Did Clarence Thomas Do anything Wrong?
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@Axtremus said in Did Clarence Thomas Do anything Wrong?:
And then Mr. Crow spent ~USD$150K on renovations on the property where Judge Thomas' mother lived (and still lives), allegedly rent free.
Come on, this guy is smart. He had to know this was wrong, especially since he was already a Supreme Court judge at the time this all happened.
Up thread, someone said his wife was worth millions. Something smells fishy somehow.
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Apparently he should have disclosed the sale…
Other than that, without market values for the properties in 3014, the rest of the story is a bunch of sound and fury signifying nothing… A house and three lots sold for $150K in 2014? Sounds reasonable…
ProPublica should be able to at least provide the tax assessments for the property in 2014… The fact that they aren’t is telling.
As far as the mom living on the property, in 2005 my dad’s wife sold the building they lived in to a commercial real estate company. As part of the deal, she and my dad live in the apartment upstairs at no charge. And in fact, the commercial real estate has paid for tens of thousands of dollars of improvements… New staircase, windows, HVAC, etc…. That’s not unusual.
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Here's Glenn Loury's take. Something about how Obama and Thomas are really only considered differently, because of their politics, rather than the content of their character. I'm not expecting any of the indoctrinated white people on this forum to understand the truth of his observations, but it's your soul anyway. It's also your politics.
On a personal level, it’s clear what makes Barack Hussein Obama such a popular figure. He’s a smart, disciplined, high-achieving black family man who was elected president twice, breaking the race barrier for the highest office in the land. And yet, I have a harder time accounting for why the second most powerful black official in the history of the United States, Clarence Thomas, is accorded so much less esteem than Obama. Thomas’s life story is arguably more impressive and his ascent more unlikely than Obama’s. He’s served on the Supreme Court for decades, and his influence will be felt for generations in ways both overt and subtle.
In the following excerpt from our recent conversation, I ask John McWhorter and Ian Rowe why it is that Barack Obama remains so influential among black Americans while Clarence Thomas is treated almost like a cartoon villain. The answer is clearly their differing politics. But that only raises a knottier, more essential question: Why does Thomas’s conservatism nullify, in the eyes of so many African Americans, his astonishing accomplishments? Why is he treated—condescendingly, unfairly, wrongly—as a lapdog to white corporate and political interests, while Obama, who did little to mitigate the racial inequities he claimed to abhor, is lauded as the very embodiment of black uplift?
It needs to be said: If black Americans chose to treat Thomas’s view with the consideration and respect they’re due, they would be a lot better off. It is impossible now to deny Thomas’s influence on the Supreme Court. He will be remembered as one of the most historically significant SCOTUS justices of any race. His vision of American law and society is one that not only deserves a fair hearing in the court of public opinion, it is one that black America ignores at its own peril. Obama or Thomas. We’ve got to choose. We can see where Obama’s vision has gotten us. It is time, at long last, to take a different path.
GLENN LOURY: Okay you guys, we're getting to the end of the hour, and I have a paradox to pose to you. I'd like to hear your reaction to it. I'm being devilish here, so brace yourselves.
The two greatest black political figures of the last century are Barack Hussein Obama and Clarence Thomas. Obama was twice elected president of this great country with a majority of votes cast for him. Thomas is the senior member of the United States Supreme Court, who's been there for decades, served long, and had an enormous impact on American law. I could go into their biographies, but I don't think I'd need to say much more than that.
Obama's mother was white, his father an African immigrant, and he grew up in Hawaii and spent some time in Indonesia and made his way to the South Side of Chicago—where I'm from—eventually. But believe me, it took a long time for him to get there. Thomas is a son of the Geechee-speaking Sea Islands of Georgia, of African American heritage, as poor as you could possibly want to get, as alienated from the mainstream American society as anyone could be, and has made his way to the top of government. However, whereas Obama is lionized by every black leader that you could find who's willing to speak in public about this subject as a great historic figure, Thomas is vilified as despicable and beyond worthy of even being discussed by many of those very same people. How do you account for this paradox?
