It is called corruption. There is no reason for it. There is nothing to understand or explain. It is corrupt and needs to be taken seriously. Honest judges devoted to the USA Constitution don't do this. They are given life time appointments to avoid such corruption.
April 25, 2023
By David Sirota, Rebecca Burns, Andrew Perez, Julia Rock & Matthew Cunningham-Cook
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas (click here) voted to end federal tenant protections that his billionaire benefactor’s company says threatened its real estate profit margins, according to corporate documents reviewed by The Lever. Thomas did not disclose his relationship with real estate billionaire Harlan Crow, nor did he recuse himself from the 2021 case, despite its potential impact on Crow Holdings.
Now, rent control — which Crow Holdings’ documents also say threatens the company’s business — could come before Thomas, and there is no indication he would recuse himself if it does.
Recent reporting by ProPublica found that Thomas failed to disclose two decades’ worth of luxury gifts provided by Crow, as well as Crow’s purchase of properties owned by Thomas, in apparent violation of longstanding federal ethics rules....
The facts stand for themselves.
January 24, 2011
By Eric Lichtblau
Washington - Under pressure from liberal critics, (click here) Justice Clarence Thomas of the Supreme Court acknowledged in filings released on Monday that he erred by not disclosing his wife’s past employment as required by federal law.
Justice Thomas said that in his annual financial disclosure statements over the last six years, the employment of his wife, Virginia Thomas, was “inadvertently omitted due to a misunderstanding of the filing instructions.”
To rectify that situation, Justice Thomas filed seven pages of amended disclosures listing Mrs. Thomas’s employment in that time with the Heritage Foundation, a conservative policy group, and Hillsdale College in Michigan, for which she ran a constitutional law center in Washington.
The justice came under criticism last week from Common Cause, a liberal advocacy group, for failing to disclose Mrs. Thomas’s employment as required under the 1978 Ethics in Government Act. While justices are not required to say how much a spouse earns, Common Cause said its review of Internal Revenue Service filings showed that the Heritage Foundation paid Mrs. Thomas $686,589 from 2003 to 2007....
This is a chronic issue with Thomas over decades of time. It is not an "Ooops" or any other one time mistake. These are methods of his corruption.
April 13, 2023
By Justin Elliot, Joshua Kaplan and Alex Mierjeski
In 2014, one of Texas billionaire Harlan Crow’s companies purchased (click here) a string of properties on a quiet residential street in Savannah, Georgia. It wasn’t a marquee acquisition for the real estate magnate, just an old single-story home and two vacant lots down the road. What made it noteworthy were the people on the other side of the deal: Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his relatives.
The transaction marks the first known instance of money flowing from the Republican megadonor to the Supreme Court justice. The Crow company bought the properties for $133,363 from three co-owners — Thomas, his mother and the family of Thomas’ late brother, according to a state tax document and a deed dated Oct. 15, 2014, filed at the Chatham County courthouse.
The purchase put Crow in an unusual position: He now owned the house where the justice’s elderly mother was living. Soon after the sale was completed, contractors began work on tens of thousands of dollars of improvements on the two-bedroom, one-bathroom home, which looks out onto a patch of orange trees. The renovations included a carport, a repaired roof and a new fence and gates, according to city permit records and blueprints.
A federal disclosure law passed after Watergate requires justices and other officials to disclose the details of most real estate sales over $1,000. Thomas never disclosed his sale of the Savannah properties. That appears to be a violation of the law, four ethics law experts told ProPublica.
The disclosure form Thomas filed for that year also had a space to report the identity of the buyer in any private transaction, such as a real estate deal. That space is blank...
And then there is Ginni Thomas and unapologetic her participation and enthusiasm for January 6th. She refuses to believe in "The Rule of Law." Belief in the Rule of Law will vanquish her political ideology.
This is an ethics issue. It is one thing for the wife a Supreme Court Justice to be involved in politics. There is nothing wrong with that, but, to seek to legitimize an assault on the USA Capitol that killed police officers defending the USA Constitution while trying to do it all over again with Trump in 2024 is highly unethical in any book one looks. It may even be illegal.
