>> If you found out that a conservative,
like, Rightwing mega donor had written a check for a Supreme Court justice,
just given him a $1,000, you'd probably be worried that that might represent a bribe.
What if you found out he'd handed over $133,000?
Well, we've got something kind of like that on our hands with conservative
billionaire donor Harlan Crow, who it was just revealed by
follow-up research by ProPublica, to their amazing revelation of this
long-standing relationship between Clarence Thomas and Harlan Crow,
where he had been taking him around the world on these amazing vacations.
Turns out now that back in 2014,
Harlan Crow bought three properties belonging to Clarence Thomas and
his family, that Thomas just forgot to ever mention in the federal disclosure
forms that one might have expected, certainly the law expected.
So this marks the first known instance of money
directly flowing from the donor to Clarence Thomas.
I mean, you've had something like that in the past, not just with the trips, but
with the incredibly lavish gifts, but for some reason, this is worse.
Crow apparently bought three properties together,
they cost $133,363 from their three co-owners,
which include Clarence Thomas, his mother, and the family of Thomas's late brother.
This is according to a state tax document and a deed dated October 15, 2014.
Crow now owned the house where the justice's elderly mother was living.
And what's interesting is that Thomas did not disclose the sale,
which is apparently unlawful.
But in response to this, he also doesn't have anything to say.
Just a man of few words when it comes to responding to this sort of
journalism as well as complying with his legal requirements.
But while he didn't have much to say, Harlan Crow actually did.
He said, my intention is to one day create a public museum at
the Thomas House dedicated to telling the story of our nation's
second black Supreme Court Justice.
I approached the Thomas family about my desire to maintain this historic site, so
future generations could learn about the inspiring life of one of our greatest
Americans.
Now, Crow's statement did not address why he also bought two vacant lots from Thomas
down the street that did not represent a historic place that he grew up as
a young tyke.
It was just property that you could buy and
thus give a bunch of money to the other guy.
He didn't talk about that.
He did write that the other lots were later sold to a vetted builder who
was committed to improving the quality of the neighborhood and
preserving its historical integrity.
Of course, he built different buildings on it.
So it's not preserving history.
It's new development, but come up with whatever facade you're going to.
Now, I also want you to bear in mind that $133,000, while it might
not seem like a lot of money in some real estate markets right now,
it does potentially represent a massive overpayment for that particular property.
Crow bought several other properties on that same street,
paid significantly less than the one with his deal with the Thomases.
In 2013, just the prior year, he bought a pair of properties on the same block,
a vacant lot and a small house for a total of $40,000.
So, again, look, houses can vary, but two properties, including a house,
$40,000, Clarence Thomas's house, $133,000,
seems pretty suspicious, and it actually gets even more suspicious, but
I wanna give both of you a chance to weigh in.
>> So, John, you're right to begin the story with,
did they pay more than market price?
And it appears that they did.
Okay, so that's already a giant problem, but there are many others.
So, number one, this funnels money directly into Clarence Thomas's pocket.
This is not hey, I have a rich friend.
We went on vacation together, he paid for it, okay?
That's already a problem because you didn't disclose it, and
this wasn't a little vacation.
These are vacations that are worth half a million dollars.
They were incredible vacations, but
at least that didn't go directly into your pocket, this did, okay?
Third problem, apparently, as far as we can tell,
Clarence Thomas's mother didn't pay any rent.
Wait a minute, she doesn't own the house?
Harlan Crow owes the house, why is she not paying any rent?
That's just the favor to Clarence Thomas.
Again, more money in the Thomas family pocket.
Now directly being given by this person who has a vested interest in
Supreme Court decisions as a person who's involved in corporations and
businesses, et cetera, that is gonna affect,
Supreme Court decisions could affect billions of dollars of form.
So for him to spend 133,000, 40,000, et cetera,
these are small bribes to pay, okay?
But it were not done, there's still more.
They did over $30,000 in renovations to her house.
She didn't pay for any of it.
There were houses next to hers that were creating issues for her.
They're making too much noise in decrepit situation, too much parties.
Harlan Crow happens to buy those houses, and
then he clears them out, and he happens to sell a new house there to
a police officer who's going to keep this place safe.
Man, this is a giant number of favors,
financial favors to a Supreme Court Justice.
Clarence Thomas knows it's wrong, never reports any of it.
So now if we don't do something about this, whether it's Chief Justice Roberts
and ultimate authority is with Congress, et cetera, well, we're just gonna say now,
bribery of the Supreme Court is legal, and that is a deeply troubling precedent.
>> Yeah, that's my takeaway as well, Genk, what comes of this?
This is a brazenly corrupt act and pattern of behavior for
20 years and think about that time frame, too.
They became friends.
Clarence Thomas tried to couch this, and, this is a close personal friendship, and
he reiterated that point multiple times in his statement.
Well, that friendship began after he became a Supreme Court Justice.
So Harlan Crow wasn't there from the beginning,
it's not like they were childhood friends.
He wanted to be his friend because he's a Supreme Court Justice.
I don't know if Thomas is just going to ignore that point or acknowledges it,
but that's why he wants to be his friend.
It's not because of his personality, because by all accounts,
Clarence Thomas doesn't have much of a personality.
But if he can do this without any repercussions, without any oversight from
Congress, without any punishment whatsoever, what's the point?
What is the point of our legal system, of the Supreme Court,
of any attempts at implementing ethical guidelines or boundaries for
public figures in their behavior?
What's the point?
What are we doing?
Because he's not the only person who has behaved in a corrupt manner in
the past several years, the past few decades.
And time and time again, we see the more powerful and wealthy and
connected elite get away with this kind of stuff.
But average working people are locked up for years,
especially if they're black for petty crimes.
