Last week, ProPublica—a New York-based non-profit, independent investigative newsroom—published a new report revealing that Thomas enjoyed at least 38 vacations in the past 20 years at the expense of wealthy benefactors and patrons "who share the ideology that drives his jurisprudence."
Earlier this year, ProPublica reported that, for at least two decades, Thomas had accepted gifts from friend Harlan Crow, a billionaire Republican donor. The reports sparked a debate over tightening ethics requirements for serving Supreme Court justices and added scrutiny to Thomas' actions.
From the DEMOCRACY NOW! transcript:
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.
Five key House Democrats are calling on the Justice Department to investigate Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas under the Ethics in Government Act, after new reporting reveals he has accepted even more gifts from wealthy benefactors without following disclosure laws than was previously known. Federal judges are required to disclose gifts worth more than $1,000, including travel.
New York Congressmember Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the vice ranking member of the House Oversight Committee, wrote the letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland, co-signed by Judiciary Committee Chair Jerry Nadler, Oversight Committee member Jamie Raskin and Democratic Caucus vice chair, Congressman Ted Lieu. It reads, quote, “Justice Thomas’s consistent failure to disclose gifts and benefits from industry magnates and wealthy, politically active executives highlights a blatant disregard for judicial ethics as well as apparent legal violations,” unquote.
The letter was sent one day after ProPublica published a bombshell new report last Thursday filled with details about a group of conservative billionaires who have given Justice Thomas free trips and gifts. Earlier this year, the outlet revealed Texas real estate billionaire, GOP megadonor Harlan Crow had showered Justice Thomas with vacations, private jets, the purchase of his mother’s house in Georgia and tuition payments. Now ProPublica reports three other business magnates, quote, “apparently came into Clarence Thomas’ life after he was appointed to one of the most sacrosanct positions of power in American government.” Of course, they’re talking about his being a justice on the Supreme Court. They are Harlan Crow, Wayne Huizenga, David Sokol and Paul “Tony” Novelly.
Reading from the report, their gifts include, quote, “At least 38 destination vacations, including a previously unreported voyage on a yacht around the Bahamas; 26 private jet flights, plus an additional eight by helicopter; a dozen VIP passes to professional and college sporting events, typically perched in the skybox; two stays at luxury resorts in Florida and Jamaica; and one standing invitation to an uber-exclusive golf club overlooking the Atlantic coast.”
For more, we’re joined by Brett Murphy, reporter for ProPublica, who co-authored their new investigation headlined “Clarence Thomas’ 38 Vacations: The Other Billionaires Who Have Treated the Supreme Court Justice to Luxury Travel.”
Brett, welcome to Democracy Now! We’ve been following these explosive ProPublica investigations. Talk about the latest, how you found what you found, because Justice Thomas is not reporting these, and what exactly they were, and if you believe he broke the law.
BRETT MURPHY: Yeah. So, we started receiving tips after we first published — my colleagues first published about Harlan Crow. We received tips that there may be other patrons in Justice Thomas’s life. It was mostly just, you know, he had been here around this time frame, or he knows this person, so we didn’t have a ton to go off of, to begin with. And what we started doing was a lot of just shoe-leather reporting. We were calling people in these billionaire circles, in the justice’s circle, people who worked for them, you know, flight attendants, pilots, staff, waitresses, bartenders, drivers, former C-suite executives — anyone we could talk to who might be able to shed light on that person’s relationship with Justice Thomas. From there, we just started accumulating evidence — pictures, flight data, emails. We sent records requests, anything we could do to substantiate, triangulate different trips that the justice had been on that were underwritten by one of these patrons.
And to your question about the violations of law, so, it’s a little murky about what exactly a justice can accept. There’s debate around which regulations they follow dictating what they can receive in terms of gifts. However, it’s much more clear about what their disclosure requirements are. The Ethics in Government Act, that you were mentioning earlier, was passed after Watergate, and it says that most gifts that any government employee receives, including a justice, has to appear on their yearly financial disclosures. They have to say, “I received this private jet flight, these tickets to this event, this yacht cruise, and this is the person who gave it to me. This is the source of this gift.” We have all 20 — all 30-ish years of Justice Thomas’s financial disclosures, and these trips, these benefactors do not appear on those disclosures.
AMY GOODMAN: So, tell us who these donors are. You have Harlan Crow, who’s the GOP megadonor from Texas.
BRETT MURPHY: Yeah. So, the three new ones we know of now are David Sokol — he was the former heir apparent of Berkshire Hathaway, Warren Buffett’s number two. He left around 2011. He now chairs a holding company. They’re on top of international shipping, power utilities. He has a private equity firm. Tony Novelly is an oil magnate from St. Louis. He made his fortune buying, transporting and storing petroleum all over the world. And then the third is Wayne Huizenga. Huizenga might be a little more of a household name. He is the billionaire behind Blockbuster, Waste Management and AutoNation. For a time, he also owned three Florida sports teams: the Florida Panthers, Miami Dolphins and — blanking on the third, but he owned three teams at the same time.
