As long as Clarence Thomas is the patron saint of the right-wing legal establishment, he won’t be held liable
It seems as though the press is dropping a new Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas corruption scandal every day. Yesterday we got two. First, Pro-Publica published yet another story about Thomas‘ wealthy benefactor Harlan Crow passing on a lavish gift to his pal which Thomas once again failed to report. This time, it was private school tuition for the grand-nephew Thomas and his wife Ginni have said they raised like he was their own son since he was 6 years old. By evening, we found out that Federalist Society guru Leonard Leo instructed longtime GOP operative Kellyanne Conway back in 2012 to have her polling firm bill his nonprofit group „another $25,000“ but give the money to Ginni Thomas — adding, with „no mention of Ginni, of course.“
What the hell is going on here?
It’s bad enough that Ginni Thomas is a hardcore far-right Republican activist who even participated in the coup attempt of 2020 and spouted QAnon conspiracy theories. This was not a huge surprise since she’s been working in far-right circles for some time, even helming her own Tea Party group and working with the shadowy Groundswell organization. But it’s particularly unnerving since her husband was the lone Justice to dissent from the Supreme Court’s rejection of former President Donald Trump’s bid to block the release of some presidential records to the January 6 committee. She claimed that she never talks to the man she famously calls her „best friend“ about any of that — which nobody believes. So we’re left with the fact that while it’s unseemly that she’s so involved in issues that come before the court in the first place, and her husband refuses to recuse himself, they both are completely shameless about their rank partisanship so there doesn’t seem to be anything anyone can do about it.
But now we have evidence that money is exchanging hands — and a lot of it.
To be precise, this isn’t exactly news. Back in 2004, the Los Angeles Times published a big expose of Crow’s lavish gifts to Thomas, which he wasn’t disclosing. And in 2011, Ian Millhiser, then at Think Progress, came out with yet another article revealing even more examples of Crow’s largesse to the Thomases. They both made brief splashes at the time but Thomas didn’t care and that was that.