It's a two-tiered justice system, and unfortunately,
one of the people who are in a position for the rest of their life to oversee
that justice system and that legal system isn't held to the same standard.
>> Yeah, we've obviously here at TYT, we've been talking about political
corruption for a long time, Wolfpack, and all that.
We already thought that we had enough issues, not just with campaign donations
to elected officials at variety of levels, but we were already worried about
all of the different pressures that influence the Supreme Court Justice.
Due to the way that the nominating process is run,
combined with the fact that they have lifetime appointments,
they're inclined to take certain sorts of positions so that they can get that job.
They can get any of these jobs at different levels of the federal judiciary.
But I guess I was still kind of naive because I imagined that for the most part,
then, that's it, which is why sometimes you get justices that end up issuing
rulings that are different than you might predict.
There have been some, including Roberts in some cases,
who didn't necessarily end up being the justice you thought that they would be.
But no, now I guess it's open season.
I guess if Roberts doesn't do anything, if Congress doesn't do anything,
then I don't know, why doesn't George Soros just cut a check to Sotomayor for
a quarter million dollars?
I mean, that's fine.
He's just trying to preserve the legacy of blah, blah, blah.
We can come up with some sort of stupid cover story and what's the difference?
It's not against the law.
There's apparently no laws.
You can shower them with expensive gifts and expensive trips, and
you can buy their used clothes for 1000 times market value.
You can just transfer money to them, and then they can rule in your favor,
and I guess we as regular people have no recourse.
This one is, at least from what we can tell, definitely against the law.
All of his other stuff seems wildly unethical.
I think a regular person would believe that they're getting away with murder, but
the system has been set up to advantage people like this so
that they can't easily be caught.
In this case, there is a federal disclosure law that
was passed after Watergate that requires justices and
other officials to disclose the details of most real estate sales over $1,000.
This was way over that.
He didn't do that.
He didn't report that he had deals with Harlan Crow.
He obviously was avoiding reporting it because it looks so terrible, and
four ethics law experts told ProPublica that he needed to report this.
Given the role that Crow has played in subsidizing the lifestyle of Thomas' wife,
you have to wonder if this was an effort to put cash in their pockets.
I don't have to wonder about that, I already know that.
I mean, look, he handed over $500,000 to Jenny Thomas' pack.
It is ridiculous what they can get away with.
So the question now is what can be done?
Who has any chance of actually trying to do something?
AOC had been talking about trying to impeach Clarence Thomas after the original
reporting.
So what if anything, happens?
>> Now, I wanna address two things you said, John.
First, about the George Soros' comment.
One of our members said something very similar right before you said
Athena Hogaboom wrote in, if George Soros bought AOC a piece of key lime pie,
these cucks would lose their mind.
[LAUGH] That is about right, I love our members,
tyt.com/join to become a member or hit the join button below the video on YouTube.
All right, anyway, onto the most serious point, which is what do we do about it?
Well, you know they're not gonna impeach Clarence Thomas.
The Democrats don't have the stones for it.
The Republicans would lose their minds.
They'd say defund the FBI, the Congress.
Wait, no, we're in Congress don't defund that, but defund something, right?
They would just absolutely lose it.
There's no way it's gonna happen.
So get a load of this.
Well, I don't know if it's an irony or
just like a vicious cycle of corruption that has happened.
So in my book, I explain how corruption started with the Supreme Court.
We never voted on it.
Never once did the American people in any way, shape, or
form say that private money should be able to go to politicians.
That was an anathema to the founding fathers.
It's a ridiculous idea.
The Supreme Court, by the way, with literally crooked justices, decided, yeah,
we're going to allow corruption.
We're gonna allow open and brazen bribery of politicians that go to Congress and
the presidency, right?
Now, by letting Clarence Thomas get away with this,
which is almost certainly what's going to happen.
The Congress will return the favor to the Supreme Court and
say, you can take bribes, too.
So now they're all going to take bribes, and this is just a free for all.
We don't have a democracy anymore.
It's an auction, a total open auction where they buy every part
of our government freely and rub it in our face.
And so, look, I mentioned my book there.
Here, I got a fake version of the book right here.
So this is what it's going to look like when it comes out.
Anyway, the Inside is not the real book.
We just finished it today, literally, literally, literally today.
Anyway, you can preorder at tyt.com/justice, but
the essence of the book, the very core of a chapter four,
is exactly how the Supreme Court stole our democracy.
Now Congress is gonna finish the job by letting the Supreme Court take endless
bribes if they let Clarence Thomas get away with this.
>> Yeah, I go back to my point earlier.
I'm kind of cynical on any potential outcomes, even though this seems so
clear-cut.
Notice John laid out, we have a very clear transfer of money from
one guy to a justice through this real estate sale.
It just seems so blatant and so easy.
This is a slam dunk case, but because of partisan gridlock in DC.
Nothing's probably going to happen, but the political will is there, right?
Over 1.2 million people have signed their name at
moveon.org/thomas to call on Congress to impeach Clarence Thomas and
acknowledge that's great, we see this groundswell of support.
People want that, it's the right thing to do.
But when you have a Congress who's just filled with obstructionist Republicans,
what's gonna happen?
I try to rein in my cynicism on this, but it's only going to get worse.
If this is okay, then something slightly more egregious is going to be okay.
And we just keep going, keep going,
keep going until they're just all bought and sold.
It's just ridiculous.
>> Well, I'll end this story on a fun note here.
Going back to our members, who I love, I think they're so smart and funny.
Dragon from the Boogie Down writes in to Jordan's earlier point
about Clarence Thomas's personality,
Clarence Thomas has the personality of a Walmart parking lot.
[LAUGH] And that dynamic character is going to destroy our Congress and
our Supreme Court at the same time, and
probably everyone in Washington is going to let him get away with it.