Clarence Thomas reported income from a real estate firm which closed in 2006

Two weeks ago, ProPublica dropped a big bombshell about Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. No, it wasn’t that his insurrectionist wife did more acts of treason, although I’m sure she did. ProPublica did a deep dive into Justice Thomas’s finances and travel, and found that he received millions of dollars of free travel, luxury vacations and gifts from a wacky GOP billionaire, and Thomas didn’t disclose any of it, which is a violation of many federal ethics/disclosure laws. There was a tragic-yet-hilarious addendum to that story, which was that that GOP donor, Harlan Crow, collects Nazi and Confederate memorabilia, and every conservative commentator tripped over themselves to argue that collecting that sh-t is perfectly normal and it doesn’t make Crow a Nazi, a racist or a Confederate loser. Well, there’s even more to the larger story about Clarence Thomas’s funky financials – he’s been disclosing hundreds of thousands of dollars in profits from a real estate firm which closed down in 2006.

Over the last two decades, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has reported on required financial disclosure forms that his family received rental income totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars from a firm called Ginger, Ltd., Partnership. But that company — a Nebraska real estate firm launched in the 1980s by his wife and her relatives — has not existed since 2006.

That year, the family real estate company was shut down and a separate firm was created, state incorporation records show. The similarly named firm assumed control of the shuttered company’s land leasing business, according to property records. Since that time, however, Thomas has continued to report income from the defunct company — between $50,000 and $100,000 annually in recent years — and there is no mention of the newer firm, Ginger Holdings, LLC, on the forms.

The previously unreported misstatement might be dismissed as a paperwork error. But it is among a series of errors and omissions that Thomas has made on required annual financial disclosure forms over the past several decades, a review of those records shows. Together, they have raised questions about how seriously Thomas views his responsibility to accurately report details about his finances to the public.

A judicial ethics expert said the pattern was troubling. “Any presumption in favor of Thomas’s integrity and commitment to comply with the law is gone. His assurances and promises cannot be trusted. Is there more? What’s the whole story? The nation needs to know,” said Stephen Gillers, a legal ethics expert at New York University.

Gillers said all three branches of government should investigate Thomas’s compliance or noncompliance with federal ethics law. “The Supreme Court has been the glue that has held the republic together since 1790 with the Civil War the only interruption. We need the public to respect it even when it disagrees with it and to understand why it is important. Generally, the public has,” he said. “But that respect is now in serious jeopardy, and others must do something to stop the free fall.”

[From WaPo]

Granted, I believed that Justice Thomas should have been impeached or whatever they call it, thrown off the bench, when the Harlan Crow story came out. But as more of these stories come out, it’s something else entirely – there needs to be a real investigation into this grifter, because it sounds like no one has double-checked his financial disclosures in decades. How does this even happen, that no one checked before now? Obviously, after the investigation, Thomas needs to be thrown off the court. Every Democratic operative saying stuff like “if this was Kagan or Sotomayor, Republicans would have already thrown her off the court” is absolutely correct.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Backgrid, Cover Images.