MACS wrote:I can't stomach either NYT or Wapo. I would use it for bird cage poop or starting fires. But that would require I spend my money on it, sooooo... just, no.
This one says what you would want it to:The Truth About Clarence Thomas’s DisclosuresHe reported carefully on his inherited real estate. ProPublica’s reporting was slipshod and incurious.WSJClarence Thomas lost his beloved maternal grandparents barely a month apart in the spring of 1983. Myers Anderson, whom his grandson knew as “Daddy,” died of a stroke on March 30. Christine Anderson, known as “Aunt Tina,” suffered a stroke as well and died on May 1. “Perhaps, I thought, she’d lost the will to live,” Justice Thomas writes in his 2007 memoir, “My Grandfather’s Son.”
The Andersons, who were 75 and 70 respectively, are buried at Palmyra Baptist Church in Liberty County, Ga. When they died, Mr. Thomas was 34 and chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. “Losing Aunt Tina a month after Daddy was more painful than I could ever have imagined,” he writes. “How could I have let myself grow away from her, or from the man who . . . was the only real father I’d ever had?”
Mr. Thomas inherited a one-third interest in a few modest houses Myers Anderson owned. Forty years later, ProPublica has taken a different kind of interest in those properties. ProPublica describes itself as “an independent, nonprofit newsroom that produces investigative journalism with moral force.” It promises “deep-dive reporting” dedicated to “exposing corruption, informing the public about complex issues, and using the power of investigative journalism to spur reform.”
Give ProPublica credit for admitting its journalism has an agenda. So does mine, as the word “opinion” atop this page should make clear. But ProPublica’s acknowledgment that it’s in the opinion business doesn’t excuse it from the obligation to report facts accurately, carefully and thoroughly.
ProPublica has at least three reporters working the Clarence Thomas beat—Justin Elliott, Joshua Kaplan and Alex Mierjeski. Their story, published last Thursday, is titled “Billionaire Harlan Crow Bought Property From Clarence Thomas. The Justice Didn’t Disclose the Deal.” The troika write that the lack of disclosure “appears to be a violation of the law, four ethics law experts told ProPublica.” That statement is equivocal because it’s a legal theory based on incomplete facts. Justice Thomas didn’t respond to ProPublica’s questions or to mine.
Some facts are known and undisputed. Mr. Crow, a Dallas developer and friend of the justice, confirmed in a written statement to ProPublica that Savannah Historic Development LLC, a company he established, bought “the childhood home of Justice Thomas,” which Mr. Crow plans to convert into a museum “telling the story of our nation’s second black Supreme Court Justice.” Public documents show that the company paid Anderson’s heirs a total of $133,363 for the Savannah house and two adjacent empty lots. According to ProPublica, Justice Thomas’s mother, 94-year-old Leola Williams, lived in the house at least until 2020 and possibly still does.
Assuming Justice Thomas received one-third of the sale price (or any amount more than $1,000), the text of the federal financial-disclosure statute would require him to have reported the transaction in Part VII (“Investments and Trusts”) of his annual AO-10 form for 2014. He didn’t do so and may need to file an amended form.
But my review of Justice Thomas’s disclosures and other documents convinces me that any failure to disclose was an honest mistake. On all other matters involving his scanty real-estate inheritance, he followed the Filing Instructions for Judicial Officers and Employees, prepared by the Committee on Financial Disclosures of the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts. Those instructions don’t make clear the statutory obligation to disclose the 2014 transaction.
Further, the ProPublica troika made a sloppy reporting error, the effect of which is to cast Justice Thomas’s disclosures in a falsely unfavorable light—to make them look shambolic or perhaps even dishonest when in fact they followed the filing instructions without fail.
The reporters’ error involves a confusion about what Justice Thomas did disclose. “By the early 2000s,” ProPublica reports, “he had stopped listing specific addresses of property he owned in his disclosures. But he continued to report holding a one-third interest in what he described as ‘rental property at ## 1, 2, & 3’ in Savannah.” It’s worth noting—ProPublica doesn’t—that the filing instructions (on page 32) prescribe disclosing rental properties in precisely this manner.
The story continues: “Two of the houses were torn down around 2010, according to property records and a footnote in Thomas’ annual disclosure archived by Free Law Project.” That footnote in Justice Thomas’s 2010 disclosure states in full: “Part VII, Line 2 - Two of the Georgia rental properties have been torn down. The only remaining property is an old house in Liberty County.”