AMY GOODMAN: So, you have Wayne Huizenga, David Sokol, Tony Novelly and, of course, Harlan Crow. Did any of these megadonors have cases before the Supreme Court? We know that Harlan Crow did.
BRETT MURPHY: So, what they’ve had are different what are called cert petitions. Tony Novelly did at some point in which a case he was involved in was being appealed to the Supreme Court. However, when exactly that took place in relation to his relationship and his vacations with Justice Thomas, it seems that that actually happened — that case happened before their friendship turned into a vacation relationship.
What each of them has is a stake. They have a stake in court cases because of the industries that they’re in. So, anything to do with regulated industries — tax law, tax decisions, labor decisions, environmental decisions — all of these could bear major impact on the industries in which they work. So, to answer your question directly, no, we have not yet found any direct cases that their companies have had before the Supreme Court, but mostly just their industries.
AMY GOODMAN: So, ProPublica reports that “Financial records from the Horatio Alger Association archives show the group has been fundraising off of an event hosted by [Justice] Thomas inside the Supreme Court building.” Explain, Brett.
BRETT MURPHY: Yeah. So, that’s a really unique arrangement. Even the fact that this is an event hosted by the Supreme Court inside of the Supreme Court building by Justice Thomas, that’s very rare. There’s not many groups who have that sort of access. And then, on top of that, we found that the association, which is a charity group that raises money for college scholarships — and it’s also a very exclusive association for industrialists, wealthy entrepreneurs, all self-made millionaires and billionaires often — they fundraise directly off of this event. They charge donors X amount of dollars. If you’re not a member, it can be $7,500 per seat at all the events, including this Supreme Court thing, all the way up to $100,000 for a table of 10. This is a little bit of an unprecedented arrangement.
And in different judiciary rules and kind of regulations around each branch of government, people are told you are not supposed to do that. You are not supposed to use your position to fundraise, even if it’s for a good cause, for an association. You’re not supposed to use your position, your title, your name to be fundraising for a charity, let alone inside of an actual government building.
"Iraq snapshot" (THE COMMON ILLS):
When Abbas Al-Zalemi walks through his fields, he remembers better times. Amber rice once flourished on the eight acres he inherited from his father, painting them a lush green. The fields are dry and barren now, populated by desert plants, the only kind hearty enough to survive.
“Without amber cultivation, I feel a sense of loss,” said Al-Zalemi, 50. “I avoid coming here to escape the sadness.”
Wracked by years of drought, Iraq is now experiencing its worst heat wave in decades. Water flows on the Euphrates and Tigris rivers are near record lows, leading to a cascading water crisis in the Iraqi countryside, where farming techniques have not kept pace with the times. Amber cultivation, which typically runs from the end of June to October, requires the rice to remain submerged in water throughout the summer. In 2021, the Iraqi Ministry of Agriculture made the “difficult” decision to prohibit most rice planting in an effort to conserve water.
It is the invisible ingredient responsible for this year's bumper wheat harvest in Iraq, a country generally considered one of the most endangered by climate change and drought in the world.
It has also helped increase the number of Tunisia's all-important date palm oases, is keeping Yemen's agriculture going despite war and ensures that Libya's bustling coastal cities are supplied with water.
Groundwater — fresh water stored underneath the earth and accessed mostly by wells — has always played a significant role in arid Middle East countries. Because it's underground, it isn't as impacted by drought and heat , and it's the main source of fresh water for at least 10 Arab nations, the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia, or ESCWA, stated in a 2020 report
.But as climate change impacts what little rainfall these countries get and extremely hot summers dry up more rivers and lakes, groundwater is becoming even more important."Awareness of groundwater is rising," said Annabelle Houdret, a senior researcher at the German Institute of Development and Sustainability, or IDOS, who's been looking into groundwater management in Morocco specifically.
"In general, people have not thought about it as much as they should because they don't see it. If you see a river where levels falls dramatically, it immediately gets a reaction," she continued. "But [groundwater] is an abstract. By the time we become aware of what's happening with groundwater, it may well be too late."
Making it even more complicated is the variable nature of groundwater, Mohammed Mahmoud, director of the climate and water program at Washington-based think tank, the Middle East Institute, told DW.
There is growing pressure on groundwater in the region, Mahmoud said, but it's also a complicated resource. How to manage groundwater depends on what sort of ground or rocks it's stored in, how deep it's stored, how it flows and how it's connected to nearby surface water like rivers and lakes. It also depends on whether the groundwater comes from renewable sources.
