Cruises on a megayacht, private jet flights… The most conservative of the judges of the American Supreme Court, Clarence Thomas, has accepted for more than twenty years many luxury stays from a billionaire known for his donations to the party Republican, says a press survey published Thursday.
The reactions to what was considered to raise ethical questions were quick to multiply on the side of the Democrats, with an elected official calling for his immediate resignation.
The online investigative magazine ProPublica says it interviewed “dozens of people” and went through internal documents to prove that the magistrate had accepted these largesse from businessman Harlan Crow without declaring them.
“Amazing” revelations, estimated in a press release the association Fix The Court, which campaigns for a reform of the Supreme Court, temple of American law.
This confirms, according to her, the need for the establishment of stricter rules on the gifts received by its members.
The friendship between the judge, who has the most seniority in the Court, and the real estate mogul had already been the subject of an article in the New York Times in 2011, which described it as “unusual and ethically sensitive.
It is not the first time that Mr Thomas’ name has been linked to controversy: his wife Ginni, a lobbyist and activist, was involved in Donald Trump’s crusade to prove – wrongly – that the 2020 presidential election will had been stolen.
Once revealed the SMS and emails she sent for this purpose, the left had castigated an apparent conflict of interest and called on her husband to recuse himself from any electoral file.
Nominated by Republican President George HW Bush in 1991, he was confirmed despite accusations of sexual harassment by a former aide. He has always denied them, claiming to be the victim of a “high-tech lynching”.
In its investigation, ProPublica indicates that Clarence Thomas goes almost every summer to a property of the businessman in the Adirondacks, in the State of New York, and that he accompanied him to the “Bohemian Grove” in California, an all-male elite club.
“To preserve what remains of the people’s respect for the Supreme Court of the United States, Justice Thomas must immediately resign,” tweeted leftist lawmaker Hank Johnson.
For his part, the influential Democratic Senator Dick Durbin asserted that “the highest court in the land should not have the lowest ethical standards”.
The revelations “show, yet again, that Supreme Court justices must be held to a binding code of conduct, like all other federal judges,” he said. “The ProPublica article is a call to action, and the Senate Judiciary Committee will act.”
Statements by the magistrate in a documentary, in which he presented himself as a man of the people, resurfaced on Thursday.
“I have no problem with going to Europe, but I prefer the United States (…), I prefer to cross rural areas,” he said. “I prefer motorhomes. I prefer Walmart (supermarket) parking lots to beaches and things like that”.