OPINION: The ‘Fix’ Is in With the Latest Attack on Clarence Thomas
A report from a self-styled non-ideological Supreme Court watchdog is filled with errors and omissions.
WSJ
It’s late in the Supreme Court’s term, which means it’s hunting season for the justices’ detractors. As usual, Clarence Thomas is a prime target. Fix the Court, which styles itself a nonpartisan advocate for “non-ideological ‘fixes’ ” to make the judiciary “more open and more accountable”—released a chart purporting to show that Justice Thomas has received almost $4.2 million in gifts and “likely gifts” between 2004 and 2023.
The other 16 justices who served during that period, according to the chart, received a combined total of less than $600,000 in gifts. That includes a mere $3,150 for Justice Anthony Kennedy, $55,014 for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and $15,500 for Justice Stephen Breyer.
Can that be true? No. A review of Fix the Court’s claims shows multiple errors and deceptions:
• It counts as “gifts” Justice Thomas’s trips and vacations with friends that weren’t required to be disclosed. Fix the Court counts annual visits by Justice and Ginni Thomas to the summer home of their longtime friends Harlan and Kathy Crow as a gift valued at $280,950. But no other justice’s visits to close friends’ homes are listed on its chart.
In 2011, 20 Democratic lawmakers filed an ethics complaint regarding Justice Thomas not disclosing his trips with the Crows. 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.
• It uses an inconsistent standard for what constitutes a “gift” to inflate Justice Thomas’s numbers. 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.
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. Justice Kennedy and his wife traveled to Europe many summers for a month to teach seminars, but none of those trips are on the Fix the Court chart.
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.
• 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. 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.
Using this same method of valuing plane travel, the group claims Justice Thomas likely received $613,323 in gifts for flights to the Crows’ summer home every year for 20 years. But the Thomases almost always drove there. The group makes a similarly flawed estimate of $997,500 for flights Justice Thomas allegedly took on Mr. Crow’s plane to the Bohemian Grove.
Fix the Court even inflates ticket prices to games. The Thomases attended a University of Nebraska football game with friends (my wife and I were there) and sat in a suite where the price of the ticket, as confirmed by the University Athletic Office, was $65—well below the $415 reporting threshold. The group values these tickets at $989. And the group claims Justice Thomas attended a 2018 Dallas conference that didn’t even take place.
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. Much of the information is drawn from another Thomas antagonist, ProPublica, which describes itself as “an independent, nonprofit newsroom that produces investigative journalism with moral force.”
In an August 2023 story, ProPublica claimed Justice Thomas took “a voyage on a yacht around the Bahamas.” That trip never happened. When a lawyer for the yacht’s owner submitted a letter to that effect to the Senate Judiciary Committee, ProPublica quietly appended an “update” to its article without acknowledging the error.
ProPublica this month published an article titled “Harlan Crow Provided Clarence Thomas at Least 3 Previously Undisclosed Private Jet Trips, Senate Probe Finds.” As it has done before, the organization failed to cite the Judicial Conference’s 2012 ruling that these trips weren’t subject to disclosure. Like Fix the Court, ProPublica aims to smear disfavored justices, not to report honestly on the court.
Mr. Paoletta served as a lawyer in the George H.W. Bush and Trump administrations. He represented Ginni Thomas, Justice Thomas’s wife, in the Jan. 6 Committee’s proceedings.
