Clarence Thomas accepted lavish gifts before joining Supreme Court, report claims

Justice Clarence Thomas’ penchant for accepting lavish gifts and free hospitality from wealthy patrons predates his 1992 confirmation to the Supreme Court, according to a new report fromThe New York Times.

The Times report claims that Mr Thomas, who has reportedly spent years taking free vacations, private jet travel and hospitality from a billionaire Republican donor, Harlan Crow, has also been taking such gratuities from wealthy benefactors for years.

According to the Times, one of Mr Thomas’s ex-girlfriends has said she took a lavish vacation in the Bahamas with him in the mid-1980s, a time when he served as a Reagan-era head of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

The ex-girlfriend, Lillian McEwan, told the Times that the vacation included lodging at a house complete with car and caretaker, and said she never knew who financed the trip apart from Mr Thomas’ explanation that a “buddy” paid for it.

She also said she understood that the “buddy” was a “professional contact” because that was how Mr Thomas referred to such persons at the time.

Another friend of the Supreme Court Justice, conservative commentator Armstrong Williams, has said he paid for the wedding reception when Mr Thomas married conservative activist and organiser Virginia “Ginny” Thomas in 1987.

During that time period, Mr Thomas somehow “struck up a friendship” with Jerry Jones, the longtime owner of the Dallas Cowboys football team, and was reported by The Legal Times as having “plans to be rich”.

Since then, Mr Thomas has taken numerous flights on Mr Jones’ private jet, was gifted a Super Bowl ring by the football team owner, and accepted tickets to watch the Cowboys play the Washington Redskins (now known as the Commanders) from the owner’s box.

The Times also reported that the Supreme Court justice has accepted hospitality and gifts from members of the Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans, a social club that he joined shortly after he was confirmed to the high court.

Named for the author whose rags-to-riches stories represent a popular American archetype of the self-made individual, the association connected Mr Thomas with extremely wealthy friends and associates who have often bankrolled his lifestyle.

In 2010, he said the association “has been a home” to him and his wife and “has allowed [him] to see [his] dreams come true”.

Over the years, his fellow members have reportedly “welcomed him at their vacation retreats, arranged V.I.P. access to sporting events and invited him to their lavish parties,” even as that hospitality has gone unreported because of the high court’s loose ethics rules.

The Times said the fellow members who’ve provided the Thomases with such gifts “major donors to conservative causes with broad policy and political interests and much at stake in Supreme Court decisions, even if they were not directly involved in the cases”.

The justice did not respond to a request for comment from the Times.