By Nicholas Wu
...And now, (click here) in case you thought things could not get weirder, we have Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Yes, the staid and stuffy highest court in the land has produced a genuine scandal.
While her husband has been hearing appeals brought before the court by Trump’s lawyers seeking to block lawsuits and investigations into the events surrounding the attack on the United States Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, it turns out Ginni Thomas has been agitating to get Trump back into the White House and Joe Biden thrown out....
Virginia Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, (click here) told the Jan. 6 panel during lengthy testimony Thursday that she still believes false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from former President Donald Trump, according to the panel’s chair.
“The information was typical of a lot of information we received from other people who were involved in this effort around Jan. 6. A lot of: ‘Well, I believed something was wrong,’” select committee chair Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), told reporters Thursday of Thomas’ testimony. “She was one of those people we wanted to talk to and, ultimately, we eventually got there.”...
Who are these people the GOP put in office, anyway? Co-conspirators? If nothing else, these guys are receiving "kick backs." Seemingly unrelated issues are not unrelated at all and the black line on the disclosure form PROVES intent.
By Heidi Przybyla
Brian L. Duffy (click here) is the Chief Executive Officer at Greenberg Traurig, LLP. Previously, Brian served as a firm President and as Chair of the firm’s 600-member Global Litigation Department. A true “working CEO,” Brian focuses his practice on trial and appellate work in the class action, employment, energy, commercial contract, and product liability areas, serving as counsel in high-profile cases throughout the United States....
For nearly two years beginning in 2015, (click here) Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch sought a buyer for a 40-acre tract of property he co-owned in rural Granby, Colo.
Nine days after he was confirmed by the Senate for a lifetime appointment on the Supreme Court, the then-circuit court judge got one: The chief executive of Greenberg Traurig, one of the nation’s biggest law firms with a robust practice before the high court. Gorsuch owned the property with two other individuals.
On April 16 of 2017, Greenberg’s Brian Duffy put under contract the 3,000-square foot log home on the Colorado River and nestled in the mountains northwest of Denver, according to real estate records.
He and his wife closed on the house a month later, paying $1.825 million, according to a deed in the county’s record system. Gorsuch, who held a 20 percent stake, reported making between $250,001 and $500,000 from the sale on his federal disclosure forms.
Gorsuch did not disclose the identity of the purchaser. That box was left blank....
A lot of the dialogue of personal family trips and cozy relationships is all fine and good, then recuse and remove any trace of doubt to the decisions made by the remaining justices. But, alas, the remaining justices might evenly split and not go the way the Associate Justice would like it the outcome to go in favor of his cozy family friend. THIS IS CORRUTION! These are ethic violations. They ARE reason for actions against them.
Simply put. THIS IS A VIOLATION OF THE PUBLIC TRUST! It takes a lot of trust to appoint an American to the Supreme Court for an indefinite period of time which could be a lifetime. Americans have a right to peace of mind in the decisions being made at the highest court. This is not peace of mind. There is a huge absence of moral turpitude.
What was Gorsuch thinking, "But, the property was really difficult to unload. Making it look like it impedes my ability to conduct a fair hearing might mean I have to buy it back." That is not moral conduct.
Maybe they all need to be more like Late Associate Justice David Souter.
By Linda Greenhouse
AT HOME David Souter at his farmhouse in New Hampshire.
...None of this held any appeal for David Souter, (click here) who after returning home from his Rhodes scholarship at Magdalen College, Oxford, crossed the Atlantic only once again, for a reunion there. Who needed Paris if you had Boston, he would remark to friends. When the court is in recess, he gets in his Volkswagen and heads to Weare, N.H., to the small farmhouse that was home to his parents and grandparents.
This pattern gave rise to a widespread view of Justice Souter as a misfit or a loner, not quite in touch with modern life. But to focus on his eccentricities — his daily lunch of yogurt and an apple, core and all; the absence of a computer in his personal office — is to miss the essence of a man who in fact is perfectly suited to his job, just not to its trappings. His polite but persistent questioning of lawyers who appear before the court displays his meticulous preparation and his mastery of the case at hand and the cases relevant to it. Far from being out of touch with the modern world, he has simply refused to surrender to it control over aspects of his own life that give him deep contentment: hiking, sailing, time with old friends, reading history.
