Harlan Crow, this wealthy Republican donor is making a series of tuition payments for
Thomas's grandnephew, who Thomas was raising as a son.
We don't know the exact dollar amount, but according to ProPublica,
it could have been to the tune of $150,000.
>> $150,000 from a Republican mega donor to Justice Clarence Thomas so
he can send his grandnephew to two different private schools.
Now, again, we don't know the exact dollar amount, but before I give
you the details of this incredible story, again, broken by ProPublica.
I do wanna remind you that Harlan Crow,
that Republican mega donor, the billionaire,
had been spending a lot more money in helping the Thomas's jet set, okay?
Half a million dollars a year just on one vacation that
the Supreme Court Justice's family would go on with Harlan Crow and his family.
So the $150,000 sounds like a lot, but in the grand scheme of things,
that's actually a drop in the bucket considering how much money this guy had
funneled to the Thomas's.
With that said, let's get to the details of the private school situation.
So in the video that you just watched, there was reference of
Justice Clarence Thomas bringing his grandnephew in as one of his own,
taking care of him as if it's his own child.
So his grandnephew is Mark Martin, and unfortunately,
his father was in prison for a drug related case.
And so since Clarence Thomas also had some difficulty in his childhood,
he brings on his grandnephew and wants to give him a good life.
So that was a kind thing to do, a good thing to do.
>> Yeah.
>> Thomas gained legal custody of Martin and
became his legal guardian around January of 1998.
According to court records,
Martin who had been living in Georgia with his mother and siblings,
moved to Virginia, where he lived with the justice from the ages of six to 19.
So that was basically his formative years,
he's being taken care of by Clarence Thomas and his wife.
Now, by 2001, Clarence Thomas was disillusioned,
unhappy with the public school system in the area.
And at that point, he decided we need to put my grandnephew into private schools.
So this is where the story gets good.
Martin spent his junior year of high school at Hidden Lake Academy,
a therapeutic boarding school in Georgia.
Hidden Lake boasted one teacher for every ten students and
activities ranging from horseback riding to canoeing.
Those services came at an added cost.
At the time, a year of tuition was roughly, I can't even believe it,
$73,000 plus fees back then.
This is in the early 2000s.
>> Remember, he's a tiny little kid.
This isn't college, this isn't graduate school,
73,000 back then is probably over 100,000 now, every year.
That's an astounding amount of money.
And look, I've never been privy to schools like this.
>> Nor have I.
>> And the name is so appropriate, Hidden Lakes.
I guess, this is where the super-duper rich send their kids.
And guys, this isn't like, well, this tangential to 2001,
Clarence Thomas because it's like a great grandnephew or something.
No, legal guardian of the kid since he was six years old, and
proudly says that he raised him as a son, and I believe it.
And by the way, again, to Annab's point, he should get a lot of credit for
raising the kid.
That's a wonderful thing to do.
But when you're using a donor's money to send him to the most exclusive
schools in the world, and at a bare minimum,
even Harlan Crow admits they've spent at least $100,000 on these schools.
I know you've got a lot more, but I actually wanna read your graphic nine,
because that's Harlan Crow's statement about this.
And I found this to be the most comical of all of the things.
And honestly, insulting because he's co-opting certain rhetoric to provide
cover for the very obvious corruption and conflicts of interest here.
Yeah, so here's how the Harlan Crow's office responded to ProPublica's piece.
Harlan Crow has long been passionate about the importance of quality education and
giving back to those less fortunate -.
>> Than pay your taxes.
>> Especially, at risk youth.
It's disappointing that those with partisan political interests would try to
turn helping an at risk youth with tuition assistance into something nefarious or
political.
Wait a minute.
He's living with a Supreme Court justice, what part of that is at risk?
>> Insane.
>> No, but was Clarence Thomas gonna do something to him, or
Jenny Thomas, or their incredibly rich neighbors?
I mean, he's basically calling him an at risk youth because he's black.
>> That's exactly right.
That is exactly what he's doing.
>> And by the way, Harlan Crow and Clarence Thomas are against exactly
this type of help for actual at risk students.
>> No, but, guys, that's in my opinion, the most important point to make here.
