GOP donor Harlan Crow bought Clarence Thomas’s childhood home to create ‘public museum’
Kaelan Deese
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Clarence Thomas sold real estate to Harlan Crow without reporting the sales, a new report has alleged, with the Republican donor stating he intended in part to create a museum in the Supreme Court justice’s honor.
In 2014, real estate developer Crow purchased a single-story home and two vacant lots in Savannah, Georgia, from an entity registered to Thomas, his mother, and the family of Thomas’s late brother, according to public records including a deed to the property obtained by ProPublica.
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The Washington Examiner located the three separate lots that were previously listed under the name of Thomas’s mother. Two of the previously vacant lots have since been transformed into upscale three-bedroom, three-bathroom homes, while the single-story home has undergone minimal changes since Crow’s 2014 purchase.
Crow issued a statement following the report, saying he purchased the single-story home to preserve it with the intention of eventually making it into a public museum about Thomas’s life.
The purchase from Crow amounted to $133,363 and marked the first known instance of payments between the pair. A report from the nonprofit outlet revealed last week that Crow had treated Thomas to years of luxury travel through “hospitality” but noted the justice never asked for such treatment.
But Thomas reportedly never disclosed the sale of the Savannah properties, leading some experts who spoke to ProPublica to speculate his action amounts to a possible violation of federal law that requires justices and officials to disclose most real estate sales over $1,000.
Thomas’s 2014 disclosure form for that year included a space to report the identity of any buyer’s private transactions, though the space is left blank.
Legal experts who spoke to the Washington Examiner said that omitting information related to capital gains on a sale of property valued over $1,000 might be problematic for the justice, though the ProPublica report does not clarify how much Thomas would have earned from the sale.
“What was the capital gain? Was there income or something of that sort?” Case Western University professor Jonathan Adler told the Washington Examiner.
“The sale value of the house as a whole doesn’t tell us that. The fact that his name or that his signature is on the deed doesn’t tell us that. So there’s other information we need before we can make that judgment,” Adler said.
Last Friday, Thomas issued a statement defending not disclosing the travel gifts given by Crow, which included trips to places including Indonesia and New Zealand and a visit to the all-male retreat known as Bohemian Grove in California.
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“Early in my tenure at the Court, I sought guidance from my colleagues and others in the judiciary, and was advised that this sort of personal hospitality from close personal friends, who did not have business before the Court, was not reportable,” Thomas wrote.
The original ProPublica report invoked a flurry of criticism from Democrats and progressives and prompted leadership on the Senate Judiciary Committee to call on Chief Justice John Roberts to investigate Thomas’s conduct.