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      Liable for sexual assault, yes – but Trump’s political career is far from over | Lloyd Green

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      It is the worst of times and the best of times for Donald Trump. On Tuesday, he suffered another legal defeat. A federal jury found him liable for the sexual abuse, forcible touching, and defamation of E Jean Carroll. She was awarded $5m in damages.The 45th president, however, escaped liability for rape. He also leads Joe Biden in their latest hypothetical match-up, while Ron DeSantis fades in the rearview mirror.The midterms in November 2022 ended with an underwhelming GOP performance, DeSantis emerging triumphant in his reelection bid, and Trump licking his wounds. Not any more. He’s back.The public judges Biden to be less than sharp, and his stewardship of the economy similarly lacking. Record low unemployment has failed to dissipate the stings of inflation, high interest rates and an underperforming stock market. Retirement accounts have taken a hit. Food prices are high. Folks are angry.Meanwhile, Hunter Biden, the first son, faces the prospect of indictment on tax and gun charges. Biden professes that the boy has done nothing wrong, but even if he escapes prosecution, the sins of the son will likely be visited upon the father. It feels incestuous.Given this tableau, the impact of the Trump sexual assault outcome is likely to be muted, which is not to say that this latest loss won’t bring fallout.In the run-up to the verdict, the court released a deposition video that showed Trump unable to identify Carroll in a photograph. Instead, he confused her with Marla Maples, his second wife. In that moment, he put the lie to his non-denial-denial that Carroll wasn’t his “type”.The potential for fall debate drama over Trump’s brain fog is high. Remember when he bragged about his performance in a cognitive test (“Person, woman, man, camera, TV”)? His mental acuity, too, is now likely to become a campaign issue. Turnabout is fair play. Biden isn’t the only one with issues.Still, Trump has already survived the infamous Access Hollywood tape. “When you are a star, they let you do it … You can do anything,” he cackled back in the day.“I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK,” Trump mused seven years ago. He was definitely on to something.For many Republicans, Trump is their Caesar, a cultural avatar and warrior who possesses license to flout and defy convention. Conversely, the GOP primary field is too timid to comment, let alone criticize or condemn Trump.For rivals purportedly wedded to law and order, their silence is both deafening and unsurprising. Apparently, the wrath of Trump loyalists far exceeds any possible political benefit.Mike Pence still won’t go full bore at his ex-boss over the events of January 6. The former vice-president tiptoes around the topic. The fact that Trump was unperturbed by the mob’s calls for Pence to be hanged apparently warrants no further discussion.Then there’s DeSantis. Bashing Disney is one thing; trashing Trump is another. Glaringly, he failed to use the Carroll trial to further his own ambitions: he didn’t dispatch his wife, Casey DeSantis, there to offer thoughts and prayers for the plaintiff or Melania Trump.The cameras would have been rolling and DeSantis would have been credited for surgically wielding a scalpel instead of crudely brandishing his usual axe. Instead, DeSantis went overseas in a vain bid to grow foreign policy credentials.In London, he fell on his face as he attempted to woo the titans of British industry. “Ron DeTedious: DeSantis underwhelms Britain’s business chiefs”, the headline at Politico blared. “UK captains of industry lambast ‘low-wattage’ US presidential hopeful.”Low wattage is the new low energy. Once upon a time, Jeb Bush was Florida’s governor. The song remains the same.DeSantis also met Israel’s beleaguered Benjamin Netanyahu – who failed to release a photo of their meeting. At this juncture, DeSantis’s anticipated announcement feels stale and overdue.His purported legislative accomplishments have earned him the title of “2024’s Ted Cruz”; the most rightwing GOP contender, little else. He makes Wall Street’s Republicans uncomfortable. Once again, the non-Trump challenger is a mirage.Looking ahead Trump’s future is muddled. He remains under criminal indictment. Grand juries in DC and Georgia proceed apace. Separately, an October trial date is set in the $250m civil fraud action commenced by New York state against him, his three older children and the Trump Organization.It’s too soon for Trump to gloat, but he can definitely smile.