IAN ROWE: You know, there was a time when Barack Obama, prior to him running, if you listened to his speeches, he talked about the importance of marriage and fatherhood and responsibility and personal accountability. And I think, for a time, those two almost converge. I mean, he was still socialist anyway, but there was a point in which they were not so far from each other. And then he became president. And then he succumbed, in my view, to what is more politically expedient, and certainly in his post-presidency, he has not done the things that really could drive our country forward.
What explains it? Clarence Thomas has the courage to stand up for the convictions, the principles of this country. And unfortunately, those are under attack. They're under assault. There's no other way to put it. However, he's generally right. He's generally right about the things that advance the interests of black people and people of all races in our country. And so I think we're at this time of national reckoning. It's a time for choosing, not to steal Ronald Reagan's line, but it's a time for choosing. Are we gonna choose equality of opportunity as individuals? That's equality. Or are we gonna choose equity, the absence of disparities of outcomes between racial groups? They are two very different strategies, in many ways, I believe, embodied by Clarence Thomas and the Barack Obama of present day.
We gotta choose. And I'm putting my thumb on the lever of equality of opportunity for individuals. We gotta go down fighting for that, because we know at the end of the day, that's what's best for society at large and certainly for black people specifically.
JOHN MCWHORTER: Thomas has an optics problem. And I truly hate to say that it is partly his doing. There are people who would despise him regardless, but I think that he could push the needle if there were two things he had done or maybe would do now. His silence on the court means that you don't get a piece of him. You don't get a sense of what is behind his views. You just get the views on the record, which often can look rather heartless, especially if you're not familiar with looking at race issues from many angles. And let's face it, most people aren't.
Why would they be? Most of us aren't familiar with most things. But if you're used to looking at race in one way, then when you hear some of the decisions that he makes, you might think he's a terrible person, when he isn't. But you don't get in the news a regular series of quotations of things that he's asked and things that he's said. Where you would get an idea at least of where he was coming from, and you might be able to see that he's not crazy, he's not malevolent, he just sees things differently. That's partly his doing, and I don't believe that the reason he doesn't talk is because he's insecure about his Gullah Creole background. I think it's any number of other things, but that silence has been a problem.
And then another thing I say, and it's a genuine question. I don't know what it is. When he put out the autobiography some years ago, it was rather opaque. And not because of things that he couldn't have said. But for example, when he was describing how he came to be against affirmative action. Now that must be a very interesting story. He dispatched it all in a few pages and didn't really explain what his beef was when he was a young man, except for a few quick lines. Now, I don't know why. Maybe he's a rather private person. But it means that you could read that book, and what you come away with is learning that he had a difficult childhood, and he was very poor. But once he's at at Yale, you lose him. He's not willing to explain what his thought process was.
And next thing you know, he's married to Ginni Thomas and smoking cigars. It's him, in a way. He needs better PR, and I genuinely don't know why he has been that way. I don't know. But I think some of it is that he's a cipher, unless you know him personally. As opposed to Barack Obama, where there was just better PR. That's what I think.
Okay. Thanks. I put that challenge to you both, I think I should probably respond to it. And my thought is Barack Obama was and is a pragmatic progressive. He was the guy that was gonna complete the FDR-LBJ program with universal healthcare. He’s a man of the left, a community organizer, somebody who's fighting for progress, as understood by the left of the political spectrum—moderate left, pragmatic left.
Clarence Thomas is a principled conservative. He's not a legislator. He is not an executive. He's a judicial guy. But within that realm, he adheres to a philosophical doctrine that one identifies with what Republican presidents are looking for when they appoint people to the bench. From my point of view, the issue here is whether or not we African Americans are married to the left, whether or not, in the essence of our striving, we have to plant our flag in a politically ideological left-of-center position. I think the answer to that must be no. It must be no for patriotism. This is a great country. Let us not forget all the blessings that flow from the greatness of this republic. It matters in terms of traditional family values. There is no substitute for a mother and father raising their children. It matters in terms of opportunity. You've gotta make your wealth. It's not falling from the sky, and nobody's gonna give it to you
IAN ROWE: Unless you live in San Francisco.
