Justice Clarence Thomas on Friday acknowledged additional luxury trips he accepted from a conservative billionaire, changing a previous financial disclosure to reflect trips he took to an Indonesian island and to a secret men-only club in the redwoods of northern California.
The trips, made in 2019, were earlier revealed by ProPublicabut this is the first time that Judge Thomas includes them in his financial informations.
Other Supreme Court justices have reported on their gifts, travels, and money earned from books and teaching. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson reported receiving four concert tickets worth approximately $3,700 from Beyoncé and $10,000 worth of artwork for her rooms from Alabama artist and musician Lonnie Holley.
The financial disclosures, released annually, are one of the few public records available about judges’ lives, providing selected details about their activities outside the court. The steady pace of revelations about some judges’ ties to wealthy donors has only intensified interest in these reports, particularly after revelations that Justice Thomas had accepted lavish gifts and trips from of wealthy friends for decades.
Books are one of the few ways judges can make money outside and without a cap. Justice Jackson declared $893,750 in advance for her next book, a memoir. Justice Neil M. Gorsuch is listed a book advance of $250,000.
Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh Disclosed an advance of $340,000. He is working on a legal brief, still untitled, and is expected to offer a first-hand account of his contentious 2018 confirmation hearing and a 2022 assassination attempt. was reported earlier by Axios.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor continued to win royalties for his books, including about $87,000 in revenue this year. She cited about $1,900 for playing a character in an animated children’s show on PBS, “Alma’s Way,” about a Puerto Rican girl from the Bronx and her family. The narrative arc is no stranger to Justice, whose Puerto Rican parents raised her in public housing in the Bronx.
The 2019 trips disclosed by Judge Thomas refer to two excursions with Harlan Crow, a Texas real estate mogul and donor to conservative causes. In one, he and his wife, Virginia Thomas, flew on Mr. Crow’s private jet to Indonesia, where they spent more than a week traveling the islands aboard Mr. Crow’s superyacht.
Judge Thomas did not provide a monetary value on his disclosure form, but ProPublica estimated that if Judge Thomas had paid for the plane and yacht trip himself, the trip could have exceeded $500,000.
The second trip, listed as a visit to Monte Rio, California, appears to be an excursion at Bohemian Grove, an exclusive retreat hosted on a 2,700-acre property in Sonoma County, north of San Francisco. Mr. Crow is a member of the club.
Justice Thomas reported no gifts, private jet flights or travel from benefactors for 2023, the year covered by the most recent disclosures. He cited only one gift, a pair of photo albums worth $2,000 from Terrence and Barbara Giroux. Mr. Giroux is the outgoing executive director of the Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans, an exclusive group that includes figures from some of the highest echelons of society.
As a member of the group, Justice Thomas granted him unusual access to the Supreme Court, presiding over an annual courtroom ceremony and meeting and mentoring recipients of college scholarships awarded by the group worth millions of dollars per year ; many come from backgrounds that mirror his own.
Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. was granted a continuance this year, said the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, which provides support to the federal court system and manages financial records. This corresponds to his usual practice. According to Fix the Court, an advocacy group criticizing the court’s lack of transparency, it delayed filing its disclosure for more than a decade.
Last year, Justices Thomas and Alito requested and received extensions to the deadline for filing their disclosure forms. Neither cited a reason for requesting a delay.
When his form was made public, Judge Thomas included an unusual addendum, a statement defending his acceptance of Mr. Crow’s gifts. In reporting a real estate transaction, a sale of his mother’s single-family home to Mr. Crow, he said in the statement that he had “inadvertently omitted” that information, which also sought to justify his decision to fly on a private jet. He stated that he had been advised to avoid commercial travel after the leak of the draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade. However, he did not list any private plane trips in 2023.
The Supreme Court, under growing pressure and intense public scrutiny, adopted its first ethics code in November. Judges on lower federal courts have long been bound by a code, but the Supreme Court has never been subject to these requirements because of its special constitutional status.
The lack of an enforcement mechanism or ethics complaints process has nonetheless drawn criticism, as has the absence of specific restrictions on gifts, travel or real estate transactions.
However, the nine page code warned that members of the Supreme Court should not participate in activities that “undermine the dignity” of their work, interfere with a judge’s ability to perform his or her official duties, “undermine the impartiality of the judge” or “lead to frequent disqualifications”.
Elizabeth A. Harris reports contributed.