      Lloyd Green is an attorney in New York and served in the US Department of Justice from 1990 to 1992 More

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      Republicans thwart Democrats’ push to stiffen supreme court ethics rules

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      Arguing that the US supreme court has “the lowest ethical standards” of a court in the country, Senate Democrats on Tuesday demanded tighter rules on the nine justices but ran into resistance from Republicans who accused them of being bitter over recent conservative rulings.Democrats had convened a hearing of the Senate judiciary committee after a series of media reports on entanglements between two of the court’s conservative justices and parties with interests in its cases. These includes Clarence Thomas’s acceptance of luxury travel and a real estate deal from Republican megadonor Harlan Crow, and Neil Gorsuch’s sale of a property to a law firm executive with business before the court. Both were interactions the two justices did not fully disclose.The committee’s Democratic chair Dick Durbin, a senator from Illinois, said: “We wouldn’t tolerate this from a city council member or an alderman. It falls short of the ethical standards we expect of any public servant in America. And yet the supreme court won’t even acknowledge it’s a problem.“Ethics cannot simply be left to the discretion of the nation’s highest court. The court should have a code of conduct with clear and enforceable rules so justices and the American people know when conduct crosses the line. The highest court in the land should not have the lowest ethical standards.”But to Republicans, the Democrats’ calls for Thomas to be investigated and for the court to accept more stringent ethics rules represent nothing more than sour grapes. Last year, the supreme court’s six conservative justices handed down decisions that upended American life by overturning the precedent established by Roe v Wade to allow states to ban abortion, expanding the ability for Americans to carry concealed weapons without a permit, and reducing the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to regulate power plant emissions.Lindsey Graham, the top Republican on the panel, alluded to these rulings to argue Democrats were simply trying to undermine the court’s conservative majority.“This assault on justice Thomas is well beyond ethics. It is about trying to delegitimize a conservative court that was appointed through the traditional process,” Graham, a senator from South Carolina, said.Durbin had invited supreme court chief justice John Roberts to the hearing, but he declined to attend, citing the need to keep the court separate and free from congressional interference, while sending along a “statement on ethics principles and practices” signed by all of the court’s nine justices. Federal law requires judges, including supreme court justices, recuse themselves from any matter “in which his impartiality might reasonably be questioned”, but unlike other judges and federal employees, the court has no formal ethics code.Democrats say the nine highest judges in the country do not have ethics rules comparable to other judges or even many federal employees, and have introduced two pieces of legislation to impose a code of conduct and other requirements. Neither measure appears to have much of a chance in this Congress, where Republicans control the House of Representatives and could use the filibuster to block any legislation in the Senate.Before the hearing began, the Democrats’ push won an endorsement from J Michael Luttig, a former appeals court judge and noted conservative legal thinker who said Congress does have the authority to establish such standards.He wrote in a letter to the committee: “There should never come the day when the Congress of the United States is obligated to enact laws prescribing the ethical standards applicable to the non-judicial conduct and activities of the supreme court of the United States, even though it indisputably has the power under the constitution to do so, but paradoxically, does not have the power to require the court to prescribe such standards for itself.”Luttig was joined by progressive scholar Laurence Tribe, who wrote to the committee: “I regard legislation to impose ethical norms in a binding way on the justices as eminently sensible. Put simply, I see such legislation as a necessary though probably not sufficient response to the current situation.”Neither men opted to testify. Instead, Democrats heard from invited legal scholars who generally agreed that Congress had the power to implement a code of conduct on the supreme court, should they choose to do so. Experts invited by the Republican minority, meanwhile, said Congress did not have the power to impose a code of conduct on the supreme court, and downplayed the severity of the reports about the court’s ethics.Michael Mukasey, a former attorney general under George W Bush, said in the hearing, said: “It’s impossible to escape the conclusion that the public is being asked to hallucinate misconduct, so as to undermine the authority of justices who issue rulings with which the critics disagree, and thus to undermine the authority of the rulings themselves.” More

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      Leaked abortion draft made us ‘targets of assassination’, Samuel Alito says