“History provides an antidote to cynicism about the past,” he said at a meeting in March of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, of which he is a fellow. His participation in a session on the importance of studying the humanities was a rare out-of-court public appearance and therefore attracted news coverage. The take-away quotation from the session was his remark that as each new Supreme Court term began, he prepared himself to undergo “sort of an annual intellectual lobotomy” — a remark that, out of context, seemed baffling and oddly alienated. What he meant was clear from the prepared portion of his talk: that the demands of the term tore him away from the serious reading he sees as essential to the job....
Remember him? He was always lauded as a GOP disappointment. Really?
I guess if a Republican can't win an election fairly, Souter might seem a disappointment.
February 14, 2022By Kyle Cheney and Nicholas Wu
A federal judge on Monday (click here) moved to speed up efforts to supply Jan. 6 investigators with a crucial set of emails from John Eastman, the attorney who helped develop then-President Donald Trump’s strategy to subvert the 2020 election.
U.S. District Court Judge David Carter, based in California, specifically ordered an expedited schedule to review efforts by Eastman to shield 568 pages of emails — all sent and received between Jan. 4 and Jan. 7, 2021 — from the Jan. 6 select committee....
...Eastman became a central player in developing Trump’s legal strategy to pressure Vice President Mike Pence to unilaterally overturn the 2020 election on Jan. 6, 2021. Pence, who presided over a joint session of Congress that day required to finalize Joe Biden’s victory, ultimately refused to go along, despite pressure from Trump and his allies. But his decision inflamed a pro-Trump mob that had encircled the Capitol and preceded a violent breach that threatened the transfer of power....
There is nothing wrong with a gathering of law clerks for the sake of fellowship, unless, it is to pollute the court with political conspiracy to change the government of the United States of America. Right, Ginny?
December 23, 2022
By Teagan Goddard
“In July 2021, dozens of former clerks of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas (click here) gathered for a reunion at the Greenbrier resort in West Virginia, a casual weekend of horseback riding and panel lectures with spouses and children,” the Washington Post reports.
“Photos from the event show beaming former clerks with Thomas and his wife, Virginia, who goes by Ginni. In one image posted to social media, she offers the camera two thumbs up. To her left, smiling in a maroon polo shirt, is John Eastman, the architect of the legal strategy that former president Donald Trump had used six months earlier to try to overturn his 2020 election loss…”
“The Supreme Court justice and the lawyer who worked to help Trump try to overturn the election have a remarkable relationship that dates back more than three decades and that began years before Eastman served as Thomas’s clerk and before Thomas joined the bench.”...
"The Power" of "the bench" is the third leg of American democracy. It seems a shame it is being used to subvert the democracy that created that power to protect citizens from corrupt power and oppressive government.
Eastman was after Pence. It is he, on Trump's behalf, that was attempting to influence Pence's role in the January 6th insurrection. These are not friendly conversations, they are conversations of sedition, sometimes in the name of a god.
The truth should not be so difficult to obtain and the intentions made obvious, except, the facts bear out a far different path then one of upholding the USA Constitution. There is a lot here with the Robert's Court in regard to "the appearance" of corruption and the facts. The facts have brevity, the inference that it only appears that way is smoke and mirrors. In all instances to obtain the truth, obstruction is the method most frequently used to hide from the American people. Why? There can be only one reason. The parties involved like money because of the power it supplies them for personal agendas. Neal Gorsuch's case is probably the most revealing to personal agendas and his willingness to be corrupt for the sake of money.
The Robert's Court has many problems and corruption is at the center of them. The Supreme Court is not suppose to be concerned with money, power and politics, it is supposed to uphold The Rule of Law. The Supreme Court is not supposed to violate the sensibilities of the American people with their personal agendas. It is called ethics. The Robert's Court cares little about the American people so much as their own agendas.
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