Clarence Thomas faces new impeachment calls over luxury trip gifts from GOP megadonor

Members of Congress are demanding investigations into long-running allegations of corruption surrounding US Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who is once again the subject of intense scrutiny after a bombshell investigation found him accepting luxury vacations from a Republican megadonor for more than 20 years.

Justice Thomas accepted trips to Indonesia and New Zealand on board Harlan Crow’s superyacht, regularly flies on his private jet and joins annual summer trips to the Texas developer’s Adirondacks resort – trips that would otherwise cost tens of thousands of dollars but do not appear anywhere on his financial disclosures, according to documents and interviews in a sweeping investigation from ProPublica.

Ethics law experts believe the absence of such trips from those disclosure forms likely violate a law that requires justices to disclose most of the gifts they receive.

“This is beyond party or partisanship. This degree of corruption is shocking – almost cartoonish. Thomas must be impeached,” said Democratic US Rep Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

She said that the legacy of the Supreme Court under chief Justice John Roberts will include “rank corruption, erosion of democracy, and the stripping of human rights.”

“This cries out for the kind of independent investigation that the Supreme Court – and only the Supreme Court, across the entire government – refuses to perform,” said Democratic US Senator Sheldon Whitehouse.

“Why did Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas keep these ultra luxury gifts from a GOP donor secret? Because Justice Thomas knew it was wrong to accept these secret gifts,” said Democratic US Rep Ted Lieu, who has called on Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and House ethics committee chair Jim Jordan to pass legislation that would mandate a code of conduct on the nation’s high court.

A statement from Mr Crow did not deny that he extended “hospitality” to Justice Thomas and his wife Virginia “Ginni” Thomas “over the years” after becoming friends in 1996, but he said the time they spent together was “no different from the hospitality we have extended to our many other dear friends.”

In 2019, after voting in cases involving extreme partisan gerrymandering, racial discrimination on jury panels and the separation of church and state, Justice Thomas boarded Mr Crow’s private jet bound for Indonesia, a trip that could have exceeded $500,000, according to ProPublica.

During one trip to Mr Crow’s lakeside compound in the Adirondacks in 2017, the justice was joined by executives from Verizon, PricewaterhouseCoopers, major GOP donors and one of the leaders of the right-wing thinktank American Enterprise Institute, according to records reviewed by ProPublica.

A painting that hangs in the property shows Justice Thomas in a group with Leonard Leo, the right-wing legal activist and former Federalist Society vice president regarded as the architect of a movement that has radically reshaped the federal judiciary and Supreme Court.

Mr Crow has donated more than $10m to Republican causes and groups that have advanced right-wing legal theories, including the Federalist Society, according to publicly disclosed political contributions.

This is a developing story