Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas (L) and billionaire Harlan Crow.
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The Republican billionaire donor Harlan Crow for several years paid the pricey private school tuition of a great-nephew of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, a recent report reveals.
Thomas had custody of the boy, Mark Martin, on the time. He never disclosed in official filings that Crow was paying the tutoring, regardless that he disclosed one other, much less generous payment of $5,000 for a fraction of Martin’s tuition by one other friend, the report by ProPublica noted. Martin is now in his 30s.
“Ethics law experts told ProPublica they believed Thomas was required by law to reveal the tutoring payments because they seem like a present to him,” ProPublica wrote.
The identical news outlet recently revealed how Crow paid for luxurious vacation trips over greater than 20 years for Thomas and his wife, Ginni, without the conservative justice reporting the gifts on annual financial disclosures.
ProPublica also exposed that a Crow company bought properties in Savannah, Georgia, owned by Thomas’ family, including a house where the justice’s mother still lives rent-free.
Thomas likewise had never disclosed, before the outlet’s reporting, either the trips gifted by the Texas real estate developer or the proven fact that he bought the properties.
That failure by Thomas to accomplish that had led to growing calls, including by Democratic members of Congress, for ethics reform on the Supreme Court, which unlike lower federal courts doesn’t have a compulsory code of ethics.
In an announcement Thursday, Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., said, “With every recent revelation on this case, it becomes clearer that Harlan Crow has been subsidizing an extravagant lifestyle that Justice Thomas and his family couldn’t otherwise afford.”
“It is a foul breach of ethics standards, that are already far too low in terms of the Supreme Court,” said Wyden, who’s the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. “I gave Mr. Crow until May eighth to offer a full account of the gifts he provided to Justice Thomas’s family. Should he fail to comply, I’ll explore using other tools on the committee’s disposal to acquire this critical information.”Â
Picking up the tab
Martin is the son of Thomas’ nephew, who at one point when Martin was a boy was in prison on drug charges, ProPublica noted.
Thomas took legal custody of Martin and have become his legal guardian around January 1998, the report said. Martin lived with Thomas and his wife from the age of 6 to 19, Martin told ProPublica.
The tutoring at considered one of the 2 institutions Martin attended, a boarding school in Georgia, was greater than $6,000 per 30 days, based on ProPublica. Martin went there for his junior yr of highschool.
“Harlan picked up the tab,” Christopher Grimwood, a former administrator at that college, Hidden Lake Academy, told ProPublica.
Martin spent the remainder of his highschool years at a military boarding school in Virginia, which Crow himself had attended, which charged between $25,000 and $30,000 annually, the report said.
“Harlan said he was paying for the tutoring at Randolph-Macon Academy as well,” Grimwood told ProPublica.
The outlet said Grimwood recalled Crow telling him that in a visit to the billionaire’s estate within the Adirondacks region of Recent York.
A friend of Thomas, the attorney Mark Paoletta, in a Twitter post on Thursday morning said Crow paid just for one yr, Martin’s first, at Randolph-Macon, after which for his yr at Hidden Lake Academy.
Paoletta said Crow’s office confirmed – to whom Paoletta doesn’t discover – “that he didn’t pay the good nephew’s tuition for every other yr at Randolph Macon.”
Thomas, who didn’t reply to questions from ProPublica, didn’t immediately return CNBC’s request for comment. The Supreme Court’s press office had no immediate comment.
Crow pushes back
In an announcement to CNBC, Crow’s office said, “Harlan Crow has long been captivated with the importance of quality education and giving back to those less fortunate, especially at-risk youth.”
The statement added that Crow and his wife, Kathy, “have supported many young Americans through scholarship and other programs at quite a lot of schools, including his alma mater.”
“It’s disappointing that those with partisan political interests would attempt to turn helping at-risk youth with tuition assistance into something nefarious or political,” the statement concluded.
Paoletta, an attorney who served within the Trump administration, in his statement on Twitter wrote: “The Thomases have rarely spoken publicly concerning the remarkably generous efforts to assist a toddler in need. They’ve all the time respected the privacy of this young man and his family.”
“It’s despicable that the press has dragged him into their effort to smear Justice Thomas,” Paoletta wrote.
Paoletta argued that Thomas was not legally obligated to reveal the tutoring payments as a present from Crow since the Ethics in Government Act doesn’t include a great-nephew under its definition of “dependent child,” but as an alternative limits that to “son, daughter, stepson or stepdaughter.”
But Mark Bennett, a former federal judge appointed by President Bill Clinton, told ProPublica, “You may’t be having secret financial arrangements.”
And Richard Painter, who served because the chief White House ethics lawyer under President George W. Bush, called Thomas’ failure to reveal the tutoring and other gifts from Crow “way outside the norm.”
“That is way in excess of anything I’ve seen,” Painter told ProPublica. “This amount of undisclosed gifts? You’d need to get them out of the federal government.”