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      Samuel Alito said the decision he wrote removing the federal right to abortion made him and other US supreme court justices “targets of assassination” but denied claims he was responsible for its leak in draft form.“Those of us who were thought to be in the majority, thought to have approved my draft opinion, were really targets of assassination,” Alito told the Wall Street Journal in an interview published on Friday.“It was rational for people to believe they might be able to stop the decision in Dobbs by killing one of us.”Alito wrote the ruling in Dobbs v Jackson, the Mississippi case that overturned Roe v Wade, which established the right to abortion in 1973.Alito’s draft ruling was leaked to Politico on 2 May last year, to uproar and protest nationwide. The final ruling was issued on 24 June.On 8 June, an armed man was arrested outside the home of Brett Kavanaugh, with Alito one of six conservatives on the nine-justice court. Charged with attempted murder of a United States judge, the man pleaded not guilty.The conservative chief justice, John Roberts, voted against overturning Roe, but the three rightwingers installed by Republicans under Donald Trump ensured it fell regardless.Progressives charged that a conservative, perhaps the hardline Alito, might have orchestrated the leak in an attempt to lock in a majority for such a momentous decision.Alito said: “That’s infuriating to me. Look, this made us targets of assassination. Would I do that to myself? Would the five of us have done that to ourselves? It’s quite implausible.”The leak was investigated by the supreme court marshal, without establishing a perpetrator.Saying the marshal “did a good job with the resources that were available”, Alito said he had “a pretty good idea who is responsible, but that’s different from the level of proof that is needed to name somebody”.Alito said the leak “was a part of an effort to prevent the Dobbs draft … from becoming the decision of the court. And that’s how it was used for those six weeks by people on the outside, as part of the campaign to try to intimidate the court.”He also said the leak “created an atmosphere of suspicion and distrust”. The justices “worked through it”, he said, “and last year we got our work done … but it was damaging”.Last November, after a bombshell New York Times report, Alito denied leaking information about a decision in a 2014 case about contraception and religious rights.His Wall Street Journal interview seemed bound to further anger Democrats and progressives. Justices regularly claim not to be politically motivated, but even with a Democrat in the White House the court has made other momentous conservative rulings, notably including a loosening of gun-control laws.Joe Biden’s administration has shied from calls for reform, including the idea justices should be added to establish balance or give liberals a majority, reflecting Democratic control of the White House and Senate.Alito told the Journal he did not “feel physically unsafe, because we now have a lot of protection”. He also said he was “driven around in basically a tank, and I’m not really supposed to go anyplace by myself without the tank and my members of the police force”.Complaining that criticism also stoked by corruption allegations against two more conservatives, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, were “new during my lifetime”, Alito said: “We are being hammered daily, and I think quite unfairly in a lot of instances.“And nobody, practically nobody, is defending us. The idea has always been that judges are not supposed to respond to criticisms, but if the courts are being unfairly attacked, the organised bar will come to their defense.”Alito said legal authorities had, “if anything … participated to some degree in these attacks”.He declined to comment on reporting by ProPublica about Thomas’s friendship with Harlan Crow, a Republican mega-donor who has bestowed gifts and purchases which Thomas largely did not disclose.But Alito did complain about how Kavanaugh was treated when allegations of sexual assault surfaced during his confirmation process.“After Justice Kavanaugh was accused of being a rapist … he made an impassioned speech, made an impassioned scene, and he was criticised because it was supposedly not judicious, not the proper behavior for a judge to speak in those terms.“I don’t know – if somebody calls you a rapist?”Accusations against Kavanaugh included attempted rape while a high school student. On Friday, the Guardian reported that new information showed serious omissions in a Senate investigation of the allegations, mounted when Republicans controlled the chamber.Polling shows that public trust in the supreme court has reached historic lows.“We’re being bombarded,” Alito complained, “and then those who are attacking us say: ‘Look how unpopular they are. Look how low their approval rating has sunk.’“Well, yeah, what do you expect when … day in and day out, ‘They’re illegitimate. They’re engaging in all sorts of unethical conduct. They’re doing this, they’re doing that’?”Such attacks, he said, “undermine confidence in the government [as] it’s one thing to say the court is wrong; it’s another thing to say it’s an illegitimate institution”.With some court-watchers, the interview landed heavily.Robert Maguire, research director for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, an independent watchdog, said: “There is no depth to the pity [justices] – and Alito in particular – feel for themselves when they face public criticism.” More

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      Judicial record undermines Clarence Thomas defence in luxury gifts scandal