Liberty County is where our journey began, but the ProPublica troika somehow missed it on the map. Their story leads the reader to think that the “remaining property” was the Savannah house where Justice Thomas’s mother lived. A Friday letter from the Center for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington—co-signed by Virginia Canter, the first of ProPublica’s “four ethics experts”—expressly says so and accuses Justice Thomas of deceptively disclosing (rather than failing to disclose) the property’s disposition.
The footnote makes clear that this is wrong. There’s a fourth property. Justice Thomas’s 2009 disclosure listed three rental properties in “Sav., GA.” Beginning in 2010, he listed only one, in “Liberty Cty, GA.” Savannah is in Chatham County, not Liberty. But Liberty County is in the Savannah area, roughly a 45-minute drive from the city. For someone living hundreds of miles away, it would have been reasonable to describe the three rental properties collectively as being “in Savannah.”
That implies that Justice Thomas never disclosed his interest in the Savannah house where his mother lived. But he didn’t need to. “Information pertaining to a personal residence is exempted from reporting, unless the property generates rental income,” the filing instructions say on page 33. Nor was there any requirement to disclose the ownership of the other two Savannah properties after the houses were demolished. Who wants to rent an empty lot in Savannah?
When an asset isn’t sold but stops being reportable—in this case because it is no longer capable of generating rental income—page 50 of the filing instructions directs the filer to “insert ‘(Y)’ after the asset description in Column A and leave Columns B-D blank, or include an explanatory note in Part VIII.” Justice Thomas did exactly that for the Savannah rental properties in 2010, and for the Liberty County property in 2015. The latter footnote reads simply: “Line 1: The asset listed on line 1 does not receive any rental income for this property.” This is the disclosure Ms. Canter and her co-signers mistake for a deception.
When my mother died in 2019, I inherited a one-third interest in her house, which I sold to my brother. I understand the statute to mean that if I had been a federal judge, I would be obligated to disclose that transaction. But if I hadn’t been made aware of the statute, it wouldn’t have occurred to me to think of my inheritance as an “investment,” and I searched the filing instructions in vain for language that makes plain a judge’s duty to disclose this sort of transaction.
In Justice Thomas’s circumstances, moreover, the instructions seem to say not to report the sale of the former rental properties. The above-quoted “insert ‘(Y)’ ” language on page 50 is followed immediately by this sentence: “In subsequent years, this asset should be deleted from Part VII.”
One may be tempted to think that of all people a judge should know what the law says. But that’s a nonsensical standard. A judge’s job isn’t to memorize statute books; it’s to discern laws’ meaning and their application to the facts in cases that litigants bring before him. Inasmuch as the law applies to the judge’s personal affairs and interests, he’s in the same boat with the rest of us—often dependent on lawyers or other specialists, such as the Committee on Financial Disclosures of the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, to make sense of his duties and rights.
The job of a journalist is similar in some ways to that of a judge. Both involve asking questions, testing arguments, and judiciously ascertaining facts and their significance. ProPublica failed to consider some obvious questions: Where is Liberty County? What is Justice Thomas’s connection to the place? If the remaining rental property was the house Mr. Crow’s company bought, what was it doing on Justice Thomas’s AO-10 for 2015, the year after the sale closed?
Journalists don’t memorize books either. I read “My Grandfather’s Son” when it came out in 2007, but as I researched this article I had to return to it and refresh my memory. “Daddy’s people worked on a three-thousand-acre rice plantation in Liberty County,” Justice Thomas writes, “and after their manumission they stayed nearby. The maternal side of my mother’s family also came from Liberty County, and probably worked on the same plantation.”
Daddy grew up on a family plot known as “the farm,” which “had been passed down undivided from generation to generation, as was often customary with land owned by southern blacks. Any family member was entitled to live there.” The fields were fallow by Christmas 1957, when Clarence was 9 and Daddy decided to build a house there. He enlisted the help of Clarence and his brother, Myers Thomas, and “by springtime we’d finished building a simple four-room house,” writes Justice Thomas, who spent his summers there until he left for college in 1967.
When Aunt Tina died in May 1983, “no sooner did Myers and I go home to the farm after the funeral than some of our relatives started fighting over the contents of the house, declaring that Aunt Tina would have wanted them to have this item or that,” Justice Thomas recounts. “Part of me was disgusted by their greed, but I couldn’t bring myself to care. Death had already stolen the only things in the house that mattered to me.”
Justice Thomas disclosed all this in a book that’s available on Kindle for $13.99. If you’re a journalist whose job is to investigate him, you probably ought to read it—especially if you aspire to produce work “with moral force.”
