Justice Clarence Thomas acknowledged on Friday additional luxury travel he had accepted from a conservative billionaire, amending a previous financial disclosure to reflect trips he had taken to an Indonesian island and a secretive all-male club in the Northern California redwoods.
The trips, taken in 2019, were earlier revealed by ProPublica, but it is the first time that Justice Thomas has included them on his financial disclosures.
Other Supreme Court justices chronicled their gifts, travel and money earned from books and teaching. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson reported receiving four concert tickets valued at about $3,700 from Beyoncé and $10,000 of artwork for her chambers from the Alabama artist and musician Lonnie Holley.
The financial disclosures, released yearly, are one of the few public records available about the justices’ lives, providing select details of their activities outside the court. A steady drumbeat of revelations about ties between some of the justices and wealthy donors has only intensified interest in the reports, particularly after disclosures that Justice Thomas had accepted lavish gifts and travel from affluent friends over decades.
Books are one of the few ways that the justices can earn outside, uncapped money. Justice Jackson reported $893,750 from an advance for her coming book, a memoir. Justice Neil M. Gorsuch listed a book advance of $250,000.
Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh disclosed a $340,000 advance. He is working on a legal memoir, still untitled, and is expected to offer a firsthand account of his contentious confirmation hearing in 2018 and an attempt on his life in 2022. The deal was earlier reported by Axios.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor continued to earn royalties for her books, including about $87,000 in proceeds this year. She cited about $1,900 for voicing a character on an animated children’s show on PBS, “Alma’s Way,” about a Puerto Rican girl from the Bronx and her family. The narrative arc is not unfamiliar to the justice, whose Puerto Rican parents raised her in public housing in the Bronx.
The 2019 trips disclosed by Justice Thomas refer to two excursions with Harlan Crow, a Texas real estate magnate and donor to conservative causes. During one, he and his wife, Virginia Thomas, flew aboard Mr. Crow’s private jet to Indonesia, where they spent more than a week island-hopping on Mr. Crow’s superyacht.
Justice Thomas did not provide a dollar value on his disclosure form, but ProPublica had estimated that if Justice Thomas had paid for the plane trip and yacht himself, the trip could have exceeded $500,000.
The second trip, listed as a visit to Monte Rio, Calif., appears to be an excursion to Bohemian Grove, an exclusive retreat held on a 2,700-acre property in Sonoma County, north of San Francisco. Mr. Crow is a member of the club.
Justice Thomas did not report any gifts or private jet flights or travel from benefactors for 2023, the year covered by the most recent disclosures. He listed only one gift, a pair of photo albums worth $2,000 from Terrence and Barbara Giroux. Mr. Giroux is the departing executive director of the Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans, an exclusive group that includes figures at some of the highest echelons of society.
As a member of the group, Justice Thomas has granted it unusual access to the Supreme Court, presiding over an annual ceremony in the courtroom and meeting with and mentoring the recipients of college scholarships awarded by the group and worth millions of dollars a year; many come from backgrounds that mirror his own.
Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. was granted an extension this year, said the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, which offers support for the federal judiciary and handles the financial records. That is in keeping with his typical practice. According to Fix the Court, an advocacy group critical of the court’s lack of transparency, for more than a decade he has delayed filing his disclosure.
Last year, both Justice Thomas and Justice Alito requested and received extensions on filing their disclosure forms. Neither cited a reason in asking for a delay.
When his form was released to the public, Justice Thomas had included an unusual addendum, a statement defending his acceptance of gifts from Mr. Crow. In reporting a real estate deal, a sale of his mother’s single-family home to Mr. Crow, he said in the statement that he had “inadvertently omitted” such information, which also sought to justify his decision to fly on private jets. He stated that he had been advised to avoid commercial travel after the leak of the draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade. However, he did not list any private plane travel in 2023.
The Supreme Court, under mounting pressure and intense public scrutiny, adopted its first ethics code in November. Judges in lower federal courts have long been bound by a code, but the Supreme Court has never been subject to those requirements because of its special constitutional status.
Still the lack of enforcement mechanism or a process to handle ethics complaints drew criticism, as did the absence of any specific restrictions on gifts, travel or real estate deals.
However, the nine-page code cautioned that members of the Supreme Court should not participate in activities that “detract from the dignity” of the job, interfere with a justice’s ability to carry out official duties, “reflect adversely on the justice’s impartiality” or “lead to frequent disqualification.”
Elizabeth A. Harris contributed reporting.
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