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      Earlier this month, the supreme court justice Clarence Thomas put out a statement in which he addressed the storm of criticism that has engulfed him following the blockbuster ProPublica report that revealed his failure to disclose lavish gifts of luxury vacations and private-jet travel from a Texan real estate magnate.Thomas confirmed that the Dallas billionaire and Republican mega-donor Harlan Crow and his wife Kathy were “among our dearest friends”. Thomas admitted, too, that he and his wife Ginni had “joined them on a number of family trips during the more-than-a-quarter-century we have known them”.The justice, who is the longest-serving member of the nation’s highest court and arguably its most staunch conservative, insisted he had taken advice that “this sort of personal hospitality from close personal friends” did not have to be reported under federal ethics laws. He emphasized that the friend in question “did not have business before the court”.But a close look at Thomas’s judicial activities from the time he became friends with Crow, in the mid-1990s, suggests that the statement might fall short of the full picture. It reveals that a conservative organization affiliated with Crow did have business before the supreme court while Thomas was on the bench.In addition, Crow has been connected to several groups that over the years have lobbied the supreme court through so-called “amicus briefs” that provide legal arguments supporting a plaintiff or defendant.In 2003, the anti-tax group the Club for Growth joined other rightwing individuals and organisations, including the Republican senator Mitch McConnell and the National Rifle Association (NRA), in attempting to push back campaign finance restrictions on election spending.At the time of the legal challenge, from at least 2001 to 2004, Crow was a member of the Club for Growth’s prestigious “founders committee”. Though little is known about the role of the committee, it clearly commanded some influence over the group’s policymaking.During the course of a 2005 investigation into likely campaign finance violations by the Club for Growth, the Federal Election Commission (FEC) noted that rank-and-file club members could “vote on an annual policy question selected by the founders committee”.Crow has also been a major donor to the club, contributing $275,000 to its coffers in 2004 and a further $150,000 two years later.The 2003 legal challenge championed by the Club for Growth targeted the McCain-Feingold Act, which had been passed with cross-aisle backing the previous year. The legislation placed new controls on the amount of “soft money” political party committees and corporations could spend on elections.On appeal, a consolidated version of the lawsuit, Mitch McConnell v FEC, was taken up by the supreme court. In a majority ruling, the court allowed the most important elements of the McCain-Feingold Act to stand (though they were later nullified by the supreme court’s contentious 2010 Citizens United ruling).Thomas was livid. He issued a 25-page dissenting opinion that sided heavily with the anti-regulation stance taken by the Club for Growth and its rightwing allies. Thomas began his opinion by breathlessly accusing his fellow justices of upholding “what can only be described as the most significant abridgment of the freedoms of speech and association since the civil war”.By the time Thomas issued his opinion in December 2003 he had already forged his deep relationship with Crow. According to the billionaire, they first met at a conference in Dallas in 1994 – by which time Thomas had already been nominated by George HW Bush to the most powerful court in the land.The businessman had already showered Thomas with several lavish gifts before the McCain-Feingold challenge reached his court. Thomas disclosed for instance a 1997 flight from Washington to northern California on Crow’s private jet to attend an all-male retreat at Bohemian Grove at which the justice went on to become a regular guest.There was also a Bible once owned by Frederick Douglass, then valued at $19,000. In 2001 Crow made a $150,000 donation to create a Clarence Thomas wing within the Savannah, Georgia, library the justice frequented as a child.The federal law 28 US Code section 455 requires any federal judge – including the nine supreme court justices – to recuse themselves from any proceeding “in which his impartiality might reasonably be questioned”.ProPublica’s explosive investigation earlier this month exposed undeclared gifts and travel that have continued to be bestowed by the billionaire on Thomas to this day. They included a nine-day vacation with Ginni in Indonesia in the summer of 2019 the cost of which probably exceeded $500,000.In a later report, ProPublica revealed that in 2014 Thomas sold his mother’s home in Savannah to Crow. That transaction was also left undisclosed.The ProPublica disclosures have prompted a debate about the need for greater scrutiny of the conduct of supreme court justices. Top Democrats have called for an official inquiry into Thomas’s behavior and for all the justices to be subject to a strict ethics code.The progressive Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, speaking on CNN, decried Crow’s largesse as “very serious corruption” and called for Thomas to be impeached.Gabe Roth, executive director of Fix the Court, a non-partisan group which advocates supreme court reform, said that a crisis of trust in Thomas’s ethical judgments had been bubbling below the surface