You had better be able to produce something that the world wants. Otherwise, you're gonna be in the dust bin of history, period. Nobody's coming to save you. These fundamental principles of politics and of values and of economics should be what drives us in a calculation of our interest in the expression of our political ambition, not a slavish adherence to the platitudes that issue from a predictable left-of-center agitation. Unfortunately, we seem to be satisfied with the latter and not so sufficiently interested in the former. And I think that's what accounts for the difference in the reception of Barack Obama and Clarence Thomas.
Education is extremely important.
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@Horace said in Did Clarence Thomas Do anything Wrong?:
Something about how Obama and Thomas are really only considered differently, because of their politics, rather than the content of their character.
This thread is very much about the content of his character. And the reason some conservatives here are missing that point is because of his politics.
DON’T let them eat cake.
- RFK Jr -
@jon-nyc said in Did Clarence Thomas Do anything Wrong?:
@Horace said in Did Clarence Thomas Do anything Wrong?:
Something about how Obama and Thomas are really only considered differently, because of their politics, rather than the content of their character.
This thread is very much about the content of his character. And the reason some conservatives here are missing that point is because of his politics.
No I don’t agree. Your guy Obama lacked the courage to even support Biden. No you don’t get that.
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@Jolly said in Did Clarence Thomas Do anything Wrong?:
BTW, I told you Thomas would be Kavanaughed in an effort to make him retire or to buttress an argument for expanding SCOTUS.
This is not the last shot. There will be more.
I'm going to repeat this in an effort to make some of you think. Just sit back and watch what happens. Watch who reports what and how it is spun. Then ask yourself why? And why now? For what purpose?
Think on those questions and see what your conclusions are...
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To me, this just shows how judges and the judge branch are getting political. (And this is from both sides.)
I am willing to bet that if any of the Supreme Court Judges retire (not by death), it will be pretty easy to guess what will be the party of the President when they retire.
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@taiwan_girl said in Did Clarence Thomas Do anything Wrong?:
And this is from both sides.
No way.
Unless you believe that defending the constitution is political.
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@Copper said in Did Clarence Thomas Do anything Wrong?:
@taiwan_girl said in Did Clarence Thomas Do anything Wrong?:
And this is from both sides.
No way.
Unless you believe that defending the constitution is political.
Are you willing to take my bet? LOL
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@taiwan_girl said in Did Clarence Thomas Do anything Wrong?:
@Copper said in Did Clarence Thomas Do anything Wrong?:
@taiwan_girl said in Did Clarence Thomas Do anything Wrong?:
And this is from both sides.
No way.
Unless you believe that defending the constitution is political.
Are you willing to take my bet? LOL
Do you know what Copper is talking about?
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I ran a Zillow search on lots available for sale in Savannah. There was 1 available for $20K, and two between $45K-$60K. The other 60 or so were well over $100K.
It actually sounds like Mr. Thomas may have sold the properties to Mr. Crow at a discount.
Me/rry/Christmas
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@LuFins-Dad , did you trace back to compare price estimates using data around the time of the sales? Are the properties comparable?
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@Axtremus said in Did Clarence Thomas Do anything Wrong?:
@LuFins-Dad , did you trace back to compare price estimates using data around the time of the sales? Are the properties comparable?
Nope and no way of knowing. But a group of properties valued at $40K in 1984 being worth $150K in 2014? That’s easily believed. Especially in a neighborhood that was being redeveloped. The company had already bought other properties in the neighborhood before, and sold most of the properties to another developer a little later. The selling price then would be handy to know, too… But they didn’t care to dig that far… I wonder why.
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And the beat goes on.
"Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas reported receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars of rental income from a real estate company since it dissolved more than a decade ago in 2006, according to The Washington Post.
The firm, Ginger Limited Partnership, was created in 1982 by his wife Ginni Thomas and her relatives, WaPo reported. Ginni, her parents, and her three siblings were partners at the firm, according to the report.
The company dissolved in 2006, and state records show a new firm was created the same year under a similar name, Ginger Holdings, LLC. But since then, Thomas reported receiving a total of $270,000 to $750,000 from the defunct firm, records reviewed by WaPo showed. The exact amounts are unknown because the disclosure forms only ask for a range to be reported."
I believe that this one is a whole lot of "nothing". I am guessing that the name of the company changed and he did not change it on his reporting forms.
BUT, Judge Thomas is one of the top judges in the US........... Is ignorance an excuse?
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@taiwan_girl said in Did Clarence Thomas Do anything Wrong?:
And the beat goes on.
"Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas reported receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars of rental income from a real estate company since it dissolved more than a decade ago in 2006, according to The Washington Post.
The firm, Ginger Limited Partnership, was created in 1982 by his wife Ginni Thomas and her relatives, WaPo reported. Ginni, her parents, and her three siblings were partners at the firm, according to the report.
The company dissolved in 2006, and state records show a new firm was created the same year under a similar name, Ginger Holdings, LLC. But since then, Thomas reported receiving a total of $270,000 to $750,000 from the defunct firm, records reviewed by WaPo showed. The exact amounts are unknown because the disclosure forms only ask for a range to be reported."
I believe that this one is a whole lot of "nothing". I am guessing that the name of the company changed and he did not change it on his reporting forms.
BUT, Judge Thomas is one of the top judges in the US........... Is ignorance an excuse?
Okay, I foretold this one. There will be more. Red pseudomeat for the gullible, the fools and the masses.
Enjoy being manipulated?
Got the next step figured out, yet?
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The Truth About Clarence Thomas’s Disclosures
He reported carefully on his inherited real estate. ProPublica’s reporting was slipshod and incurious.
Clarence Thomas lost his beloved maternal grandparents barely a month apart in the spring of 1983. Myers Anderson, whom his grandson knew as “Daddy,” died of a stroke on March 30. Christine Anderson, known as “Aunt Tina,” suffered a stroke as well and died on May 1. “Perhaps, I thought, she’d lost the will to live,” Justice Thomas writes in his 2007 memoir, “My Grandfather’s Son.”
The Andersons, who were 75 and 70 respectively, are buried at Palmyra Baptist Church in Liberty County, Ga. When they died, Mr. Thomas was 34 and chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. “Losing Aunt Tina a month after Daddy was more painful than I could ever have imagined,” he writes. “How could I have let myself grow away from her, or from the man who . . . was the only real father I’d ever had?”
Mr. Thomas inherited a one-third interest in a few modest houses Myers Anderson owned. Forty years later, ProPublica has taken a different kind of interest in those properties. ProPublica describes itself as “an independent, nonprofit newsroom that produces investigative journalism with moral force.” It promises “deep-dive reporting” dedicated to “exposing corruption, informing the public about complex issues, and using the power of investigative journalism to spur reform.”
Give ProPublica credit for admitting its journalism has an agenda. So does mine, as the word “opinion” atop this page should make clear. But ProPublica’s acknowledgment that it’s in the opinion business doesn’t excuse it from the obligation to report facts accurately, carefully and thoroughly.
ProPublica has at least three reporters working the Clarence Thomas beat—Justin Elliott, Joshua Kaplan and Alex Mierjeski. Their story, published last Thursday, is titled “Billionaire Harlan Crow Bought Property From Clarence Thomas. The Justice Didn’t Disclose the Deal.” The troika write that the lack of disclosure “appears to be a violation of the law, four ethics law experts told ProPublica.” That statement is equivocal because it’s a legal theory based on incomplete facts. Justice Thomas didn’t respond to ProPublica’s questions or to mine.
