If Clarence Thomas thought that promising to do better with disclosing whenever a billionaire pal/GOP mega-donor wines and dines him with private jet rides and superyacht vacations would quell the calls for his impeachment… oops!
Less than a month after ProPublica published an explosive report about the millions of dollars of “hospitality” that has been lavished on the Supreme Court Justice and his kooky, QAnon-believin’ wife Ginny by their close friends Harlan and Kathy Crow, the Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalism website has struck again. On Tuesday, they reported that the Crows’ kindness toward Thomas also extended to the judge’s grandnephew.
In 2008, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas decided to send his teenage grandnephew to Hidden Lake Academy, a private boarding school in the foothills of northern Georgia. The boy, Mark Martin, was far from home. For the previous decade, he had lived with the justice and his wife in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. Thomas had taken legal custody of Martin when he was 6 years old and had recently told an interviewer he was “raising him as a son.”
While that was 15 years ago, recently discovered documents reveal that Martin’s whopping tuition bill, which cost more than $6,000 per month, was paid for not by Thomas, but by the company owned by Harlan Crow… which seems hella shady.
While the recently uncovered bank statement that revealed this bombshell was for one month only in 2009, Christopher Grimwood — a former administrator at the chic school — confirmed to ProPublica that it was Crow, not Thomas, who paid Martin’s tuition throughout his entire time at the school.
“Harlan picked up the tab,” said Grimwood, who knew both the Thomases and Crow, and further claimed that it was Crow who paid Martin’s tuition at Randolph-Macon Academy, another boarding school, which the teen attended both prior to and after his time at Hidden Lake Academy.
Thomas did not include Crow’s tuition payments as part of his annual financial disclosure, and even Martin — who is now in his 30s — was unaware that it was Crow who was footing his educational bills. Though he doesn’t see anything nefarious in it.
“I think his intentions behind everything is just a friend and just a good person,” Martin told ProPublica of Crow, who we now know has a massive collection of Hitler/Nazi memorabilia.
Mark Paoletta, a longtime friend of the Thomases who occasionally acts as Ginni’s lawyer, released a statement following the publication of ProPublica’s story, in which he claimed that “Harlan Crow’s tuition payments made directly to these schools on behalf of Justice Thomas’s great nephew did not constitute a reportable gift” because Martin was Thomas’ grandnephew and not the legal definition of a dependent child.
“Justice Thomas never asked Harlan Crow to pay for his great nephew’s tuition. And neither Harlan Crow, nor his company, had any business before the Supreme Court,” Paoletta added. Before ending with:
This malicious story shows nothing except for the fact that the Thomases and the Crows are kind, generous, and loving people who tried to help this young man.
Generous? That’s one word to describe the Crows’ frequent tendency to pay a Supreme Court Justice’s bills. Here’s hoping Charles Barkley makes more jokes about this shady mess.
(Via ProPublica)