A New York Times investigation reveals how Justice Clarence Thomas's
relationship with the Horatio Alger Association basically
placed him in the company of America's wealthiest elites and
possibly exacerbates concerns of corruption within the Supreme Court.
Now, as with the relationship that the justice has with Harlan Crow,
and as with the give gifts he received from Harlan Crow, in this case with
the various gifts he received from people associated with the organization,
here the association, he failed to disclose the gifts to the public.
Now, the New York Times spoke to two dozen people and reviewed public filings and
internal documents as part of their investigation.
And this investigation found that Thomas had received many unreported
benefits from his cohort of wealthy and powerful friends.
As the Times writes quote the broader cohort of wealthy and powerful friends
have included major donors to conservative causes with broad policy and
political interests, and much at stake in Supreme Court decisions,
even if they were not directly involved in the cases.
Now, look, the appearance of corruption is a huge problem.
And while there's been quite a bit of reporting in regard to Justice Thomas
in recent months, there is other instances of other Supreme Court
justices the late Anthony Scalia, the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
There were issues with some of the gifts they were receiving as well,
although in those cases a lot of it was reported.
We'll get to that in a moment, but
here's more on the latest reporting from the Times.
So there was apparently a time when the justice actually did report gifts that he
was receiving.
In his early years on the Court, Justice Thomas disclosed about
20 private plane flights and an assortment of other gifts, including cigars,
a Daytona 500 jacket, a silver buckle, and a rawhide coat.
After the LA Times chronicled his gifts and travel in 2004,
he stopped disclosing private flights and has seldom reported gifts or
other benefits, even though he's supposed to, right.
Now he argued that other justices basically told him, nah,
don't worry about it, you don't have to do it.
But that is actually not the case.
His decision not to disclose many benefits for nearly two decades, beyond trips
related to teaching, speeches and attending legal or academic conferences,
has made it difficult to even track potential conflicts of interest.
And here's the truth justices are allowed to accept gifts and free travel, and
many other justices have disclosed receiving such benefits.
The Justices, like all federal judges, are required to complete an annual form
listing investments, gifts, and other financial ties.
Yet, in some cases, the rules are ambiguous and
the disclosures do not provide a full portrait of gifts or finances.
So the rules are not really strong enough, so that's the argument made there.
But even given what the current rules are, it's clear that Justice Thomas should have
disclosed these gifts, but failed to do so.
And again, what we're about to talk about isn't even in regard to the gifts he
received from Harlan Crow.
This has to do with gifts received through individuals he met through this
Horatio Alger Association.
And so, real quick, justice Thomas's acceptance of such
hospitality apparently predates his time on the court.
A former girlfriend said in an interview that a buddy of Justice Thomas had paid
for their vacation in the Bahamas in the mid 1980s when he was chairman of
the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
A longtime friend, a conservative commentator, Armstrong Williams,
said he had paid for the justice's 1987 wedding reception.
In fact, it was Williams who encouraged him to join the Horatio Alger Association.
And in just a moment, I'll talk a little bit about the relationships he forged
through that association and what kind of gifts he received as a result, Cenk.
>> Yeah, so for me, there's always a line, right?
And there's plenty of things that could be under the line.
So you've got some lifelong friends, you took a bunch of trips with them.
It is what it is, there's no problem, right?
You guys regularly go to the Poconos.
Nobody's gonna begrudge you that, okay.
We were in the cat schools, everything's gonna be fine, right?
You do one or two spectacular trips, again, your lifelong or
maybe they're even new friends, all right?
It's not the end of the world.
So where's the line?
Number one line obvious, you stop reporting it when you're supposed to
report it, that means you're actively hiding it, right?
And so now I'm very concerned, and there's a reason why we have rules, and
the Supreme Court is supposed to be the ultimate arbiter of rules.
So it is deeply concerning when they go, no, the rules don't apply to us, and
we're not gonna abide by them at all.
Secondly, all these friends for Justice Thomas, since he's been on the court,
are friends he acquired right as he was getting on the court and got on the court.
And then they have been paying for lavish trip on top of lavish trip, but again,
to me, that's not the biggest issue.
The biggest issue now the second line is when they start doing things like buying
your mom's house at above market value and buying all the property around it and
paying for your wedding reception.
Now we're not in the Poconos.
Now we're in a completely different arena.
And it looks like this Heredia Alger Association, everybody can draw their own
assumptions and opinions about it, but my opinion is it looks like it's one of
those organizations that's meant to purchase people, right?
So you go, if you're a good boy,
whether you're a commentator like Armstrong Williams or Clarence Thomas or
name any other person, and it doesn't matter what their background is,
what their religion, race, etc is, as long as you're playing ball,
you're gonna get a lot of free stuff, and it's gonna be awesome.