for some time. “The reason that it is so salient now is that the supreme court has grown exponentially in power since Justice Thomas took that first private plane ride in 1997 – when the court becomes the most powerful government body, then ethics issues become all the more critical.”The Guardian contacted Thomas at the supreme court but did not receive a response.This week, the normally media-shy Crow, who has assets valued at $30bn and who has donated at least $13m to Republicans, gave an in-depth interview to the Dallas Morning News. He claimed the furore around his relations with Thomas was a “political hit-job” by the liberal media.He insisted he and Thomas were just friends who spent their time talking about their kids and animals. “We talk about dogs a lot,” he said.Asked whether he ever considered their friendship as a ticket to quid pro quo, he replied: “Every single relationship – a baby’s relationship to his mom – has some kind of reciprocity.”Crow’s office, in a statement to the Guardian, disputed any relevance of Crow’s links with the Club for Growth, his friendship with Thomas, and the justice’s opinion in the McConnell v FEC case. “Harlan Crow was not a party to the litigation, was only a financial supporter of Club for Growth, and had no role whatsoever in any Club for Growth litigation decisions.”The statement continued: “Any insinuation that Justice Thomas wrote his opinion in this case because Harlan Crow was a supporter is ridiculous as Justice Thomas had already expressed these same views in a previous case, Nixon v Shrink MO PAC.”The billionaire’s office insisted that Thomas’s skepticism of the constitutionality of campaign finance regulation “was established before he had even met Harlan Crow”.Crow has never personally come before the supreme court, and denies ever trying to influence Thomas on any legal or political issue. But he has served on the boards of at least three conservative groups that have lobbied the supreme court through amicus briefs. Early in his friendship with Thomas, Crow sat on the national board of the now defunct Center for the Community Interest, which filed at least eight amicus briefs in supreme court cases backing rightwing causes such as sweeping crime off the streets and countering pornography.He has also been a trustee for more than 25 years of the American Enterprise Institute, a thinktank advancing free enterprise ideas that has filed several supporting briefs to the court. In 2001 AEI gave Thomas a bust of Abraham Lincoln then valued at $15,000.Crow is an overseer of the Hoover Institution, a conservative thinktank based at Stanford University. In February, Hoover senior fellows led an amicus brief filed to Thomas and his fellow justices challenging the $400bn student loan debt-relief program introduced by Joe Biden.The supreme court is likely to rule on whether the scheme can go ahead this summer. In oral arguments in February, Thomas was among the rightwing justices who hold the supermajority who indicated they were skeptical of the program, raising the possibility that the court will scupper the hopes of more than 40 million Americans eligible for the debt relief. More

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      The case(s) against Trump: New York charges only beginning of legal woes

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      It was the day that Donald Trump got mugged by reality. After years of dodging legal accountability, the former US president found himself being driven towards a New York courtroom where he would be charged with a crime.“WOW, they are going to ARREST ME,” he wrote on his Truth Social media platform, the true scale of his predicament finally dawning on him. “Can’t believe this is happening in America.”But dramatic as the day was, as Trump pleaded not guilty to 34 felony counts of falsifying business records relating to hush money payments, it represented only the first drop of rain in what could be a legal thunderstorm. Several more cases are fast approaching and some are potentially far more devastating.Whereas the ex-president has so far been able to spin the hush money indictment to his political advantage as he seeks to win back the White House in 2024, experts suggest that the quantity and gravity of the upcoming investigations could ultimately bury him and his electoral chances.Tuesday’s court appearance, in which Trump – the first former US president in history to be arrested and arraigned on criminal charges – had to answer meekly to a judge and found there was no one to hold doors open for him, was the humbling and sobering moment that he discovered his legal troubles are no longer theoretical.Michael D’Antonio, a political commentator and author of The Truth About Trump, said: “His attitude prior to this has always been obstinance and a chin-jutting pride and refusal to appear to be affected. But he sure appeared to be affected this time. There was a quality of a cow being led to the slaughter.”He added: “He must realise that he’s in trouble and that the situation is grave and that showed on his face. He doesn’t care as much about the proceedings politically as he cares about the story that he can tell about them. He is a storyteller above all and a fabulist. If he can tell a story that motivates his base and also manage to stay out of prison, he will argue that it’s a victory over a corrupt system.”Trump himself will not be in jeopardy when Dominion Voting Systems’ $1.6bn defamation lawsuit against Fox News goes to trial, currently scheduled for 17 April. But the