VOSS Posted April 14, 2023 Posted April 14, 2023 Even if the private jet and yacht trips are “personal hospitality” this certainly is not
Sergi91 Posted April 14, 2023 Posted April 14, 2023 Will he resign? Unfortunately not under a Dem as president… unless there’s tons of pressure to do so but I doubt it.
ClashAndBurn Posted April 14, 2023 Posted April 14, 2023 22 minutes ago, Sergi91 said: Will he resign? Unfortunately not under a Dem as president… unless there’s tons of pressure to do so but I doubt it. The only chance a Democrat would ever have to replace him would be if Clarence Thomas were to die before next year. Manchin/Sinema might just decide not to have a vote in an election year if it happens in 2024, and of course the Senate will be lost for a LONG time after that. Not to mention he retires the instant a Republican president gets sworn in. He’s not as blissfully ignorant of his position as the monumentally unaware Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
VOSS Posted May 5, 2023 Posted May 5, 2023 Quote Conservative judicial activist Leonard Leo arranged for the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas to be paid tens of thousands of dollars for consulting work just over a decade ago, specifying that her name be left off billing paperwork, according to documents reviewed by The Washington Post. In January 2012, Leo instructed the GOP pollster Kellyanne Conway to bill a nonprofit group he advises and use that money to pay Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, the documents show. The same year, the nonprofit, the Judicial Education Project, filed a brief to the Supreme Court in a landmark voting rights case. Leo, a key figure in a network of nonprofits that has worked to support the nominations of conservative judges, told Conway that he wanted her to “give” Ginni Thomas “another $25K,” the documents show. He emphasized that the paperwork should have “No mention of Ginni, of course.” Conway’s firm, the Polling Company, sent the Judicial Education Project a $25,000 bill that day. Per Leo’s instructions, it listed the purpose as “Supplement for Constitution Polling and Opinion Consulting,” the documents show. Full article I imagine this stuff will just keep dripping out
Vermillion Posted May 5, 2023 Posted May 5, 2023 1 hour ago, midnightdawn said: Where are these leaks coming from Public records in many cases that people hadn’t been bothered to look through. Otherwise, FOIA requests I think.
John Slayne Posted May 10, 2023 Posted May 10, 2023 a corrupt, hypocritical conservative? i'm shocked!
Sergi91 Posted May 23, 2023 Posted May 23, 2023 2 minutes ago, Espresso said: Is he the spokesperson of the Supreme Court ?
Vermillion Posted May 23, 2023 Posted May 23, 2023 1 minute ago, Sergi91 said: Is he the spokesperson of the Supreme Court ? Might as well be at this point
VOSS Posted July 18, 2023 Posted July 18, 2023 Quote For months, Harlan Crow and members of Congress have been engaged in a fight over whether the billionaire needs to divulge details about his gifts to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, including globe-trotting trips aboard his 162-foot yacht, the Michaela Rose. Crow’s lawyer argues that Congress has no authority to probe the GOP donor’s generosity and that doing so violates a constitutional separation of powers between Congress and the Supreme Court. Tax data obtained by ProPublica provides a glimpse of what congressional investigators would find if Crow were to open his books to them. Crow’s voyages with Thomas, the data shows, contributed to a nice side benefit: They helped reduce Crow’s tax bill. As ProPublica reported in April, Crow lavished gifts on Thomas for over 20 years, often in the form of luxury trips on Crow’s jet and yacht. One focus of the investigations is whether Crow disclosed his generosity toward Thomas to the IRS, since large gifts are subject to the gift tax. Another is whether Crow treated his trips with Thomas as deductible business expenses. (While the data sheds light on how Crow might have accounted for Thomas’ trips, there are no clear implications for Thomas’ own taxes, experts said.) Crow’s entry into the world of superyacht owners came nearly 40 years ago. By 1984, his father, Trammell Crow, had forged his real estate fortune, and Harlan, then in his 30s, was taking an increasing role in the family business. That year, father and son worked together to erect the 50-story Trammell Crow Center in downtown Dallas. They also formed a company, Rochelle Charter Inc., with the purpose of leasing out their new yacht, the Michaela Rose. ProPublica’s trove of IRS data, which contains tax information for thousands of wealthy individuals, includes both Harlan Crow and his parents, who filed jointly. The data shows his parents with a majority share in Rochelle Charter. After they both died, Harlan Crow took full control in 2014. ProPublica’s data for the company runs from 2003 to 2015. Rochelle Charter reported losing money in 10 of those 13 years. Overall, the net losses totaled nearly $8 million, with about half flowing to Harlan Crow. By using those deductions to offset income from other sources, the Crows saved on taxes. (The wealthy often find ways to deduct the expense of a private jet; the records don’t make it clear whether Crow is doing so.) In order to claim these