I mean, in their minds,
at risk youth are at risk simply because their parents have failed them.
And to be sure, in a lot of cases, that is part of it.
However, at risk youth are also at risk because of
the lack of opportunities they have.
And the lack of opportunities begin in the public education system
that has been intentionally gutted by Republicans who do not want
to pay taxes that adequately fund these public institutions.
So with that said, let's get to actual numbers here.
Because as I mentioned,
Martin only spent junior year of high school at Hidden Lake, okay?
The rest of the time, he was at a different private school.
And we should get into the numbers in regard to how much Harlan Crow had
funneled to Justice Thomas so he can pay for this tuition.
Crow Holdings LLC wired $6,200 to the school,
Hidden Lakes in July of 2009, the exact cost of the month's tuition.
Imagine spending $6,200 a month on high school tuition.
Anyway, the wire is marked Mark Martin in the ledger,
the administrator at Hidden Lake told ProPublica that Crow wired
the school money once a month to pay Martin's tuition fees.
Okay, so that went on for a year.
But what about the rest of his high school experience?
Where did he go?
Well, we've got some details on that.
For the rest of high school, Thomas sent Martin to Randolph Macon Academy,
which is a military boarding school 75 miles west of Washington,
DC where he was in the class of 2010.
The school, which sits on a 135 acre campus,
charged between $25,000 and $30,000 a year,
which is, I guess, a bargain compared to the other private school.
[LAUGH] It's crazy, okay?
And so we've said it once, we're gonna say it again, because this is also important.
You can try to estimate how much money Harlan Crow funneled to Justice Thomas for
this tuition money, but the exact total Crow paid for
Martin's education over the years remains unclear.
If he paid for all four years at the two schools,
the price tag could have exceeded $150,000.
However, ProPublica spoke to Martin,
they interviewed Thomas's great-grandnephew as well.
And it appears that at some point in Martin's childhood, Thomas was paying for
private school himself.
Martin told ProPublica that Thomas sold his Corvette, his most prized
car to pay for a year of tuition, although he didn't remember when that occurred.
>> Okay, so Sam Alito did an interview where he was crying about
how the Supreme Court justices are under attack.
All they did was bribery, and now all of a sudden, people are criticizing us.
What are we supposed to do, right?
And so, well, you're supposed to be honest.
And then he said, this is delegitimizing the Court, the attacks against us.
No, that's just journalism, all of that stuff actually happened, right?
You can't delegitimize the Court yourself by having Clarissa,
look, a lot of people writing in Twitch micro on Twitch wrote in that's old school
bribery I'm not holding my breath for consequences.
And that's exactly the point.
>> Yes. >> And there's gonna be no consequences.
We already know it, Justice Roberts is gonna protect him.
Obviously, Alito and the other right wing thugs are gonna protect him and
Congress isn't gonna do anything.
And then everybody's gonna get the solution with the Supreme Court and
think, I guess now they're just allowed to take bribes, right?
And then Alito will come and say, that's your fault for
reporting things that we're doing.
No, that's your fault for being a crook.
>> Yeah, exactly right.
And so for any consequences to occur, you would need Congress to act.
Because the only way to, I guess, punish a Supreme Court justice who has
a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court is to impeach them, similar to how
Congress would need to impeach the President of the United States.
So the House of Representatives would need to bring forth charges,
after they vote on the charges, they kick it over to the Senate, and
they would have to convict the Supreme Court Justice on the charges.
And that's just not gonna happen.
And so it's just such a significant flaw in the system, Cenk,
because if there isn't any accountability, they're just gonna do what they want.
And it appears that's exactly what's happening.
I mean, you have Jenny Thomas in bed with the individuals who planned the riots
on January 6, and Justice Thomas refuses to recuse himself because guess what?
He can, what's gonna happen?
What are we gonna do about it?
And by the way, the final thing I got to mention is after Watergate,
there were important financial disclosure rules passed, right?
So Justice Thomas is supposed to disclose these gifts, and
when it comes to Harlan Crow, he has failed to do so.
So he has broken the rules when it comes to the financial disclosures and
nothing's gonna happen to him.
>> Yeah, and it's interesting because he did disclose some of the payments that he
made for the kid in other instances, but when it came to Harlan Crow, he hid them.
