Clarence Thomas’ ongoing “income” from long-defunct company is just the start of his corruption nightmare
Even in the wake of the revelation that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has spent years secretly accepting huge gifts from a politically motivated donor, the man obviously has no shame and isn’t going to resign out of pure embarrassment. The only thing that could prompt him to resign is if his corruption turns out to be so ugly, he comes to fear that the DOJ could actually get criminal charges against him to stick, and he decides to bail in the hope of making it all go away.
But there’s a world of difference between Thomas being “obviously guilty” in the court of public opinion, and a trial jury actually convicting him on corruption charges. The latter requires proof of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, and Thomas is still at the stage where he can carve out a reasonable doubt defense by claiming to have naively not realized the severity of what he was doing.
That said, this was always going to get uglier. When a public office holder is brazen enough to have been accepting corrupt gifts for years on end, it’s unlikely that that office holder stopped at just one kind of corrupt gift, or just one benefactor. Now that the media knows what to dig for when it comes to Thomas’ corruption, it felt like it would be just a matter of days before more dirt surfaced. Sure enough, that’s now happened already.
It turns out Clarence Thomas is still reporting $50,000 to $100,000 in annual income from a real estate company called “Ginger, Ltd., Partnership” – which according to the Washington Post, was originally launched by Ginni Thomas’ family but hasn’t existed in seventeen years. It turns out that income has actually been coming from a new company called “Ginger Holdings, LLC.”
Thomas will once again no doubt claim that this was merely a negligent oversight, an innocent paperwork failure. But it raises new questions that will now be investigated. Why did this company go out of business in 2006, rise from the ashes under a new but similar name, and continue to pay money to Clarence Thomas every year?
But what really matters here is the larger pattern. Clarence Thomas has been receiving huge gifts from a right wing donor, but “forgot” to report them. Clarence Thomas has been receiving significant annual income from his wife’s real estate holdings, but when those holding were mysteriously shut down and reincorporated under a different name, he “forgot” to let anyone know about it.
If the media keeps digging into Clarence Thomas’ financial history – and at this point it absolutely will keep digging – it’s just a matter of time before one of these “errors” exposes the kind of crime that prosecutors can get a criminal conviction on.
Think about what happened to Donald Trump in Manhattan. It’s one thing to falsify your company’s records. But on its own it’s only a misdemeanor, and if you can make a reasonable doubt argument that it was an honest oversight, it’s nothing. However, if it can be proven that you falsified your records in an attempt at covering up some other crime, then suddenly you’re Donald Trump and you’re getting indicted on thirty-four felony counts.
Keep in mind that there would be no point whatsoever for the DOJ (or any other prosecutor) to criminally indict Clarence Thomas, unless it first finds the kind of evidence that can deliver a conviction at trial – and so far we have not seen that. But we know there’s a whole lot more coming than merely what’s been dug up so far. And now we’re seeing that Thomas has been rather sloppy at covering his tracks, which is always a good sign when you’re hoping to catch someone in the act of something.
And again, Clarence Thomas will only resign if he reaches a threshold where he concludes that he’s going to end up criminally indicted (and convicted) if he remains on the bench, and that disappearing quietly is his only remaining hope of shifting the attention away from himself. We know that threshold exists, we just don’t if we’ll ever reach it. But each time more of Thomas’ lifetime of corrupt dirt gets dug up, we move incrementally closer to that threshold.
In the meantime, our best option for dealing with Clarence Thomas is to make him the face of the 2024 election. He’s a deranged extremist and he’s a corrupt criminal. What’s not to hate? Persuadable voters out there need to be made to understand that a vote for the Democratic Party is a vote against Thomas and his evil ilk. This guy is the perfect poster child for everything that’s gone so horribly wrong with the Republican Party. Now let’s use it to go win some elections.