Some facts are known and undisputed. Mr. Crow, a Dallas developer and friend of the justice, confirmed in a written statement to ProPublica that Savannah Historic Development LLC, a company he established, bought “the childhood home of Justice Thomas,” which Mr. Crow plans to convert into a museum “telling the story of our nation’s second black Supreme Court Justice.” Public documents show that the company paid Anderson’s heirs a total of $133,363 for the Savannah house and two adjacent empty lots. According to ProPublica, Justice Thomas’s mother, 94-year-old Leola Williams, lived in the house at least until 2020 and possibly still does.
Assuming Justice Thomas received one-third of the sale price (or any amount more than $1,000), the text of the federal financial-disclosure statute would require him to have reported the transaction in Part VII (“Investments and Trusts”) of his annual AO-10 form for 2014. He didn’t do so and may need to file an amended form.
But my review of Justice Thomas’s disclosures and other documents convinces me that any failure to disclose was an honest mistake. On all other matters involving his scanty real-estate inheritance, he followed the Filing Instructions for Judicial Officers and Employees, prepared by the Committee on Financial Disclosures of the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts. Those instructions don’t make clear the statutory obligation to disclose the 2014 transaction.
Further, the ProPublica troika made a sloppy reporting error, the effect of which is to cast Justice Thomas’s disclosures in a falsely unfavorable light—to make them look shambolic or perhaps even dishonest when in fact they followed the filing instructions without fail.
The reporters’ error involves a confusion about what Justice Thomas did disclose. “By the early 2000s,” ProPublica reports, “he had stopped listing specific addresses of property he owned in his disclosures. But he continued to report holding a one-third interest in what he described as ‘rental property at ## 1, 2, & 3’ in Savannah.” It’s worth noting—ProPublica doesn’t—that the filing instructions (on page 32) prescribe disclosing rental properties in precisely this manner.
The story continues: “Two of the houses were torn down around 2010, according to property records and a footnote in Thomas’ annual disclosure archived by Free Law Project.” That footnote in Justice Thomas’s 2010 disclosure states in full: “Part VII, Line 2 - Two of the Georgia rental properties have been torn down. The only remaining property is an old house in Liberty County.”
Liberty County is where our journey began, but the ProPublica troika somehow missed it on the map. Their story leads the reader to think that the “remaining property” was the Savannah house where Justice Thomas’s mother lived. A Friday letter from the Center for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington—co-signed by Virginia Canter, the first of ProPublica’s “four ethics experts”—expressly says so and accuses Justice Thomas of deceptively disclosing (rather than failing to disclose) the property’s disposition.
The footnote makes clear that this is wrong. There’s a fourth property. Justice Thomas’s 2009 disclosure listed three rental properties in “Sav., GA.” Beginning in 2010, he listed only one, in “Liberty Cty, GA.” Savannah is in Chatham County, not Liberty. But Liberty County is in the Savannah area, roughly a 45-minute drive from the city. For someone living hundreds of miles away, it would have been reasonable to describe the three rental properties collectively as being “in Savannah.”
That implies that Justice Thomas never disclosed his interest in the Savannah house where his mother lived. But he didn’t need to. “Information pertaining to a personal residence is exempted from reporting, unless the property generates rental income,” the filing instructions say on page 33. Nor was there any requirement to disclose the ownership of the other two Savannah properties after the houses were demolished. Who wants to rent an empty lot in Savannah?
When an asset isn’t sold but stops being reportable—in this case because it is no longer capable of generating rental income—page 50 of the filing instructions directs the filer to “insert ‘(Y)’ after the asset description in Column A and leave Columns B-D blank, or include an explanatory note in Part VIII.” Justice Thomas did exactly that for the Savannah rental properties in 2010, and for the Liberty County property in 2015. The latter footnote reads simply: “Line 1: The asset listed on line 1 does not receive any rental income for this property.” This is the disclosure Ms. Canter and her co-signers mistake for a deception.