But you rule the wrong way, all of a sudden, things could dry up.
>> So, yeah, I mean, look, I think that's what the concern is,
not just with this association, but also with any relationship where gifts
are being exchanged and could influence decisions made by Supreme Court justices.
Look, it's really, really important for
the American public to have faith in our institutions.
And when there is, even in the very least, right,
the appearance of conflicts of interest, the appearance of corruption, right?
Even if you want to steal man this and really assume that there's no evidence
of actual corruption here, just the appearance of corruption is bad enough,
because that leads to distrust toward these institutions.
And remember, the Supreme Court is supposed to adjudicate whether or
not certain laws or certain issues are constitutional, right?
So let's get to what that organization is.
Cenk mentioned it briefly, but I do wanna talk about what they claim to be and
what they actually do.
So, the Horatio Alger Association was founded in 1947.
And according to its website,
the whole point of the organization is to dispel the mounting belief among
our nation's youth that the American dream was no longer attainable.
To that end, the group has awarded more than $245 million in college
scholarships to roughly 35,000 students, which I think is great.
I don't think there's anything wrong with that.
Now, its members have included a wide spectrum of people whose life stories
exemplify the Horatio Alger credo, although they have trended conservative.
So Justice Thurgood Marshall and Fred Trump,
former President Donald Trump's father were members so was Harlan Crow's father.
And you also have Justice Thomas's class of inductees,
which included the poet Maya Angelou.
And so you get a sense of the people who are associated with it.
It's not all conservative, it's important to know that.
But with that said, the whole point of what they're trying to do
is provide scholarships and to uplift young scholars.
With that said, within a few months of Clarence Thomas
getting confirmed as a Supreme Court justice,
he ends up joining the Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans.
And he was able to secure some material gains through his
association with this group.
Over the years, his Horatio Alger friends have welcomed him at their
vacation retreats, arranged VIP access to sporting events, and
also invited him to their lavish parties.
In 2004, he joined celebrities including Oprah Winfrey and
Ed McMahon at a three-day 70th birthday bash in Montana for
the industrialist Dennis Washington.
Several Horatio Alger friends also helped finance the marketing of a documentary
about the justice in the wake of an HBO film that had resurfaced Anita Hill's
sexual harassment allegations against him during his confirmation.
And there's a little more including prominent among
his Horatio Alger friends has been David Sokol,
the one time heir apparent to Warren Buffett at Berkshire Hathaway.
Sokol describes the justice and his wife Jenny as close personal friends, and
in 2015, they hosted the Thomases for a visit to their sprawling Montana ranch.
The Sokols have also hosted the Thomases at their waterfront mansion in Florida,
and there is a photo showing them at that retreat back in 2015.
That's the image that you're seeing featuring the Thomas's with the Sokols in
this Montana ranch, Cenk.
>> Yeah, so some more nuance and then some more clear lines.
So, first of all, a lot of organizations are a mixed bag, and by the way,
things change.
So, for example, Heresiology started in 1947.
Probably sounds like it was started with grade intent and has done some great work,
like $245 million for 35 students, ain't no joke.
So we don't have to paint everything as black and white, right?
And things change like the Republicans used to be the party of Lincoln.
They're not that anymore.
And you could argue the Democrats are not the party of FDR.
So it might have started with great intent,
but here the issue is when you've got incredibly wealthy people next to
incredibly powerful people in the government,
whether it's Clarence Thomas back in the day at the Equal Employment Commission.
By the way, where he spiked almost all the cases,
he never saw any racism anywhere, pretty much.
Hey, look at that corporations win.
And when on the Supreme Court, he almost always rules with corporations, right?
So, hey, you could say it's a nice coincidence.
You could say he's being affected by his incredibly wealthy friends that
he happened to find at this organization.
And by the way, they're not the only organization.
There's tons of right wing organizations, and in this case, this is, again,
mixed bag, right?
There's right wing, left wing, etc, at that organization.
But there's other organizations specifically set up to funnel a giant
amount of money to the right wing.
Look, there's a person who came over from the right wing to the left wing, and
I have a relationship with him, and
he explained to me how it was back when he was the right wing as opposed to now.
And basically, he said, it's shocking how little money the left has,
when you're on the right the money is just flowing everywhere, everywhere, right?
And so Justice Thomas is basically just sitting there,
like having the tsunami of money wash over him.
He doesn't have to take the bribe and spend it on a fancy vacation.
He just gets the fancy vacation, right?
He doesn't have to get the bribe to take care of his mom's house.
They just do that for him, and on and on it goes.
And one fun note in this story, by the way,
is I like that they're bringing back the word industrialist.
>> Right, I know, it's incredible.
No, but it's interesting because you don't even need an explicit quid pro quo, right.
