense-paid vacation as a reimbursement, with the attendant concealment of its value.

Thomas’ motivation for the categorization seems obvious. The Financial Disclosure Committee’s rationale for apparently allowing it is, to put it politely, opaque. The Judicial Conference’s Guide to Judiciary Policy defines “reimbursement” as the payment or repayment for travel-related expenses “other than gifts.”

If we’re reading this correctly, and we’re almost definitely not because in no way does any interpretation make any sense, what this means is that while Thomas may have needed to reveal the reimbursements, he did not need to reveal how much he paid Crow to reimburse him, or alternately, how much Crow paid Thomas to reimburse Thomas. If Harlan Crow said, “Okay Clarence, for all this largesse, you owe me a nickel,” and Thomas handed him a nickel, and then they went out to sit in Harlan Crow’s garden with the statues of Mao and Stalin and smoke stogies while railing against petty governmental concerns like transparency and ethics, that’s perfectly inbounds. But we’re pretty sure it’s the other way around, and Crow “reimbursed” Thomas (did not actually reimburse Thomas) for travel for which Thomas never paid out.

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Thomas also reports that his rides on Crow’s private plane were sparked by concerns raised by his security detail in the wake of the leak of the Dobbs opinion in May of 2022, which resulted in an explosion of anger directed towards the Supreme Court. People are so touchy when you take away rights.

But what about all the other rides on Crow’s private jet? The ones that occurred for years upon years before Dobbs apparently made it too dangerous for Clarence Thomas to fly commercial, lest someone be mean to him in line at the Reagan Airport Starbucks? Those flights remain unaddressed. As do all the prior stays at Crow’s Adirondacks resort, where Thomas has reportedly vacationed for many years.

Then there is Thomas’s retconning of Crow purchasing his mother’s home in Savannah, Georgia, in 2014, ostensibly to preserve it for possible conversion into a museum dedicated to the justice sometime in the future. Part of the deal was that Thomas’s mother got to live in the house rent-free for the rest of her life. Thomas’s lawyer’s letter describes this as “not a gift, but part of the overall transaction.”

Yr Wonkette is not a fancy lawyer, but “free rent for life” in a property that has doubled in value since you also bought a couple of properties around this one and redeveloped them in an effort to gentrify the area sure sounds like a pretty nice fucking gift to us. The excuse that it was a gift to Clarence Thomas’s mother and not Clarence Thomas personally? That’s not splitting hairs, that’s splitting the atoms that make up a hair.

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Anyway, all these details are somewhat overshadowed by the main thrust of the statement from Thomas’s lawyer, which is that everything is everyone else’s fault. The Judicial Conference that oversees these matters for not previously giving clear guidance. The unnamed colleagues Thomas has asked for advice over the years who also steered him wrong. And of course the usual “left wing organizations with largely undisclosed supporters that stand diametrically opposed to his judicial philosophy” who are “abusing [the Constitution] and their own privilege to score cheap political points for a few slow news cycles.”

First, we appreciate that at least some conservatives are suddenly opposed to dark money in politics. Maybe they could lobby Congress for some reforms.

Second, obviously a stance of “combative hyperpartisan asshole” is not going to put anything to rest here. But if Clarence Thomas wants to spend his golden years dealing with ethics controversy after ethics controversy instead of airing out all of his dirty laundry, that’s his choice. Though he’ll still blame everyone else for his making it.

[Slate / Clarence Thomas’s partisan hack lawyer’s website]

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