case, which could hear testimony from the Fox Corporation executives Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch and an array of Fox News hosts, could provide some deeply embarrassing details about how the ex-president is perceived by the network.Then, on 25 April, a civil trial in a New York lawsuit involving Trump is scheduled to begin. E Jean Carroll, a former Elle magazine columnist, accuses Trump of defaming her by denying he raped her in New York’s Bergdorf Goodman department store dressing room in late 1995 or early 1996. Carroll is seeking monetary damages and it is not known whether Trump will testify.Another important trial is set for 2 October. Letitia James, the New York attorney general, is suing Trump and his Trump Organization for fraud. James has said her office found more than 200 examples of misleading asset valuations between 2011 and 2021, and that Trump inflated his net worth by billions of dollars.James said the scheme was intended to help Trump obtain lower interest rates on loans and better insurance coverage. The civil lawsuit seeks to permanently bar Trump and three of his adult children from running companies in New York state, and recoup at least $250m obtained through fraud.Before then, there may have been developments in Georgia, where a prosecutor is investigating Trump’s alleged efforts to overturn his 2020 election defeat in that state. Fani Willis, the Fulton county district attorney who will ultimately decide whether to pursue charges, told a judge in January that a special grand jury had completed its work and that decisions were “imminent”.If convicted, Trump would not be able to seek clemency from a future Republican president since such pardons do not apply to state offences. Barbara McQuade, a law professor at the University of Michigan, said: “The most perilous is probably the case out of Georgia because it relates to election interference and because there is no ability for Trump, if he becomes president again, to pardon himself.“We know the grand jury foreperson said that they were recommending indictments of more than a dozen people and she strongly hinted one of those people was Trump. That one might pose the most danger to him at the moment.”Meanwhile the justice department has investigations under way into both Trump’s actions in the 2020 election, including lies that led to the January 6 insurrection, and his retention of highly classified documents after leaving the White House in 2021. Both are overseen by Jack Smith, a war crimes prosecutor and political independent.When he returned to his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida on Tuesday night and hurled abuse at the investigators one by one, Trump devoted the lion’s share of his comments – and patent falsehoods – to the classified documents case, implying that he recognises it as posing the maximum danger.The FBI seized 13,000 documents from Mar-a-Lago last August; about 100 documents were marked classified and some were designated top secret. Earlier this week the Washington Post newspaper reported that investigators have fresh evidence pointing to possible obstruction of justice by the former president as he resisted a subpoena demanding the return of all classified documents.As for the charges over hush money payments during the 2016 election campaign, Trump is expected back in court in New York on 4 December – about two months before the official start of the 2024 Republican presidential primary calendar.Norman Eisen, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution thinktank in Washington, said: “The moment he set foot into official custody in New York probably was a chilling realisation for him of the difficulties that lie ahead, and not just in this case, although it’s serious.“It’s that feeling of the walls closing in from every direction. He’s got a lot of serious problems on his hands. Even in a Republican primary, the compound of all of these challenges will be very deleterious because Republican primary voters are going to ask: can he win?”Asked if the 45th president could end up in prison, Eisen, author of Overcoming Trumpery: How to Restore Ethics, the Rule of Law, and Democracy, replied yes. “It won’t be easy, it may not be fast but it’s certainly possible,” he said.Beneath the cries of a witch-hunt by Democrats and the “deep state”, and despite a bounce in primary polls as Republicans rally in his defence, Trump, 76, may no longer be sleeping easy at Mar-a-Lago. Allan Lichtman, a history professor at American University in Washington, commented: “He looked like a man with pins sticking into his torso. He is scared stiff.“Sure, he’s going to bluster and express bravado and confidence, but he is terrified of being confined. No doubt about that. This is the beginning of the first day of the rest of his life. The issues are just going to pile on. It’s extraordinary. Outside of the mafia, it’s hard to find any American with such legal problems.” More

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      Clarence Thomas faces impeachment calls after reports of undisclosed gifts

