Though the Supreme Court may be out of session, Justice Clarence Thomas remains front and center in the news. A new report from The New York Times digs into Thomas’ murky involvement in the Horatio Alger Association and his long-history of using his official position for personal benefit.
This is just the latest in a series of scandals involving the conservative Supreme Court Justices making a mockery of ethics laws and guidelines designed to uphold the integrity of the Court. We need meaningful ethics and transparency reforms to root out corruption and to restore Americans’ faith in the judiciary.
New York Times: Where Clarence Thomas Entered an Elite Circle and Opened a Door to the Court
Abby VanSickle and Steve Eder
07/09/23
Key sections:
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On Oct. 15, 1991, Clarence Thomas secured his seat on the Supreme Court, a narrow victory after a bruising confirmation fight that left him isolated and disillusioned.
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Within months, the new justice enjoyed a far-warmer acceptance to a second exclusive club: the Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans, named for the Gilded Age author whose rags-to-riches novels represented an aspirational version of Justice Thomas’s own bootstraps origin story.
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At Horatio Alger, he moved into the inner circle, a cluster of extraordinarily wealthy, largely conservative members who lionized him and all that he had achieved. While he has never held an official leadership position, in some ways he has become the association’s leading light. He has granted it unusual access to the Supreme Court, where every year he presides over the group’s signature event: a ceremony in the courtroom at which he places Horatio Alger medals around the necks of new lifetime members. One entrepreneur called it “the closest thing to being knighted in the United States.”
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At the same time, Justice Thomas has served as the group’s best messenger, meeting with and mentoring the recipients of millions of dollars a year in Horatio Alger college scholarships, many of whom come from backgrounds that mirror his own.
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“The Horatio Alger Association has been a home to Virginia and me,” Justice Thomas said, referring to his wife, as he received the group’s most prestigious award in 2010. The organization, he added, “has allowed me to see my dreams come true.”
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His friendships forged through Horatio Alger have brought him proximity to a lifestyle of unimaginable material privilege. Over the years, his Horatio Alger friends have welcomed him at their vacation retreats, arranged V.I.P. access to sporting events and invited him to their lavish parties. In 2004, he joined celebrities including Oprah Winfrey and Ed McMahon at a three-day 70th birthday bash in Montana for the industrialist Dennis Washington. Several Horatio Alger friends also helped finance the marketing of a hagiographic documentary about the justice in the wake of an HBO film that had resurfaced Anita Hill’s sexual harassment allegations against him during his confirmation.
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Prominent among his Horatio Alger friends has been David Sokol, the onetime heir apparent to Warren Buffett at Berkshire Hathaway. Mr. Sokol describes the justice and his wife as “close personal friends,” and in 2015, the Sokols hosted the Thomases for a visit to their sprawling Montana ranch. The Sokols have also hosted the Thomases at their waterfront mansion in Florida.
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In recent months, Justice Thomas has faced scrutiny over new revelations by ProPublica of his relationship to Harlan Crow, the Texas billionaire, whose largess over more than two decades has included vacations on a superyacht, private school tuition for the great-nephew the justice was raising, and the purchase of his mother’s Savannah, Ga., home. None of this was reported by the justice, and the revelations have renewed calls for tighter Supreme Court ethics rules.
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But a look at his tenure at the Horatio Alger Association, based on more than two dozen interviews and a review of public filings and internal documents, shows that Justice Thomas has received benefits — many of them previously unreported — from a broader cohort of wealthy and powerful friends. They have included 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.
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Justice Thomas declined to respond to detailed questions from The New York Times.
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In his early years on the court, Justice Thomas disclosed about 20 private plane flights and an assortment of other gifts, including cigars, a Daytona 500 jacket, a silver buckle and a rawhide coat. After The Los Angeles Times chronicled his gifts and travel in 2004, he stopped disclosing private flights and has seldom reported gifts or other benefits. After the Crow revelations, the justice said that “colleagues and others in the judiciary” had advised him that he did not need to report the hospitality of good friends.
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His decision not to disclose many benefits for nearly two decades — beyond trips related to teaching, speeches and attending legal or academic conferences — has made it difficult to track potential conflicts of interest.
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While the court has no formal ethics system, the federal courts’ policymakers earlier this year announced more stringent disclosure rules, requiring the justices to report travel by private jet, as well as free stays at commercial properties like hotels, resorts and hunting lodges. However, the justices do not have to document the amount of a spouse’s income, and there are a number of other exceptions, including information about the receipt of “personal hospitality” — food, lodging or entertainment of a personal, nonbusiness nature.
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In the 1980s, Justice Thomas appeared in a public service announcement for the agency that featured the Dallas Cowboys, his favorite football team. He struck up a friendship with the team’s owner, Jerry Jones, and began to taste the good life that he still hoped would somehow become his own.
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Over the years, he flew in Mr. Jones’s private jet. Mr. Jones gave him a Super Bowl ring. He attended the Cowboys’ training camp, and when the team played in Washington, he sat in the owner’s box. (Mr. Jones later became a member of the Horatio Alger Association.)
