Supreme Court Justice Faces Lawsuit for Ethic Violations and Avoiding Tax Laws

However, it has recently come to light that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas may be guilty of both tax evasion and questionable ethical decisions over the past several years. Now, authorities are investigating the allegations.

Today, Thomas is the court’s longest-serving, oldest member, and, by all accounts, the most conservative member. While other justices have come and gone, he’s remained and truly stayed the same.

Before he was even approved for the position, he was charged with sexual harassment by a former colleague. But much to everyone’s surprise, he was still awarded the position.

It seems that Thomas has been hiding the fact he has been receiving exceptionally valuable gifts from supportive billionaires over the past few years. Some are saying these “gifts” not only should be taxed but also violate an understood code of morality that public servants are expected to follow.

Some reports even say that the gifts were specifically given to supplement Thomas’ minimal salary as a Supreme Court Justice, and if that is true, that money would unquestionably be taxable.

Clarence Thomas released a statement that said, “As friends do, we have joined them on several family trips during the more than quarter century we have known them.”

Because, even if the gifts were, in fact, simple gestures of goodwill, the judge would still have had to pay taxes on them at the end of every year.

Brian Galle, a law professor at Georgetown University Law Center, explained, “If there are in fact people saying more or less, ‘We’re offering these goodies to the justice so that he will stay in his role’. . . it sounds like it would be taxable income for him.”

Within a statement, he said none of his friends who offered him money, tuition, flights, or vacations had “business before the Court.”

Unreported income is a serious crime in and of itself, so the IRS and the other government organizations looking into Thomas’ gifts will continue to investigate until they decide whether or not to charge him.

However, it is highly unlikely that Thomas will ever see the world from behind bars, even if he is found guilty of accepting and hiding expensive gifts or even bribes.

David Cay Johnston, a lecturer at Syracuse University’s College of Law, explained, “What Clarence Thomas has done would result in not only any judges in America being removed from the bench, but there is a good chance it would result in criminal prosecution for income tax fraud and for false filings in his mandatory financial ethics disclosure statements.”

However, justices in the past have accepted expensive trips and other benefits during their role on the bench from private sponsors, some of which have been in the court before.

Justices from every political persuasion and leaning have taken trips paid for by other parties where they received lodging, transportation, and food expenses paid for to some degree.

Khan paid for Ginsberg to take a trip to Israel where she received an award from the Genesis Prize Foundation. What’s worse is that Khan had been involved with business in the court just a year prior.

Scalia was actually on one such subsidized trip when he died at Cibolo Creek Ranch resort in West Texas.

One of these trips was to the exclusive island of Nantucket, the flight paid for by billionaire David Rubenstein. Rubenstein runs one of the world’s largest hedge funds. Breyer and Rubenstein were reportedly friends and Breyer rode on his private plane for a wedding on the island.

The property was purchased by the CEO of a law firm that was connected to several cases that had come before the Supreme Court in the past. During the disclosure, Gorsuch allegedly left a box blank that would have identified the person who gave him the money for the sale.

Supreme Court Justices made $268,000 per year in 2021, with the chief justice making $280,500. The current chief justice in the United States Supreme Court is John Roberts.

For example. the disclosures don’t include an estimated monetary value for the services justices are given.

“Once again, the justices took dozens of trips across the country and around the world last year in which a third party paid for their dining, airfare, and accommodations, with the public left in the dark about how lavish these trips may have been,” Roth said in 2019.

Liberal Justice Ginsberg at the time compared the suggestion to the USSR under Joseph Stalin. “Stalinism, saying that such oversight ‘is a really scary idea’ that ‘sounds to me very much like [how] the Soviet Union was.”

Organizations like ProPublica, the New York Times, and the Lever uncovered the largest secret politician donation in American history in 2022. Reportedly, a secret $1.6 billion payment to a Republican political group went undisclosed because of American tax laws.

A 2022 Gallup poll found that confidence in the US Supreme Court fell to a historic low. In that poll, only 25% of Americans reported having confidence in the Supreme Court. Something needs to change if the court hopes to regain the trust of Americans, otherwise, some may dismiss the authority of the court altogether for important decisions in the future.