Lawyer Mark Paoletta believes the recent Fix the Court report about gifts Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas The documents reportedly obtained over the past several years are riddled with “errors and deception.”
Paoletta, who co-authored the book “Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words,” is a longtime friend of Thomas and worked on his confirmation in 1991. On Sunday, she wrote an article Wall Street Journal opinion piece The headline read, “The latest attack on Clarence Thomas is ‘resolved,’” which criticized recent claims about Justice Thomas.
“It’s late in the Supreme Court term, which means it’s hunting season for critics of the justices. As usual, Clarence Thomas is the prime target. Fix the Court, which describes itself as a nonpartisan advocate for ‘non-ideological’ reforms to make the judiciary ‘more open and more accountable’ — has released a chart claiming to show that Justice Thomas has received gifts and ‘potential gifts’ totaling nearly $4.2 million between 2004 and 2023,” Paoletta wrote in the Journal.
“According to the chart, the other 16 justices who served during that period received gifts totaling less than $600,000. This includes a mere $3,150 for Justice Anthony Kennedy, $55,014 for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and $15,500 for Justice Stephen Breyer,” Paoletta continued. “Can this be true? No. A review of Fix the Court’s claims reveals numerous errors and deceptions.”
An image of Justice Clarence Thomas and author/attorney Mark Paoletta. (Mark Paoletta)
Paoletta broke down a June 6 Fix the Court article into parts, detailing “gifts” Supreme Court justices have received over the years.
“It counts as ‘gifts’ Justice Thomas’s trips and vacations with friends that were not required to be disclosed. Fix the Court counts annual visits by Justice and Ginni Thomas to the summer home of their longtime friends Harlan and Kathy Crow as gifts valued at $280,950. But visits by any other Justice to the homes of close friends are not listed in its chart,” Paoletta wrote.
He added, “In 2011, 20 Democratic lawmakers filed an ethics complaint about Justice Thomas’s failure to disclose his trips with Crow.” “In response, the U.S. Judicial Conference, which regulates judges’ financial disclosures, concluded in 2012 that Justice Thomas did not need to report such trips and vacations.”
Paoletta also said the Fix the Court article used an “inconsistent standard for defining a gift” to inflate Justice Thomas’s figures.
“He traveled to Dallas to speak at a civil rights conference hosted by the American Enterprise Institute in 2022. Fix the Court counted plane travel provided by AEI trustee Mr. Crow as a gift valued at $68,333,” Paoletta wrote. “But the group did not count Justice Breyer’s more than 230 trips — 63 of them outside the U.S. — including 17 trips paid for by the Pritzker family’s Architecture Foundation to take Justice Breyer to London, Paris, Beijing, and Copenhagen.”
Paoletta wrote that Justice Kennedy frequently traveled to Europe to teach month-long summer seminars “but none of those trips are in the Fix the Court chart.”
Paoletta’s feud didn’t end there with Fix the Court, a “non-profit organization that advocates for non-ideological ‘reforms’ to make the federal courts, and primarily the U.S. Supreme Court, more open and more accountable to the American people,” according to its website.
“The group counts two high-school scholarships established by the Horatio Alger Association in the name of Justice Thomas’s son as a $35,000 gift to Justice Thomas, even though none of the money went to him or any member of his family. But it does not count as a gift the $1 million award given to Ginsburg in 2019 by the Berggruen Institute, which she distributed to her favorite charities,” Paoletta wrote.
Mark Paoletta, who co-authored “Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words,” is a longtime friend of Justice Thomas and worked on his permanent appointment in 1991. (Mark Paoletta)
He added, “It uses highly inflated values for ‘gifts’ given to Justice Thomas. Most shockingly, Fix the Court values a vacation taken by Justice Thomas and his wife with Croes to Indonesia in 2019 at $500,000 – which, again, was not even subject to disclosure as a gift.” “This estimate is based on the assumption that Justice Thomas may have chartered Mr. Croes’ yacht and plane for himself. In fact he was Croes’ guest, along with 14 other passengers, including my wife and I. Even under its own methodology, the group dishonestly inflated the value of this trip without taking the other passengers into account.”
Paoletta said that “consistent with its modus operandi, the group dishonestly inflated the price of this trip without taking into account other travellers.” He also said that Fix the Court also inflated the prices of tickets to sporting events.
“The Thomases attended a University of Nebraska football game with friends (my wife and I were also there) and sat in a suite where the ticket price, as confirmed by the university athletic office, was $65 — well below the reporting limit of $415. The group estimated the value of these tickets at $989,” Paoletta wrote.
He said, “Fix the Court alleged 101 ‘potential but unconfirmed gifts’ worth nearly $1.8 million to Justice Thomas during 2004-23, but identified no ‘potential gifts’ to any other justice.”
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is regularly criticized by ProPublica. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
Paoletta said much of the information used by Fix the Court “came from another Thomas adversary, ProPublica.” Paoletta has long criticized ProPublica’s coverage of Justice Thomas, and has described the nonprofit newsroom’s past reporting as “offensive”, “racist”, “absurd”, and “false”.
Fix the Court stood by its reporting when contacted for comment, but pointed out that the article Updated with the methodology, as the initial version was “a bit jargony”.
“Once again, Justice Thomas’s political and media allies have attacked our nonpartisan judicial transparency organization for reporting the indisputable facts about Thomas’ decades-long pattern of non-disclosure of reportable gifts,” said Gabe Roth, executive director of Fix the Court. Fox News Digital,
“Ever since ProPublica published its Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation last April, partisan activists have been using the Wall Street Journal’s opinion pages to defend this blatantly unethical and, in some cases, illegal conduct,” Roth added. “Fix the Court stands by its report, and we will not be deterred by ill-intentioned attempts to justify unethical behavior by public servants.”
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ProPublica also defended its reporting.
“ProPublica exposes abuses of power no matter which party is in power, and our newsroom operates with total independence. The fact that Clarence Thomas amended his previous filings is Formally disclose “The trips paid for by billionaire Harlan Crow speak for themselves,” a ProPublica spokesperson told Fox News Digital.
“We stand by our reporting about Thomas’s trip to the Bahamas,” the spokesperson said. “After our story was published in August 2023, we updated it to include new information: Paul ‘Tony’ Novelli’s attorney issued a statement to Congress denying the trip.”
