Nothing To See Here: Clarence Thomas’s Billionaire Buddy Paid For His Grand-Nephew’s Private School Tuition

Not only did Harlan Crow shower Clarence Thomas with lavish gifts and luxury vacations, and purchase three properties owned by the right-wing justice and his family — the conservative billionaire also apparently footed the bill for Thomas’s grand-nephew’s private school tuition. ProPublica reported Thursday that Thomas in 2008 sent his grand-nephew — whom he had legal custody over and was “raising like a son” — to Hidden Lake Academy, a Georgia boarding school where tuition ran over $6,000 a month. Crow, a Republican donor, “picked up the tab,” Christopher Grimwood, a former administrator at the school, told ProPublica, which obtained a bank statement showing that Crow’s real estate company was funding Thomas’s grand-nephew’s education there. 

As in the travel and real estate transactions previously reported by ProPublica, Thomas did not publicly disclose the tuition payments from Crow.

“This is way outside the norm,” Richard Painter, the former chief ethics lawyer in George W. Bush’s White House, told ProPublica. “This is way in excess of anything I’ve seen.”

Thomas did not comment on the payments to ProPublica, and the Supreme Court did not respond to Vanity Fair’s request for comment. But Crow defended the tuition payments, telling ProPublica in a statement from his office that it is “disappointing that those with partisan political interests would try to turn helping at-risk youth with tuition assistance into something nefarious or political.” And Mark Paoletta, a close ally and family friend of Clarence and Ginni Thomas, released a statement effusively praising the justice and his wife for their having made “immeasurable personal and financial sacrifices” for their grand-nephew and claiming that Crow’s financial support “did not constitute a reportable gift.”

“This malicious story shows nothing,” the former Trump administration counsel wrote, “except for the fact that the Thomases and the Crows are kind, generous, and loving people who tried to help this young man.”

In actuality, of course, the report shows the glaring need for ethics reform at the Supreme Court, whose nine unelected justices with lifetime appointments have been able to operate in a black box with little accountability, transparency, and outside oversight. Democrats — and one Republican, Lisa Murkowski — have pushed to change that, renewing calls to hold the Supreme Court justices at least to the same standard as other federal judges. “Congress can — and must — step in if the Supreme Court won’t police itself,” Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a longtime proponent of court reform, said this week. “The justices have been playing out of bounds for a long time.” But most of the GOP has brushed off the scandals, accusing Democrats of politically targeting conservative justices Thomas and Neil Gorsuch — who also failed to fully report a suspicious real estate transaction — and leaving any ethics reform up to Chief Justice John Roberts, who has long made clear that he doesn’t think such action is necessary or appropriate. “This is not about making the [Supreme Court] better,” Lindsey Graham, ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said during a hearing earlier this week. “This is about destroying a conservative court.”

But, as Graham and other conservatives have inadvertently acknowledged, this is not a partisan issue. While Thomas’s disregard for ethics may be more brazen and far-reaching than most, members of the liberal minority have also invited scrutiny over potential conflicts of interest. And without taking action to weed out what is at best the appearance of impropriety and at worst outright corruption, the court is going to continue to hemorrhage public trust. “People want to believe there’s some transparency to their decision-making and that they’re not being influenced,” as Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Dick Durbin told me this week, and such revelations raise “questions about their objectivity and reliability.”

That erodes the legitimacy of the court, as well as confidence in a legislative branch that apparently cannot provide a check on the judiciary’s power — all because the Republicans who built this right-wing court refuse to rein it in and cast efforts to conduct even basic oversight as “unseemly,” as Graham put it in the Judiciary Committee hearing Tuesday. But what’s actually unseemly is Thomas’s egregious disregard for ethics — and the system that has enabled his conduct, shielded him from accountability, and resisted long overdue reform.