A billionaire friend of Justice Clarence Thomas is refusing to satisfy Senate Democrats’ demands to reveal a full list of “payments or gifts of travel and lodging” given to Supreme Court justices, suggesting it lacks the authority to do so.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin (D-IL) and fellow member Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) revealed the correspondence on Friday from billionaire David Sokol’s counsel in response to its “ongoing oversight investigation” into alleged ethical violations by members of the high court.
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Sokol’s personal friendship with Thomas spans over two decades, and “there is none” of a business relationship, lawyer Matthew Schneider wrote the Democrats, noting, “We have concluded that the Committee lacks the authority to investigate this personal relationship.”
Durbin and Whitehouse have long sought to surface potential ethical dilemmas on the high court, especially in the wake of nonprofit ProPublica’s reporting on Republican-appointed justices, and vowed Friday to “continue to investigate these ethical violations.”
“This letter from one of the billionaires who has been swarming around the Supreme Court demonstrates why Justice Alito’s public comments were clearly unethical,” the pair said in a joint statement.
Schneider argued, “We can discern no plausible connection between an enumerated power and imposing an ethics code on the Supreme Court. … Indeed, as the Committee certainly knows, Justice Samuel Alito recently made this same point.”
The response from Sokol’s counsel appeared to point to Justice Samuel Alito‘s summer Wall Street Journal interview with attorney David Rivkin in which Alito said, “No provision in the Constitution gives [Congress] the authority to regulate the Supreme Court — period.”
Durbin has tried without success to have Chief Justice John Roberts open some form of investigation into Alito, saying the justice was improperly opining on a piece of legislation Whitehouse proposed in July, the Supreme Court Ethics, Recusal, and Transparency Act, which would require the high court to adopt a code of conduct and mechanism to investigate alleged violations of it by justices.
The lawmakers’ inquiry to Sokol, a former top executive at Berkshire Hathaway, was sent in response to ProPublica’s August report that revealed Thomas didn’t disclose “lavish gifts” from billionaires, including oil baron Paul Novelly and Sokol.
Publication of Sokol’s response comes one day after the pair of Democrats rejected an offer by Republican megadonor Harlan Crow, another wealthy friend who has traveled with Thomas, to view a list of luxury vacations he gifted Thomas over the past five years.
Durbin and Whitehouse argued Crow’s “partial” offering of his trips with Thomas was insufficient and would leave out information they believed was necessary to “inform the Committee’s ongoing legislative efforts” for Supreme Court ethics reform.
A spokesperson for the office of Crow told the Washington Examiner it was “disappointing” that “members of one party forced the committee to reject a mutually respectful compromise.”
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The megadonor’s office said the rejection of the “reasonable compromise” he offered underscored that efforts from Democrats like Durbin and Whitehouse are a “political campaign designed to discredit a sitting Supreme Court Justice and not a legitimate effort to legislate.”
“Considering the committee has already passed the legislation for which it says it needs this information, and it took nearly four months to simply say no to a compromise offer, it’s difficult to imagine a basis or a need for further cooperation, but we remain hopeful both parties can work toward a satisfactory resolution.”
