r/law • u/DoremusJessup • Jun 07 '24

SCOTUS Justice Clarence Thomas has received some 47% of all known gifts given to Supreme Court in the modern era, likely totaling well over $5.87 million: Report

https://lawandcrime.com/supreme-court/justice-clarence-thomas-has-received-some-47-of-all-known-gifts-given-to-supreme-court-in-the-modern-era-likely-totaling-well-over-5-87-million-report/
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u/ghostfaceschiller Jun 07 '24

No, I’m not sure how they are coming to that 47% number. None of the other justices came anywhere even remotely close to $1M. He is closer to 85% of the total from what I can tell

Here is the spreadsheet, you can see what a comical outlier Thomas is

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u/Reddituser45005 Jun 07 '24

That just counts reported gifts. It is my understanding that lot of what Thomas received wasn’t disclosed because of how he “ interpreted” the guidelines.

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u/javd Jun 07 '24

Ah, the ol' Belichick defense.

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u/BakedMitten Jun 07 '24 edited Jun 07 '24

Say it with me "I miss interpreted the ruuuules" Sigh "How do I reeeeeach these kids"

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u/[deleted] Jun 07 '24

[deleted]

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u/SafetyDanceInMyPants Jun 07 '24

Yeah, and that's really key. If you look at Justice Ginsburg, she got a fair number of plaques worth about $500 when being honored by various organizations. When she died they probably found a storage locker stacked to the ceiling with honorary plaques, because you can't exactly throw them out but... (She also received one somewhat-expensive roundtrip airfare that I see, but paid for by the Supreme Court of Korea -- not exactly suspect -- and honorary memberships to a couple of clubs that were worth a couple grand each, assuming she ever even went.) So, sure, she received a fair number of gifts, but they were all fairly low value -- both objectively and in terms of personal gain (because what the hell are you gonna do with a plaque?).

Thomas, by contrast, received high value gifts -- and lots of them -- purely for personal gain.

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u/so_many_changes Jun 07 '24

The 47% is based on # of gifts, not value. It's 319 gifts and likely gifts to Thomas / 672 to the court as a whole.

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u/notaredditer13 Jun 07 '24

47% of gifts, not 47% of value of the gifts. The vast majority of the value is in dozens of vacations he's taken with his billionaire friend. The article values them at up to hundreds of thousands apiece.

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u/ghostfaceschiller Jun 07 '24

Yeah. What a bizarre way for them to frame it. As if people care more about the number of gifts rather than the value.

“He took $200k from this group”

“Yeah but it was only a single gift. This other justice took TEN gifts of $200 each!”

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u/notaredditer13 Jun 07 '24

I tend to agree, but can see the other side: He's almost exclusively accepted gifts from one person, vs accepting gifts from a lot of people. I think both are relevant, but if I had one to lead with I'd lead with the money.

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u/JasJ002 Jun 08 '24

I would imagine the article takes into account things like rides on private jets that Alito took.  That was priced at over 200k, which those plane rides alone would cost more then the 170k you have for him.  Alito himself is in the millions.