I think that's important to keep in mind as well,
forging these types of relationships where an exchange of gifts occurs,
even if there's no explicit agreement or explicit conversation
that makes it clear to Justice Thomas that this is a favor for a favor.
Just building that relationship and exchanging those gifts could have
an influence on the decisions Justice Thomas makes in these various cases.
And by the way, I wanna be fair and
note that there have been other instances of other Supreme Court Justices where
the exchange of gifts seems a little concerning, right.
So I said that I would give you two examples.
There's Justice Antonin Scalia, who passed away.
But according to the Times,
Scalia's disclosures show that he took 258 subsidized trips from 2004 to
2014 to destinations that included Switzerland, Ireland, and Hawaii.
He died in 2016 while staying for free at the West Texas hunting lodge of a business
executive whose company had recently had a case before the Supreme Court.
And even Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had some issues, I'll give you that example.
So Justice Ginsburg disclosed more trips than any other justice in 2018.
During a trip to Israel to accept a lifetime achievement award
she was a guest of the Israeli billionaire Morris Kahn.
The year before,
the Court had given his company a victory by declining to take up a case.
So, look, I don't know if the relationship she had here with
Morris Kahn at all played a role in not wanting to take up that case.
But my point is the appearance of that influence,
the appearance of that conflict of interest and possible corruption,
communicates something to the general public that is toxic and terrible,
which is why we're supposed to have these disclosures.
We're supposed to have ways of mitigating potential conflicts of interest.
And so when you have, let's say, legacy media outlets,
or when you have commentators scratching their heads in regard to why so
many American voters, why the electorate does not trust in American institutions,
I think this is a big part of it.
>> Yeah, [COUGH] and I have one more bright line.
When you're judging a case where you have anywhere near a conflict
of interest to Anna's point, even an appearance of conflict of interest,
you got to recuse yourself.
And by the way,
justices do do that sometimes, and these days almost exclusively the left
wing that does that that puts them at an even bigger disadvantage.
But if there's a case about Harvard, the Justices that went to Harvard recuse
themselves, or at least the left wing justices do.
>> Right, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson did that in regard to the Harvard
affirmative action case.
>> Yeah, and I should be clear, not just if they went to Harvard, but
I think she was on their board, right?
So she goes, hey, look out, and that's great, that's exactly right.
Now you could say, damn it, that's one justice we need in that case.
Okay, that's fair but it is what it is.
The propriety of the Court and the trust that we have in the Court is so
important because it establishes order in the country, right?
But now they've just shredded it so much that now there was a poll out saying
the majority of Americans now think that the Supreme Court is making decisions
based almost purely on politics, to which, unfortunately, I say, of course.
So since that's happening, even though the media go, no politics.
They're just calling balls and strikes and
every confirmation hearing we have this theater that's absurd,
where all the justices go, I have no political opinions, what are politics?
Policy never heard of it.
And they go on the court and whoever's right wing votes right wing 98% of
the time, left wing votes that way 90% of the time, 80% of the time.
The other 20%, they vote with big business, okay?
And so guys, already the Supreme Court's reputation is in significant
trouble with the American public.
And this is doing body blow, body blow.
As they keep taking these enormous gifts from the incredibly wealthy and
then not recusing themselves from the cases.
>> Right.
>> And ruling on them, it's disastrous.
>> It is, and I leave you with this because this is telling.
Remember, the very person who encouraged Justice Thomas to join
the Horatio Alger Association was a guy named Armstrong Williams.
And he spoke to the New York Times to say that while he was happy that
Justice Thomas's relationship with this organization seems to make him very happy,
there are some concerns, he says this.
This is also about power and prestige.
I mean, Thomas is on the Supreme Court even though they provide for
these kids, meaning the scholarships and all of that.
This is the true aristocracy of America.
>> And yes, that's exactly right.
And look, guys, so
some on the left will say they shouldn't even have organizations like this.
And by the way, some on the right will definitely say it too,
where the rich get together and they hub up and say, no,
there's gonna be rich people in the world and they're gonna get together somewhere.
That's not the issue, the issue is what do they do?
So when the Koch brothers gather up all of the rich right wingers in the country and
they have a conference one to two times a year and
they literally decide which politicians they're gonna purchase and for
what political purposes so they can all get richer, that's a massive problem.
And then the right wing will be like, Bilderberg, and the place where there's
the fire and this and the that, guys, Koch brothers right there, they all the rich
get together in that particular case, and decide how they're gonna do the bribes.
>> And the right gets it, I mean,
when the right complains about Soros that's the exact same thing.
It's just that it is an incredibly wealthy and
influential man who is pushing political issues or policies that you disagree with.
And the argument that we're making is that no wealthy person should
be able to buy our politics or politician.
>> Exactly, you don't have to eat the rich, but
the rich are not allowed to buy our government.
And we have to get back to absolutely insisting on that.