Iraqi merchant Mohamed has never seen such a grim tourist season — years of drought have shrunken the majestic Lake Habbaniyah, keeping away the holidaymakers who once flocked there during the summer.
“The last two years, there was some activity, but now there’s no more water,” said 35-year-old Mohamed, asking to be identified by his first name only.
He laid out inflatable water floats, nets and shirts in front of his lakeside shop, but expected few if any customers.
“This year, it’s dry, dry,” Mohamed said, his shirt soaked in sweat in the inhospitable heat of nearly 50°C.
Shorelines at Habbaniyah, about 70km west of the capital, Baghdad, have receded by several dozen meters after four consecutive years of drought ravaged parts of the nation.
The UN ranks water-stressed Iraq as one of five nations most impacted by some effects of climate change.
When full, as it last was in 2020, the lake can hold up to 3.3 billion cubic meters of water, said Jamal Odeh Samir, director of water resources in Anbar Province, but now “the lake contains no more than 500 million cubic meters of water.”
Shops like Mohamed’s and holiday homes by the lake now sit empty in the height of summer. On the beach, stray dogs wander between unused umbrellas.
Amidst an ugly rise in anti-LGBTQ hate - note to right-wing bigots who missed the memo: words matter - hundreds of New Yorkers have turned out to honor O'Shae Sibley, a black queer dancer stabbed to death by a white teenager as he and his friends were joyfully dancing to Beyoncé at a Brooklyn gas station. Asserting "the power of community" and their right to exist - and dance - allies insist, "No one should have to live in fear of violent attacks (for) being themselves."
Sibley, 28, was a Philadelphia native who moved to New York City in 2019 for his dance career - Mayor Eric Adams: "He was coming to the city to express himself the way New Yorkers are allowed to do" - and was returning from the beach on the steamy night of July 30 when he and his friends stopped for gas at a Mobil station in Midwood, Brooklyn. As one friend fueled up, the others began dancing, or voguing - a stylized, improvisational dance of model-like poses originating in 1980s Harlem and now popular in the LGBTQ+ ballroom scene. As they danced, shirtless in the heat, to Beyoncé’s latest album Renaissance, several white teenagers emerged from the station, demanded the group of black gay dancers stop, and began hurling slurs at them like, “Get that gay shit out of here." "You don’t know us - we’re just having a good time and enjoying our lives," Sibley reportedly told the men. "It's all respect, we’re allowed to be here just like you." Surveillance video shows the two groups in a heated encounter; at some point, most of the young men left but one remained face-to-face with Sibley alongside a friend, taunting them; they began scuffling, and the teen eventually stabbed Sibley in the chest, puncturing his heart.
Sibley stumbled back, falling into the arms of Otis Peña, a close friend whose birthday the group was celebrating that day. In a tearful Facebook video hours after the attack, Peña recalled holding Sibley, his blood soaking Peña's hands and clothes as he lost "the one thing I had closest to my heart." Sibley had “the power to touch everyone’s heart," he said; his friend died "just because he's trying to let people know that we're gay, we exist....We’re not going to live in fear. We’re not going to live in hiding." Sibley's funeral last week in Philadelphia, where he grew up and performed with the dance company Philadanco, drew over 200 relatives and friends, among them Peña, who reiterated his sense of Sibley as "a beacon." "Just when I thought the world couldn't get any darker, it went black," he said in tears. "I know O'Shae would've done everything in his power to stand up for what he believed in...He encouraged us to stand out and be us. He danced with us, he made us sing, even though he sounded like a cat" - bittersweet laughs from the crowd - "but there was a beauty in it all. It was the power of brotherhood, the power of family, the power of community." "Remember, in dark times there is always light," Peña ended. "And for everyone in this room, that light is O'Shae."
Sibley's murder sent shockwaves through New York's LGBTQ community and beyond at a time when violence and threats against LGBTQ+ people have soared nationwide, with nasty rhetoric increasingly spiraling into "real world harm." While hate crimes generally, and those targeting LGBTQ people specifically, are hard to document and famously under-reported, experts cite at least 356 anti-LGBTQ "incidents" in the last year and up to 11,000 hate crimes in 2021, the most recent data available, up 12% from the year before. Calling Sibley's death "a sobering snapshot" of the hate targeting the LGBTQ community, advocates hope it can "serve as a wake-up call." "We have to call out hate for hate," said the ADL's Jonathan Greenblatt. "Homophobia is homophobia, and a violent act predicated on prejudice is not a point of view. It is an act of hate." Still, even a brief, queasy look at comments about Sibley's death also serve as a wake-up call to the malevolence unleashed by today's right-wing bigotry. As in: "Stop exaggerating the special treatment for these people....Celebrate Me, Celebrate Me, Celebrate Me! It's just getting old...If they minded their own business and left kids alone they would be all right. People are getting tired of them shoving their lifestyle in their faces...You DON'T need to prance around while getting gas. Get your gas, and move on." (And otherwise, clearly, die.)