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In the mid-1980s, divorced and with custody of his son, Justice Thomas dated a woman named Lillian McEwen. In an interview, she remembered the Bahamas vacation, at a house with a caretaker and a car. She never knew the identity of the “buddy” footing the bill but understood it to be a professional contact because that was how the justice referred to such people, she said.
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Not long after Ms. McEwen and Justice Thomas broke up, he met Virginia Lamp, known as Ginni. They married in 1987; Armstrong Williams, a close friend from Justice Thomas’s earliest days in Washington who is now a conservative commentator, said in an interview that he paid for their wedding reception.
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The Horatio Alger Association was founded in 1947, according to its website, “to dispel the mounting belief among our nation’s youth that the American dream was no longer attainable.” To that end, the group has awarded more than $245 million in college scholarships to roughly 35,000 students. Its members have included a wide spectrum of people whose life stories exemplify the Horatio Alger credo, although they have trended conservative. Justice Thurgood Marshall and Fred Trump, former President Donald Trump’s father, were members. So was Harlan Crow’s father, Trammell Crow. Justice Thomas’s class of inductees included the poet Maya Angelou.
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The organization, according to Armstrong Williams, made Justice Thomas “realize that not everyone judges him by the confirmation process, particularly among people of that class and wealth group. They really treated him like a brother, like he mattered and, in return, he opened up the Supreme Court.”
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Justice Thomas’s use of the courtroom for the Horatio Alger Association, while hardly unprecedented, is quite rare. That special access and affiliation with Justice Thomas have become central to the identities of the organization and its members. Several have said they counted among their proudest achievements having Justice Thomas bestow their Horatio Alger medallions at the Supreme Court.
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The Horatio Alger Association has repeatedly celebrated Justice Thomas. It has made him an honorary board member and twice created scholarships named after his son, Jamal. Both scholarships were unusual in that they directed money to two Virginia prep schools, instead of paying for college or graduate school. One, established at Fork Union Military Academy in 2002, overlapped with the attendance there of a young man whom Justice Thomas mentored. The other, begun at Randolph-Macon Academy in 2007, coincided with Justice Thomas’s great-nephew’s time there.
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Justice Thomas has never been among the wealthier members of the Supreme Court, according to his financial disclosures. In addition to his judicial salary — now $285,400 — his disclosures show $1.5 million he received for his autobiography, as well as income from teaching, which has been capped at roughly $30,000 a year for every justice. Without disclosing the amount, he also lists income from his wife, a political consultant whose ventures have been underwritten by ideological allies like the Heritage Foundation and Mr. Crow.
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As Justice Thomas became a fixture at the Horatio Alger Association, he gained entree to the lives of some of the wealthy members at its core.
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In January 2002, the justice and his wife attended a Horatio Alger board meeting at a resort developed on a former sugar plantation in Jamaica. Before a performance by Johnny and June Carter Cash, the Thomases conducted a “special session” for members, records show. It is unclear how they traveled to Jamaica or who paid for their stay.
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In the 2000s, Justice Thomas made annual visits to South Florida to help Mr. Huizenga, the Dolphins owner, pass out scholarships, sometimes also meeting with the team. At least once, Justice Thomas flew in a private jet emblazoned with the Dolphins logo. Another time, a helicopter whisked him off the Dolphins’ practice field, according to Mr. Hutcherson, who attended the Florida trips.
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In 2001, Mr. Huizenga’s foundation donated $25,000 to help restore, expand and name a wing of Savannah’s Carnegie Library in honor of Justice Thomas, records show. (Mr. Crow donated $175,000.) The library had been open to Black people during segregation, and Justice Thomas had spent many hours there in his youth.
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In 2017, the year before Mr. Huizenga died, he held a “quiet, private meeting” with the justice at a Florida home of Mr. Sokol, according to a Horatio Alger publication. Mr. Sokol was out of town at the time, but he, too, had developed a bond with Justice Thomas.
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Together, Justice Thomas and Mr. Sokol, a major donor to the school, have enjoyed royal treatment at Cornhuskers football games, sitting in a suite with all-access passes, according to emails obtained through a public records request.
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The Thomases and the Sokols have also vacationed together in recent years. One 2020 photo shows the justice and Mr. Sokol standing behind a barbecue grill, wearing matching white chef’s toques. Another from the same year shows them on the deck of a boat. In a third, from 2022, they are wearing tie-dyed shirts; the caption reads, “Fishermen in tie-dye (good luck).”
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Mr. Sokol became one of the justice’s most vocal defenders when a 2016 HBO film resurfaced Anita Hill’s allegations. He published an opinion essay in The Washington Times, appeared on Lou Dobbs’s Fox News show and gave a speech at a Connecticut library in which he said the justice had faced “lies, innuendo, distortions and outright personal attacks.”
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The HBO film prompted a response, a slickly produced documentary titled “Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words.”
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As the credits roll, a list of its funders appears: among them Mr. Crow and friends from Horatio Alger, including Mr. Sokol and Mr. Washington.
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