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      Clarence Thomas, the most conservative justice on the US supreme court, is facing renewed calls for impeachment after it was reported that for two decades he has accepted undisclosed luxury gifts from a Republican mega-donor.Thomas may have violated financial disclosure rules when he failed to disclose travel on yachts and jets and other gifts funded by the property billionaire Harlan Crow and uncovered by ProPublica.It found that Thomas flies on Crow’s Bombardier Global 5000 jet and holidays on Crow’s 162ft super-yacht. He has enjoyed holidays at Crow’s ranch in Texas and joined him at an exclusive all-male California retreat. The justice usually spends about a week each summer at Crow’s private resort in the Adirondack mountains in New York.The revelations prompted sharp criticism by Democrats of Thomas, who after 31 years is the longest-serving justice and an influential voice in the rightwing majority that last year ended the right to abortion.Dick Durbin, a Democrat from Illinois and chair of the Senate judiciary committee, said: “This behavior is simply inconsistent with the ethical standards the American people expect of any public servant, let alone a justice on the supreme court.“Today’s report demonstrates, yet again, that supreme court justices must be held to an enforceable code of conduct, just like every other federal judge. The ProPublica report is a call to action, and the Senate judiciary committee will act.”Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a progressive congresswoman from New York, tweeted: “This is beyond party or partisanship. This degree of corruption is shocking – almost cartoonish. Thomas must be impeached. Barring some dramatic change, this is what the [chief justice John] Roberts court will be known for: rank corruption, erosion of democracy, and the stripping of human rights.”Impeachment remains unlikely, even given other calls regarding the pro-Trump activities of Thomas’s wife, the rightwing activist Ginni Thomas, and not just because Republicans hold the House. Only one supreme court justice has ever been impeached: Samuel Chase, in 1804-05. He was acquitted in the Senate.Thomas, 74, has made his humble origins a central part of his identity. He was born in Savannah, Georgia, and learned Geechee, a Creole language spoken by the descendants of slaves, before standard English. He was abandoned by his father but says his grandfather instilled his work ethic.In a documentary which Crow helped finance, Thomas described no-frills tastes: “I prefer the RV parks. I prefer the Walmart parking lots to the beaches and things like that. There’s something normal to me about it. I come from regular stock, and I prefer that – I prefer being around that.”ProPublica told a different story, drawn from flight records, internal documents and interviewees ranging from super-yacht staff to members of the secretive Bohemian Club to an Indonesian scuba-diving instructor.It found that Thomas’s friendship with Crow has enabled him to experience luxuries he would never have been able to afford on his salary of $285,000. For example, in 2019, Thomas and his wife flew on Crow’s jet to Indonesia for nine days island-hopping on Crow’s yacht. The trip would have cost more than $500,000.ProPublica also noted that each summer Thomas spends about a week at Camp Topridge, Crow’s Adirondacks resort. The 105-acre property offers boathouses, a clay tennis court, a batting cage and a replica of Hagrid’s hut from Harry Potter. A painting there shows Thomas enjoying a cigar alongside Crow and talking with influential rightwingers including the legal activist Leonard Leo.ProPublica said: “The extent and frequency of Crow’s apparent gifts to Thomas have no known precedent in the modern history of the US supreme court.”It said the trips do not appear in Thomas’s financial disclosures and cited two experts saying that appears to violate a law that requires justices, judges, members of Congress and federal officials to declare most gifts.In a statement, Crow denied seeking to influence supreme court decisions. The Dallas businessman said he and his wife, Kathy, had been friends with the Thomases since 1996 and “the hospitality we have extended … is no different from the hospitality we have extended to our many other dear friends”.Crow added: “Justice Thomas and Ginni never asked for any of this hospitality. We have never asked about a pending or lower-court case, and Justice Thomas has never discussed one, and we have never sought to influence Justice Thomas on any legal or political issue.“More generally, I am unaware of any of our friends ever lobbying or seeking to influence Justice Thomas on any case, and I would never invite anyone who I believe had any intention of doing that. These are gatherings of friends.”ProPublica said it reviewed a record showing that “during just one July 2017 trip, Thomas’ fellow guests included execs at Verizon and PricewaterhouseCoopers, major GOP donors, and one of the leaders of the conservative American Enterprise Institute thinktank”.Sarah Lipton-Lubet, president of Take Back the Court Action Fund, said: “How many of Crow’s pet interests have had business in front of the court while Thomas was enjoying the lifestyle of the rich and famous on the right-wing mega-donor’s dime?“Thomas’ repeated mockery of basic ethical standards calls into question every decision he has imposed on millions of Americans.”Meagan Hatcher-Mays, of the grassroots movement Indivisible, called for the Senate judiciary committee to investigate “Thomas’s reported ethical lapses, and move quickly to hold hearings and votes on the Supreme Court Ethics, Transparency, and Recusal Act.“The American people want to believe that the court is fair, that the justices behave ethically, and that their decisions are free from undue political influence.”Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond, Virginia, said the “alleged failure to report Harlan Crow’s substantial expenditures … could further undermine public trust in the supreme court and Thomas specifically.“This is especially important now, when public trust in the court has plummeted in light of Dobbs overruling of Roe v Wade and the leaked opinion.” More

