(USNewsBreak.com) – ProPublica published an exposé on Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas in April 2023. It detailed the luxury vacations and gifts he received from a billionaire Republican donor but failed to disclose. That revelation raised several questions about whether the Supreme Court should have an enforceable ethics code. Now, a watchdog group has parsed the data to determine how much each justice has received in gifts, and Thomas exceeds the others by far.
Following ProPublica’s bombshell, Fix the Court took it upon itself to compile the data of all the gifts the Justices have received over the last 20-plus years. In total, the Justices received nearly $5 million in gifts. Justice Thomas, by far, remained the largest recipient, with $4.042 million. The watchdog group also compiled a list of “likely gifts” totaling more than $1.8 million, bringing the overall likely total to $6,592,657 for all the High Court Justices.
Clarence Thomas Has Raked in Millions in Gifts Over the Past Two Decades, Watchdog Group Says https://t.co/EApF6lCTE6
— Mediaite (@Mediaite) June 6, 2024
The second-largest recipient, former Justice Antonin Scalia, only received $175,861, according to Fix the Court. Then, Justice Samuel Alito and former Justices John Paul Stevens and Ruth Bader Ginsburg rounded out the top five with $170,095, $79,059, and $55,014, respectively. Fix the Court detailed how it came to the totals in a June 6 report. It also noted the threshold of the gifts and the limit after which Justices had to disclose them every year, dating back to 1981. The Justices must report anything over the limit of $480 from 2023 to 2025.
Fix the Court’s disclosure could bring down more heat on Thomas. Over the past year, he has received nearly constant criticism regarding his decision to accept gifts and withhold his declarations.
He only recently acknowledged in a filing that he should have disclosed two prior trips — expensive stays in Indonesia and northern California — but “inadvertently omitted” them. Thomas has also amended prior filings in the past in response to controversial revelations and nearly always says they were misunderstandings or unintentional errors.
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