Clarence Thomas Is Winning His War on Transparency

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has spent two decades taking some very fancy vacations with the immensely rich conservative donor Harlan Crow, who also allows Thomas’s mother to live rent-free on property he bought for a very generous price from Thomas almost a decade ago. Those revelations arrived in reports from ProPublica, Slate, and CNN over the past two weeks. Other outlets had previously reported that Crow had given a great deal of cash to the political-advocacy organization run by Thomas’s wife, Virginia, who was last seen urging Republicans to overthrow the 2020 presidential election to keep Donald Trump in power.

There is no proof Thomas ever acted at Crow’s direction. The justice has publicly stated that the failure to comply with the law by disclosing, Thomas has argued over decades that laws compelling such disclosure are unconstitutional.