Supreme Court judge received trips from billionaire Republican

In one instance Clarence Thomas visited Indonesia — alone was likely to be worth $US500,000 — paid by Harlan Crow.

Clarence Thomas has accepted years of luxury travel, including yachting in New Zealand and private jet flights across the globe. Picture: AFP

US Supreme Court judge Clarence Thomas has accepted years of luxury travel trips from a billionaire Republican, including yachting in New Zealand and private jet flights across the globe.

The conservative Justice Thomas, the longest-serving member of the court, went on a trip to Indonesia that alone was likely to be worth $US500,000 – paid for by real estate tycoon Harlan Crow, according to the ProPublica news outlet on Thursday.

The ProPublica investigation showed “the Supreme Court is the least accountable part of our government”, legal reform action group Fix the Court said.

“Nothing is going to change without a wholesale, lawmaker-led reimagining of its responsibilities when it comes to basic measures of oversight,” the group’s director Gabe Roth said.

The 74-year-old Justice Thomas also joined Mr Crow – whose friendship with the judge The New York Times in 2011 called “unusual and ethically sensitive” – for trips to an exclusive all-male wilderness resort in California and to properties in Texas and New York State over the past two decades.

Mr Crow told ProPublica that his gifts to Justice Thomas were “no different from the hospitality we have extended to our many other dear friends”, and that the two had never discussed pending cases.

He has donated more than $US10m ($15m) to Republican political groups, ProPublica said, including $US500,000 to a lobbying group founded by Justice Thomas’ wife Ginni Thomas.

Ginni Thomas’ involvement in politics has drawn its own scrutiny over reports she took part in Donald Trump-led efforts to illegally overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.

Justice Thomas, who was nominated for the court in 1991 after a confirmation process in which he was accused of sexual harassment by a former aide, joined the majority of judges who ruled to overturn the national right to abortion last year. He went further than his colleagues, saying the conservative-dominated court should also examine its rulings on contraception and same-sex marriage.

In response to the report, Democrat senator Dick Durbin said Justice Thomas’s “behaviour is simply inconsistent with the ethical standards the American people expect of any public servant, let alone a justice on the Supreme Court”. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said: “I’m not going to comment from here. There are other bodies of government who should be dealing with this.”

Justice Thomas declined to comment to ProPublica, which also tweeted a clip from a documentary in which he said he liked driving around rural corners of America more than travelling abroad. “I don’t have any problem with going to Europe, but I prefer the United States,” he said. “I prefer the Walmart parking lots to the beaches and things like that. I’d come from regular stock and I prefer that.”

AFP