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      Donald Trump’s prosecution is a triumph | Osita Nwanevu

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      Trump’s prosecution is a triumph. Not a shame. Not a tragedy. A triumph ⁠— one of the great events in American presidential history. The public and the pundits might disagree by the end of Trump’s trial in Manhattan ⁠— perhaps the first of a few ⁠— but the significance of what district attorney Alvin Bragg has managed to do will be wholly unsullied, in substance, by the outcome of his case.One of the major questions in American political and legal thought has been whether presidents may be allowed to commit crimes. As it stands, the position of the Justice Department is that they may ⁠— for half a century, it has held that a president cannot face criminal prosecution while in office. And while there’s not even a theoretical bar to prosecuting a president once they leave office, no one had ever tried it, leaving the question of whether criminal laws functionally apply to presidents at all, as a practical matter, a matter of speculation.Here Alvin Bragg has bravely taken a stand: a person may, in fact, be indicted for a crime even if they were once president— just as though they were an ordinary person to whom laws applied. This is tremendous news. No rifts have opened in the time-space continuum. Frogs, locusts, and lice have yet to descend upon Manhattan. For the time being, it appears that a prosecutor really may attempt to hold a president ⁠— or at least a former president ⁠— accountable for a suspected crime without reality collapsing in on itself. What’s more, Bragg’s indictment amounts to an insistence that a former president may be indicted even for a relatively low-level crime like falsifying documents ⁠— just like any other white collar criminal.To be sure, as many observers have already written, Bragg may have his work cut out for him. His case against Trump is a multi-part argument ⁠that hinges on the idea that Trump concealed hush money payments to abet violations of election law. It has troubled many that Bragg may lose this case. And this is true. Sometimes prosecutors lose cases.But it would be wrong to suppose on that basis, as some have, that prosecutors who believe presidents have committed crimes have a responsibility to behave like political strategists: to bear public opinion and the expectations of the press in mind by only bringing forth the simplest, most straightforward cases and pursuing only the largest, most eye-popping crimes while letting other offenses slide.They’ve no obligation to calibrate the content and timing of their cases to maximize the possibility of success in other wholly unrelated cases in other jurisdictions; the feelings of a defendant’s fans and supporters should be of no account whatsoever. This is what it means, to use a phrase Trump himself has long been fond of, to be a nation of laws. It is especially ridiculous, on the latter point, to suppose that there’s a prosecutorial approach Bragg or anyone else might have taken that would have quelled the rage of a political constituency that is now fully beyond reason and respect for the law. Predictably, Bragg has drawn both explicit threats and implicit comparisons to Pontius Pilate this holy week; Trump, per Marjorie Taylor Greene, now sits next to Christ himself among historical figures “persecuted by radical, corrupt governments.”On Thursday, Trump’s chief rival for the Republican presidential nomination, Florida governor Ron DeSantis ⁠— St Peter? ⁠— reiterated that he would refuse to cooperate with an extradition request from New York in the event that Trump refused to surrender on his own. Things didn’t come to that, but the pundits aren’t wrong to predict that a lot of chaos and drama will come our way in the coming months. And that’s especially frightful to all those who’ve come to believe political polarization and the heightening of partisan tensions are the central problems of our time ⁠— a notion that’s spurred commentary suggesting America might be too divided to bear Trump’s prosecution. To wit, a report from The New York Times Thursday speculated that this and Trump’s other potential indictments might “shake the timbers of the republic” or “tear the country apart.”But what would it mean, actually, to “tear the country apart?” We’ve seen and survived civil war. We’ve seen cities razed and presidents killed. Social unrest, economic collapse ⁠— these are cornerstones of the American experience. A public health crisis has taken the lives of more than one million people in this country over the last three years. The reactions to Trump’s prosecution will remain loud and ludicrous. They may well turn violent ⁠— we can put nothing safely beyond a party that rallies easily to the defense of a man who attempted a coup and roused a mob into an attack on the Capitol.But there is something rather pathetic about the idea that a president’s trial might be among the greatest trials our nation has faced. Nothing that’s coming will break us. Our republic, for all its many faults, is made of stronger stuff than that. We will be tested, yes. But let’s take a moment, too, to recognize that Bragg has already passed a critical test on our behalf.
      Osita Nwanevu is a Guardian US columnist More