Democratic Senators Sheldon Whitehouse and Ron Wyden are asking Attorney General Merrick Garland to assign a special prosecutor to investigate complaints of potential ethics and tax law violations against conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. The Democratic senators sent a letter to the Justice Department last week demanding action and detailing various gifts Thomas received from Republican billionaires that Thomas failed to disclose until after they were made public by ProPublica and other news outlets.
“The scale of the potential ethics violations by Justice Thomas, and the willful pattern of disregard for ethics laws, exceeds the conduct of other government officials investigated by the Department of Justice for similar violations,” the letter, dated July 3, reads. “The breadth of the omissions uncovered to date, and the serious possibility of additional tax fraud and false statement violations by Justice Thomas and his associates, warrant the appointment of a Special Counsel to investigate this misconduct.”
Whitehouse is the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Federal Courts, while Wyden is the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. Their letter argues that Thomas’s pattern of failing to disclose luxurious gifts from conservative billionaires is a violation of the Ethics in Government Act and raises concerns that neither Thomas nor his billionaire benefactors are in compliance with federal tax-reporting requirements.
The letter points to an investigation led by the Senate Finance Committee and Judiciary Subcommittee on Federal Courts into a loan given to Thomas by Anthony Welters to purchase a luxury motor coach. According to Whitehouse and Wyden’s letter, Thomas never repaid the principal on that loan and only paid interest until collections on the loan stopped in 2008. Welters told The New York Times in August 2023 that “the loan was satisfied” without detailing whether that meant it was paid in full or forgiven.
“The evidence assembled thus far plainly suggests that Justice Thomas has committed numerous willful violations of federal ethics and false-statement laws and raises significant questions about whether he and his wealthy benefactors have complied with their federal tax obligations,” the letter continues.
A ProPublica investigation in April 2023 revealed Thomas received luxury vacations from billionaire Republican donor Harlan Crow, which had not been disclosed by Thomas in accordance with mandatory financial disclosure rules. Soon after ProPublica’s April reveal, Thomas submitted amended disclosure forms to include the gifts from Crow exposed by ProPublica. In August 2023, ProPublica revealed even more undisclosed gifts—at least 38 vacations and 26 private jet flights given to Thomas from an array of right-wing billionaires—which ProPublica described as “certainly an undercount.” In September 2023, Thomas submitted more disclosure forms to acknowledge some gifts he received in 2022, which he used to explain failing to disclose gifts he received in previous years. According to NPR, the use of the 2022 form to justify previous lapses in disclosure suggested Thomas wouldn’t be retroactively submitting disclosures for the past 20 years of luxurious treatment from his billionaire friends. Last month, Thomas acknowledged that he should have reported luxury vacations, travel, and hotel stays paid for by Crow.
“Appointment of a Special Counsel would serve the public interest. The public must have confidence that the judiciary and the Department of Justice execute their responsibilities fairly, impartially, and without respect to political expedience or partisan interests,” Whitehouse and Wyden wrote in their letter requesting an investigation into Thomas’s lavish gifts, which they estimate to be “potentially worth millions of dollars.”
The request follows similar promises by congressional Democrats ahead of the Fourth of July holiday break to hit back at the Supreme Court’s conservative bloc. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently stated her intention to file unspecified articles of impeachment following the Supreme Court’s ruling that vastly expanded Trump’s presidential immunity.
