A friend of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is pushing back against a new report claiming a wealthy GOP donor paid for the private school tuition of the justice’s grandnephew.
During the presidency of Donald Trump, Mark Paoletta was general counsel to the Office of Management and Budget and before that chief counsel to then-Vice President Mike Pence. He is also a friend of Thomas and his wife, Ginni Thomas, whom he has represented as a lawyer.
Paoletta was responding on May 4 to a ProPublica article published hours before that detailed how billionaire Harlan Crow’s company paid the private school tuition of Thomas’s grandnephew, Mark Martin, who the justice took custody of when he was 6 years old and was raising like a son. The exact amount paid over four years at two schools was unclear but the article said it could be upwards of $150,000. Paoletta disputes that estimate, saying Crow only covered first-year tuition at each school.
Crow, who is a major donor to Republicans, criticized a ProPublica report last month as a “political hit job” after the media outlet stated that Crow had underwritten many luxurious vacations for Thomas and his wife and suggested Crow’s purchase of Thomas’s mother’s house, with a view to one day turning it into a museum about the justice, was somehow a quid pro quo. Crow has said he and Thomas have never discussed any cases pending before the Supreme Court.
Crow, a longtime friend of Thomas and his wife, a prominent Trump supporter and conservative activist, said at the time that ProPublica was “funded by leftists” with “an agenda to destabilize the [Supreme] Court.” ProPublica is a left-wing nonprofit funded in part by the preeminent Democratic Party donor, financier George Soros, through his Foundation to Promote Open Society. Soros has been widely criticized recently by conservatives and Republicans for funding the election campaigns of various district attorneys across the nation who are soft on crime.
The revelation that Thomas’s wealthy friend shares his largesse with the Thomases prompted Democrats to accuse Thomas of corruption and demand that the Supreme Court adopt a code of conduct even though legal experts say there is no conflict of interest because Crow has not had business before the Supreme Court.
Ohio Northern University law professor Scott Douglas Gerber wrote in The Hill that “Supreme Court justices are allowed to have friends, even if a particular friend is rich and a particular justice is conservative.”
The Democrat-led Senate Judiciary Committee conducted a combative hearing May 2 in which Democrats said the Supreme Court must adopt a code of conduct governing justices’ behavior or Congress will impose one on them. Republicans pushed back, saying Democrats have manufactured a phony ethics crisis to justify cracking down on the conservative-dominated court. Democrats are also looking at ways to pressure the court by withholding congressional appropriations to it.
Legal experts say the Supreme Court has a special status because it was created by the U.S. Constitution, not by Congress. These experts also say this means that under the Constitution only the Supreme Court can regulate the internal workings of the Supreme Court. Justices say they voluntarily comply with public reporting requirements established by the Judicial Conference of the United States, a body created by Congress that sets rules for the federal judiciary.
The Epoch Times reached out to Thomas and the Supreme Court for comment on the ProPublica article but had not received a reply as of press time.
In a nearly 600-word statement about Mark Martin and the tuition payments posted at his account on Twitter, Paoletta wrote that the Thomases had, beginning in 1997, “devoted twelve years of their lives to helping a beloved child in desperate need of love, support, and guidance.”
“They agreed to take in this young child much as Justice Thomas’s grandparents had done for him and his brother in 1955.”
“Justice Thomas and his wife made immeasurable personal and financial sacrifices and poured every ounce of their lives and hearts into giving their great nephew a chance to succeed.”
When the Thomases were trying to find a school where they could send Martin, Crow recommended Randolph-Macon Academy in Front Royal, Virginia, which he had previously attended. Crow had also funded scholarship programs for disadvantaged students at the school for decades, Paoletta wrote.
Crow paid only for Martin’s first year at Randolph-Macon and when Martin transferred to another school in Georgia, Crow paid for the first year at that school as well, Paoletta wrote.
“The Thomases love their great nephew. It is despicable that the press has dragged him into their effort to smear Justice Thomas. This story is another attempt to manufacture a scandal about Justice Thomas. But let’s be clear about what is supposedly scandalous now: Justice Thomas and his wife devoted twelve years of their lives to taking in and caring for a beloved child—who was not their own—just as Justice Thomas’s grandparents had done for him.
“They made many personal and financial sacrifices to do this. And along the way, their friends joined them in doing everything possible to give this child a future. Harlan Crow’s tuition payments made directly to these schools on behalf of Justice Thomas’s great nephew did not constitute a reportable gift.”
The federal Ethics in Government Act did not require that the tuition payments be publicly disclosed “because the definition of a ‘dependent child’ under the Ethics in Government Act (5 U.S.C. 13101 (2)) does not include a ‘great nephew,’” Paoletta wrote.
“It is limited to a ‘son, daughter, stepson or stepdaughter.’ Justice Thomas never asked Harlan Crow to pay for his great nephew’s tuition. And neither Harlan Crow, nor his company, had any business before the Supreme Court. This malicious story shows nothing except for the fact that the Thomases and the Crows are kind, generous, and loving people who tried to help this young man.”