So that shows you intent to hide because he knows that what
they're doing is deeply wrong.
And so Harlan Crow did have business in front of the Court,
we covered that previously on the show.
And of course, Harlem Crow is a massive conservative, and
cares about all of the business cases in front of the Supreme Court, and
stands to profit from a lot of them.
So for him as a billionaire, this is a drop in the bucket, and
it's an excellent investment to make.
And remember, Harlan Crow and Clarence Thomas are not lifelong friends.
Harlan Crow reached out to Thomas after he got on the Supreme Court and
befriended him.
And how did he befriend him?
By giving him tons of money.
Look, there's the giant vacations, there's now this tuition, etc.
But to me, probably the worst of them is that
Harlan Crow finances the organization that Jenny Thomas works for and
where she gets a giant salary that's coming directly from Harlan Crow.
If that isn't bribery, what is bribery?
I mean, he's directly funneling hundreds of thousands of dollars,
let alone the money that he used to buy Clarence Thomas's mom's house and
do improvements, etc.
This is as clear-cut case of corruption as you can get.
But the great irony here is the Supreme Court legalized bribery for
politicians back in 1976 and 78 in two landmark cases saying that, yeah,
corporations and individuals can give unlimited money to politicians.
And so now they say, we're gonna police ourselves,
[LAUGH] we let everybody else be corrupt.
Of course, we're gonna let ourselves be corrupt.
So, no, they're not gonna do anything about it.
And yes, every institution we have gets delegitimized by these crooks who commit
the corruption in the first place and destroy any kind of belief in our systems.
And then they cry about it afterwards like, you don't respect us enough.
You didn't earn it, brother.
You didn't earn it.
>> Hell no. I mean, who wants to respect crooks?
They're crooks, right?
They have sold out our institutions for personal gain.
And look, obviously, it's difficult to point to exactly what kind
of quid pro quo happens in these situations.
But let's talk about, just quickly, some of the benefits that Harlan Crow has
gotten from Justice Thomas through his rulings.
So Harlan Crow, he's a big real estate guy,
that's how he has made all that wealth.
And so he had a big problem with the COVID moratoriums as it pertains to rent.
So The Lever did a great piece, as always, about this.
Thomas helped kill eviction ban threatening benefactor's business.
And that benefactor, of course, is Harlan Crowe.
So in August of 2021, Thomas was one of the six justices who voted to
strike down a federal administrative moratorium on evictions originally
enacted in September of 2020 by the CDC to halt the spread of COVID-19.
And then in June, Thomas was one of the four justices, so June before that ruling
in August, he was one of the four Justices who voted to end the moratorium.
But the majority actually voted to keep the moratorium in place because it was set
to expire the following month, it didn't expire the following month.
And in August, that is when the majority of conservative justices
decided to strike down the CDC's rent moratorium.
By July, between the two rulings, Crow Holdings,
which owns apartment buildings, student housing, and
manufactured housing nationwide, was cited in congressional testimony for
being one of the country's most frequent eviction filers despite the moratorium.
Not only did Harlan Crow hate the moratorium, and very likely had
influence over justices like Thomas to essentially lift the moratorium.
When the moratorium was in place, homeboy didn't even care, and
he was evicting people anyway.
That's who these people are.
But I'm sure he's very concerned about disadvantaged youth,
at risk youth in the country.
I'm sure he's very worried about that.
>> Yes, one of our members on YouTube wrote in Supreme Court justices for sale,
get it while they're hot, get it while they're hot.
If you act now, they'll throw a garcitch for free.
[LAUGH] The Federal Society is basically it's not just for
right-wingers, it's not just for religious thoughts.
It's mainly for corporations as a way of purchasing the entire Supreme Court.
I wrote about this in my book,
tyt.com/justice is how you can preorder It.
Chapter Four is all about how we lost our democracy, and
this is exactly how we lost it.
In 1971, Lewis Powell wrote a memo saying,
why don't companies take over the Supreme Court?
And that way, we don't even have to pass any laws,
we could just install activist judges to do our job for us.
>> Mission accomplished.
>> That is exactly what they have done.
And this is the natural consequence of it.