‘Calumny’ Is How, in a New Filing, Lawyers for Clarence Thomas Describe Allegations Against the Justice

Lawyers for Justice Clarence Thomas, describing the allegations against him as “calumny” and a “partisan feeding frenzy,” have released amended financial disclosure forms for 2022 that they say answer and “utterly refute” allegations that the justice improperly accepted gifts and travel accommodations paid for by wealthy GOP donors.The disclosures, amended to adhere to new rules that went into effect in March, show that a longtime friend of Justice Thomas, Harlan Crow, a Dallas real estate developer, hosted the justice at his home at the Adirondacks region of New York for a week in summer 2022. Mr. Crow also paid for his transportation and lodging to speak at two events hosted by the American Enterprise Institute at Dallas, first in February 2022 and again during a weekend in May.The only other travel expenses paid on behalf of the justice were meals, lodging, and transportation for a three-day speaking engagement at the Hatch Center at Salt Lake City, Utah. Three of the trips involved private planes owned by Mr. Crow, and one of them was at the behest of his security detail following the leak of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision last year.Justice Thomas has been under fire from Democrats on Capitol Hill and their allies in the press for going on what were described as “lavish” holidays paid for by Mr. Crow and others in his conservative-leaning circles. In a series of reports earlier this year, ProPublica described the vacations as luxurious trips to far-flung locales on Mr. Crow’s “superyacht” and his private jet. The outlet described Mr. Crow’s largesse as “unprecedented” and insinuated that it was an effort by the billionaire to influence Justice Thomas’s Supreme Court rulings.In a statement accompanying the disclosure forms, Justice Thomas’s lawyer, Elliot Burke, says the amended report “answers — and utterly refutes — the charges trumped up in this partisan feeding frenzy.”“The attacks on Justice Thomas are nothing less than ridiculous and dangerous, and they set a terrible precedent for political blood sport through federal ethics filings,” Mr. Burke says in his summary. “It is painfully obvious that these attacks are motivated by hatred for his judicial philosophy, not by any real belief in any ethical lapses.”Democrats in Congress have seized on the reporting by ProPublica as evidence that the Supreme Court, with a solidly conservative majority for the first time in decades, needs to adopt a code of ethics. Democrats have introduced legislation in the Senate that would force it to do so. The high court currently has no such code, and a bill that squeaked out of the Senate Judiciary Committee on a party-line vote before Congress recessed for the summer break is due to be voted on by the full body when it returns to session in September.The Illinois Democrat who has been leading the charge for reform, Senator Durbin, said in a statement released earlier this month that Justice Thomas’s interactions with Mr. Crow are part of a “shameless lifestyle underwritten for years by a gaggle of fawning billionaires.”Republicans in both the Senate and the House, though, have pushed back on the efforts by Mr. Durbin and others. The bill before the Senate, Senator Graham said during a July 20 vote of the Judiciary Committee, is “not designed to make the court stronger and more ethical.”The legislation, he said, “is a bill to destroy a conservative court, to create a situation where conservative judges can be disqualified by stature and to rearrange the makeup of how the court governs itself.”Following Justice Thomas’s new disclosures, Republicans in the House — among them Congressmen Jim Jordan and Chip Roy — released a statement reiterating their support for the embattled justice. “The Left has been out to get Justice Clarence Thomas for over 30 years. They started before he was even confirmed. Despite their baseless attacks, he has not stopped standing up for the rule of law and the Constitution. He is a threat to the radical progressives’ agenda because he openly defies them and he cannot be intimidated.”Earlier this week, another group of the justice’s supporters said more of the same in an open letter. More than 100 former clerks of Justice Thomas — some of them now sitting on federal benches across the nation — defended their former boss as a man of “unimpeachable integrity.”The stories circulating about Justice Thomas, the letter says, “are malicious, perpetuating the ugly assumption that the Justice cannot think for himself. … They are part of a larger attack on the Court and its legitimacy as an institution. The picture they paint of the Court and the man for whom we worked bears no resemblance to reality.”

‘Calumny’ Is How, in a New Filing, Lawyers for Clarence Thomas Describe Allegations Against the Justice

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