sorts of deductions, taxpayers must be engaged in a real business, one that’s actually trying to make a profit. If expenses dwarf revenues year after year, the IRS might conclude the activity is more of a hobby. That could lead to the deductions being disallowed, plus penalties. Nevertheless, the ultrawealthy often pass off their costly pastimes, like horse racing, as profit-seeking businesses. In doing so, they essentially dare the IRS to prove otherwise in an audit. For a yacht owner to meet the legal standard of operating a for-profit business, said Michael Kosnitzky, co-chair of the private client and family office group at the law firm Pillsbury Winthrop, “You have to be regularly chartering the yacht to third parties at fair market value,” typically through an independent charter broker. ProPublica interviewed around a dozen former crew members of the Michaela Rose, some of whom spent years aboard the ship, and none said they were aware of the boat ever being chartered. ProPublica also reviewed cruising schedules for three different years. According to the former staff and the schedules, use of the vessel appears to have been limited to Crow’s family, friends and executives of Crow’s company, along with their guests. Since April, when the Senate Finance Committee first sent Crow a long list of questions about Thomas’ trips on his jet and yacht, Crow has refused to provide extensive answers. But last month, his attorney, Michael Bopp of the law firm Gibson Dunn, did shed some light on how his chartering business worked: Crow leased from himself. According to Bopp, then, whenever Crow used his yacht, Crow (or one of his businesses) would pay his own company, Rochelle Charter, and Rochelle Charter would put that down as revenue. On the other side of the ledger would go the considerable expenses of operating the yacht: maintenance, crew, fuel and other costs. If, at the end of the year, Rochelle Charter’s revenue from chartering exceeded those expenses, Crow would pay tax on that income. If, as happened most years for which ProPublica has data, Rochelle Charter’s expenses far exceeded revenue, Crow would save on taxes. The Senate investigation has also focused on an entirely different tax question: Given that Thomas’ trips on Crow’s jets and yachts could easily be valued in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, did Crow report them to the IRS as taxable gifts? For each year that Crow gave gifts to someone that exceeded a certain threshold ($17,000 in 2023), he was required to file a gift tax return. That might or might not have resulted in a tax bill for Crow, depending on how much he’d already given to others over the course of his life. (The lifetime limit for total gifts is $12.9 million in 2023.) Source
VOSS Posted August 31, 2023 Posted August 31, 2023 Quote Justice Clarence Thomas disclosed Thursday that Republican megadonor Harlan Crow paid for private jet trips for Thomas in 2022 to attend a speech in Texas and a vacation at Crow’s luxurious New York estate, as ethics questions continue to rock the Supreme Court. In one instance, Thomas said he took the private transportation in May because of “increased security risk” following the leak of the Dobbs opinion overturning Roe v. Wade that had occurred a few days earlier. Newly released financial disclosure forms Thursday also amend prior reports to include information that had been “inadvertently omitted” from past forms including a real estate deal between Thomas and Crow back in 2014. A lawyer for Thomas released a statement and executive summary and said that there had been “no willful ethics transgressions” and that prior reporting errors were “strictly inadvertent.” The lawyer also refuted what he called a “partisan freezing frenzy” against the justice that he said amounted to “political blood sport.” Alito also released his 2022 financial disclosure forms on Thursday after receiving an extension from the May 15 deadline. Alito’s 13-page report confirms reporting by CNN earlier this year that a trip the justice took to Rome in 2022 to give a keynote speech to Notre Dame Law School’s Religious Liberty Initiative was paid for by the conservative group. The initiative’s legal clinic has filed a series of “friend-of-the-court” briefs in religious liberty cases before the Supreme Court since its founding in 2020. Source
GhostBox Posted December 18, 2023 Posted December 18, 2023 5 minutes ago, VOSS said: This is just ridiculous at this point. He and his corrupt wife should be no where near the Supreme Court.
Vermillion Posted December 18, 2023 Posted December 18, 2023 @VOSS Beat me to the punch - was gonna make a thread but this is fine. I really hope this news isn’t buried among the holidays.
VOSS Posted December 18, 2023 Posted December 18, 2023 2 minutes ago, Espresso said: @VOSS Beat me to the punch - was gonna make a thread but this is fine. I really hope this news isn’t buried among the holidays. I thought about it too but there are already like 3 threads about CT’s corruption lol He has no shame and there is not the political will to oust him or seriously reform the court, so I think the best we can hope for is that he’ll actually recuse himself from cases he clearly shouldn’t be anywhere near. The recent J6 recusal gives me a bit of hope there. 1
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