On Aug. 10, a week after Sibley's death, his assailant Dmitry Popov turned himself in. A 17-year-old high school senior who lives nearby with his Russian mother, he has been charged with two counts of second-degree murder as a hate crime, second-degree murder, two counts of first-degree manslaughter as a hate crime, first-degree manslaughter, fourth-degree criminal possession of a weapon, second-degree menacing and second-degree aggravated harassment. A spokesperson for the D.A's office explained the double hate-crime counts stem from legal theories based on "intentional” violence and “depraved indifference." Popov will be tried as an adult; he faces a minimum of 20 years in prison, and has pleaded not guilty. His grandmother says he was defending himself from Sibley and his friends: "There were four of them...Strong big men and intoxicated...If he did not do it, (they) would have killed him." She also refuted initial reports the family is Muslim; she said they're Christian, her grandson isn't racist, and "he does not understand gay or not gay." "We are going to stand up for Mr. Sibley: for the right he has to dance, to be exuberant, (to not) stop dancing because it offended someone else," said D.A. Eric Gonzalez of the charges, citing today's "intolerance (of) people who are different than ourselves." "That's a right all New Yorkers share..to not (be) afraid to live your true self."
New Yorkers have, nonetheless, been shaken by the "cold-blooded murder" of "a gentle spirit (who) loved dancing" on the streets of "the best city in the world to be yourself." Still, notes a local, "Being visibly queer in this world, even in a ‘liberal’ city like New York, is like walking outside with a target on your head.” For those like Sibley who've found a safe space in the ballroom scene, voguing is seen as "the dance of our people" and "an act of resistance." Said one dancer. "We come to ballroom to be peaceful, and that’s exactly who O’Shae was." His death reverberated through a close-knit Black queer community where "we have each other's backs (because) it's so much against us already" and "it could have been so many of us....We all listen to Beyoncé. We all dance...It could have been anybody...To be Black and gay, we share one skin.” Since the murder, people have held vigils, marches, memorials, dance pits, at the gas station and Chelsea's LGBTQ+ Center, wearing orange (O'Shae's fave) and bearing signs: "Stop Hate," "Dancing Isn't A Crime - Murder Is," "We're Here, We're Queer, Get Used To It." They've wept, laughed, danced, grieved, declared, "This is our city too" and vowed to "continue to live out loud" in an America where "being Black and queer...always feels like you’re being left behind." “O’Shae Sibley should be alive," yelled activist Qween Jean at the gas station. “We are done dying in silence."
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) and his 2024 presidential campaign affiliates have given $95,000 to an anti-LGBTQ+ hate group in Iowa.
The Family Leader Foundation is affiliated with the Family Research Council, which has been designated as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. It is run by prominent evangelical leader Bob Vander Plaats, whose endorsement is considered extremely influential for the Iowa caucuses, as according to Reuters, about two-thirds of Iowa caucus-goers in 2016 identified as evangelical.
Campaign finance reports reportedly show that the $95,000 was paid collectively by the DeSantis campaign, the DeSantis super PAC Never Back Down, and a pro-DeSantis nonprofit called And to the Republic.
$25,000 from the DeSantis campaign went to an ad in a commemorative booklet passed out at the event, as well as access to an after-event dinner with Tucker Carlson. $20,000 from And to the Republic bought a table at the after-event dinner, and $50,000 from Never Back Down got DeSantis a two-page ad and dinner tickets.
Naomi Wolf has praised Carol's work as well.
The full Megyn Kelly quote is:
‘“Certainly, I don’t have a lot of respect for Megyn Kelly. She’s a lightweight and y’know, she came out there reading her little script and trying to be tough and be sharp. And when you meet her you realize she’s not very tough and she’s not very sharp.” Then, came the kicker: “She gets out there and she starts asking me all sorts of ridiculous questions, and you could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her … wherever.”’
President Trump asserted later, after a media firestorm saying that he was referring to menstruation, that he did not mean to refer to menstruation. “Trump himself has insisted that he did not, in using the word “wherever,” actually mean to suggest that Kelly was on her period. Rather, as he later told the Today Show and CNN’s Jake Tapper, he meant that she was so angry that she seemed to be bleeding from some other orifice—like, say, a nose, or an ear.” And arguably, his quote was indeed not directly saying what the media universally claimed it said.
