It’s a ridiculous story that the liberal media is obsessed with though no one cares enough about it. Only the most ardent progressives think these stories will oust Justice Clarence Thomas from the Supreme Court. It won’t. The narrative's core is that Clarence Thomas is an evil man for going on vacation. Yes, a black man went on vacation—this is the scandal of the century.
Since April, the Left has been clamoring for impeachment hearings over these vacations with Thomas’ uber-wealthy friends, which Leah wrote about last spring. Also, judges don’t have to disclose gifts from personal friends, so this was a nothing burger out of the gate:
I read the latest high tech lynching of Clarence Thomas for going on vacation with his rich friend
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) April 6, 2023
I also read the disclosure laws for judges linked in the story that says they don't have to report gifts from personal friends
ProPublica mysteriously left that out of their story pic.twitter.com/oL75PKBM39
The left reported on a major “scandal” this week involving Clarence Thomas that conservatives are dismissing as just the latest “high tech lynching” of the Supreme Court justice.
According to left-leaning ProPublica, Thomas has vacationed for more than two decades with billionaire businessman Harlan Crow, flying on his private jet, traveling on his yacht, and staying at his various properties.
Calling them “gifts,” ProPublica says the vacations are nowhere to be found on the justice’s financial disclosures.
In response, Crow said his “hospitality” to Thomas is no different than what he’s shown to other “dear friends” and noted that the justice’s family never asked for any of it.
But ProPublica decided to swing at Thomas again, hitting him with this nonsensical line that Supreme Court justices can’t go on vacation with friends. There’s one problem: it’s riddled with errors. Thomas is said to have been galivanting on this luxury yacht, but the sitting justice was never on it when it was taken to sea. He had a tour of the boat, which never left the dock. The whole ‘boat trip’ lasted 30 minutes. There were luxurious golf club invitations offered to Mr. Thomas, who doesn't play golf and rejected the invite—things ProPublica omitted (via WSJ):
ProPublica is at it again. On Aug. 10 the website, which styles itself “an independent, nonprofit newsroom that produces investigative journalism with moral force,” published its latest hit piece against my friend Justice Clarence Thomas. The article focuses on three friends of Justice Thomas—Tony Novelly, David Sokol and Wayne Huizenga—and gets significant facts wrong.
The story makes much of Mr. Novelly’s 126-foot yacht, the Le Montrachet, which he takes on fishing expeditions in the Bahamas. ProPublica claims to have found that Justice Thomas took “a previously unreported voyage on a yacht around the Bahamas.” Justice Thomas tells me he has never seen this yacht and hasn’t been to the Bahamas since the 1980s, before he joined the high court. A senior official with the Novelly organization confirmed that its records show Justice Thomas was never a passenger on any yacht owned by Mr. Novelly.
Mr. Novelly co-owned a different yacht, the Daybreak, with Mr. Sokol. That boat was docked at Mr. Sokol’s home in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., when Justice Thomas visited in 2018. Mr. Sokol and Justice Thomas have both confirmed that Justice Thomas walked onto the boat, got a tour of the engine room, and left within 30 minutes. Mr. Novelly wasn’t there, and the boat never left the dock. That’s the only time he has set foot on a boat owned by Mr. Novelly.
As for Mr. Huizenga, ProPublica reports that in the early 2000s he “gave Thomas something that was priceless at the time: a standing invitation to his exclusive, members-only golf club”—but leaves out that Justice Thomas, who doesn’t play golf, declined the invitation. His only connection to the club is that he visited once a year, no more than five times in total, to have lunch with Mr. Huizenga when he traveled to Florida to visit Ginni Thomas’s parents, who lived in the Sunshine State. Justice Thomas’s in-laws came along for the lunches.
ProPublica also finds a scandal in Justice Thomas’s attending a University of Nebraska football game with Mr. Sokol and sitting in a suite hosted by former Nebraska coach and athletic director Tom Osborne. The reporters cite a “typical” suite’s annual price tag, $40,000, and quote an “ethics expert” saying that Justice Thomas should have reported this ticket as a gift. But the price of a ticket has nothing to do with the price of a suite.
The ticket price for Justice Thomas’s seats at this game was $65, based on information provided by the Nebraska Athletic Department.
At $65, Justice Thomas didn’t have to report this gift. In their effort to make something stick, the liberal media got sloppy, and had an OceanGate-like implosion with this latest attempt to satisfy a ravenous Left-wing readership that can’t stand that a black conservative is on the Supreme Court.
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