Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s longtime friend Mark Paoletta last Thursday issued a lengthy statement blasting the latest hit piece on the conservative justice, the Washington Times reported.
That same day, the left-wing site ProPublica released its latest attempted smear of Thomas, revealing that the justice’s longtime friend Harlan Crow paid the private school tuition costs for a great-nephew, whom Justice Thomas and his wife Ginny took when he was only six.
According to the report, the tuition costs for the two schools could have exceeded $150,000.
The report attempts to frame the tuition payments as an ethics violation since Justice Thomas never disclosed the payments as gifts.
But in his statement, Paoletta, who served as general counsel to the Trump administration’s Office of Management and Budget, argued that the great-nephew’s tuition payments did not constitute a gift subject to disclosure since the payments were made, not to Thomas, but directly to the schools.
Paoletta also said that under the “Ethics in Government Act,” disclosure is only for a “dependent child,” and that does not include a “great-nephew.” He added that Justice Thomas didn’t ask Harlan Crow to pay the tuition and reiterated that neither Crow nor his company has ever had “any business before the Supreme Court.”
Paoletta described the ProPublica report as a “malicious story” and “another attempt to manufacture a scandal” about the conservative justice. He argued that the ProPublica report only shows that the Thomases and the Crows are both “kind, generous, and loving people who tried to help this young man.”
Over the last month, leftwing outlets, including ProPublica, The Washington Post, and the New York Times have published a series of hit pieces on several of the conservative Supreme Court Justices that Congressional Democrats have used as a pretext to call for changes to the Court. Some House Democrats, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other members of the Squad, have even called for Justice Thomas to resign or be impeached.