When my mother died in 2019, I inherited a one-third interest in her house, which I sold to my brother. I understand the statute to mean that if I had been a federal judge, I would be obligated to disclose that transaction. But if I hadn’t been made aware of the statute, it wouldn’t have occurred to me to think of my inheritance as an “investment,” and I searched the filing instructions in vain for language that makes plain a judge’s duty to disclose this sort of transaction.
In Justice Thomas’s circumstances, moreover, the instructions seem to say not to report the sale of the former rental properties. The above-quoted “insert ‘(Y)’ ” language on page 50 is followed immediately by this sentence: “In subsequent years, this asset should be deleted from Part VII.”
One may be tempted to think that of all people a judge should know what the law says. But that’s a nonsensical standard. A judge’s job isn’t to memorize statute books; it’s to discern laws’ meaning and their application to the facts in cases that litigants bring before him. Inasmuch as the law applies to the judge’s personal affairs and interests, he’s in the same boat with the rest of us—often dependent on lawyers or other specialists, such as the Committee on Financial Disclosures of the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, to make sense of his duties and rights.
The job of a journalist is similar in some ways to that of a judge. Both involve asking questions, testing arguments, and judiciously ascertaining facts and their significance. ProPublica failed to consider some obvious questions: Where is Liberty County? What is Justice Thomas’s connection to the place? If the remaining rental property was the house Mr. Crow’s company bought, what was it doing on Justice Thomas’s AO-10 for 2015, the year after the sale closed?
Journalists don’t memorize books either. I read “My Grandfather’s Son” when it came out in 2007, but as I researched this article I had to return to it and refresh my memory. “Daddy’s people worked on a three-thousand-acre rice plantation in Liberty County,” Justice Thomas writes, “and after their manumission they stayed nearby. The maternal side of my mother’s family also came from Liberty County, and probably worked on the same plantation.”
Daddy grew up on a family plot known as “the farm,” which “had been passed down undivided from generation to generation, as was often customary with land owned by southern blacks. Any family member was entitled to live there.” The fields were fallow by Christmas 1957, when Clarence was 9 and Daddy decided to build a house there. He enlisted the help of Clarence and his brother, Myers Thomas, and “by springtime we’d finished building a simple four-room house,” writes Justice Thomas, who spent his summers there until he left for college in 1967.
When Aunt Tina died in May 1983, “no sooner did Myers and I go home to the farm after the funeral than some of our relatives started fighting over the contents of the house, declaring that Aunt Tina would have wanted them to have this item or that,” Justice Thomas recounts. “Part of me was disgusted by their greed, but I couldn’t bring myself to care. Death had already stolen the only things in the house that mattered to me.”
Justice Thomas disclosed all this in a book that’s available on Kindle for $13.99. If you’re a journalist whose job is to investigate him, you probably ought to read it—especially if you aspire to produce work “with moral force.”
"Now look here, you Baltic gas passer... " - Mik, 6/14/08
The saying, "Lite is just one damn thing after another," is a gross understatement. The damn things overlap.
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@George-K said in Did Clarence Thomas Do anything Wrong?:
Assuming Justice Thomas received one-third of the sale price (or any amount more than $1,000), the text of the federal financial-disclosure statute would require him to have reported the transaction in Part VII (“Investments and Trusts”) of his annual AO-10 form for 2014. He didn’t do so and may need to file an amended form.
But my review of Justice Thomas’s disclosures and other documents convinces me that any failure to disclose was an honest mistake.Okay, an honest mistake, and it probably is.
However, If I was audit by the IRS, is telling them it was an "honest mistake" a good defense?
For someone in his position, and if he has as much money (or his wife has as much as said), he should have personnel that are checking this. And then he should have a second set which double checks it.
I have been involved in preparing contracts/white papers, etc. Each of them go through multiple people checking them. Is everything 100% okay by all parties? And then it will get a final review by the Ministry of Law.
He is one of the top judges in the US. All about appearances.
