This is a part of Disorder in the Court, a weeklong series on the legal press and the most explosive Supreme Court in generations: how we cover it, how we’ve failed, and how we can do better.
In early April, three reporters at ProPublica published an explosive story about the friendship between billionaire Republican donor Harlan Crow and Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Joshua Kaplan, Justin Elliott, and Alex Mierjeski reported that Crow had flown Thomas all over the world for fancy holidays and hosted him in a variety of luxury settings—none of which was disclosed on required financial filings. After publishing the story, tips came in detailing other largesse: In 2014, Crow had purchased the home where Thomas’ mother lived—and continues to live to this day—and also paid for the private schooling of Thomas’ grandnephew, whom he raised as his own son.
These stories have had huge impact: Members of Congress have demanded an investigation into the undisclosed travel of Thomas on Crow’s dime, ethics watchdogs have called for new rules regarding Supreme Court justices and their financial ties to donors, and journalists—notably here at Slate—have begun a conversation about just how important it is to cover the justices as well as the court itself. The rules are changing.
So how did ProPublica get the goods? Reporter Josh Kaplan was kind enough to answer a few questions over email about just how they managed to blow the lid off the troubling connections between Harlan Crow and Justice Clarence Thomas.
Hillary Frey: Disclosure forms filed by the justices were one place you were rooting around, but the “behind the scenes” piece I mentioned above also noted that you hunted in some “obscure corners of the internet.” Can you give a sense of the volume of documents you needed to sift through, and what kind of internet rabbit holes pulled you in?
Josh Kaplan: This story started with a pile of records that had been sitting on the internet for years. Several years ago, a nonprofit called Fix The Court sued the Department of Justice to get a massive trove of highly redacted records related to Supreme Court justices’ travel. The records didn’t tell you that much—even the names of the justices were redacted—but they did tell you that a justice had gone from point A to point B on a given day. Sometimes, they also told you their method of travel, whether it was via Amtrak or on a private jet.
While Fix the Court published the records, it wasn’t clear if any reporter had ever read them that carefully. So we decided to spend a few days sorting through them. For trips that seemed interesting, we filed public records requests to get flight records that might shed more light on what happened. This ultimately led us to Clarence Thomas and Harlan Crow. We found evidence that in 2016, Thomas had flown from D.C. to New Haven and back on Crow’s private jet for a trip that lasted roughly three hours. We were told that renting an equivalent plane for that trip could cost about $70,000. It felt to us that wasn’t the sort of trip one would take unless it was a habitual thing. So we decided to keep digging.
Most of our reporting relied on human sources. But this sort of open-source research was also key—everything from the polo shirts Thomas wore in random pictures on Flickr to an old issue of Catholic Cemetery magazine helped us put the puzzle together.
What was the moment you knew you “had” the story?
To be honest, even when we just knew about that New Haven trip, we thought it was pretty interesting and might merit a story in its own right. But our reporting snowballed quickly from there. When we confirmed the details of the Indonesia trip—and the level of luxury that came with that—we felt that we’d found something that went so far beyond the norms of judges’ conduct that it should be in the public domain.
The other core fact, in my opinion, was establishing that these trips had happened virtually every year for decades. It took a lot of reporting to be able to nail that down. But that’s what really sets Thomas apart: the extent and frequency with which he’s indulged in these lavish trips over the years, without disclosing any of them to the public.
Why do you think this story has gone unreported for so long?
Importantly, there has been some very good reporting on Crow and Thomas’ relationship over the years, most notably by Ken Vogel and Mike McIntire back in 2011. But my best guess as to why the full extent of Crow’s largesse went undetected for so long is that the people best positioned to know about it were far from the halls of power in Washington. Our reporting relied on yacht workers scattered around the world, the staff at Crow’s private resort in the Adirondacks, and administrators at a now-defunct boarding school in northern Georgia, along with dozens of others who’d gotten a window into some aspect of this relationship over the years. We would never have been able to uncover any of this without these sources’ help, and some of them took real risks to bring this to the public’s attention.
It’s also true that Supreme Court justices historically haven’t gotten the level of scrutiny that other public officials receive. Uncovering the private jet and yacht trips took a lot of work. But the real estate sale, for instance, was documented in public records sitting in a courthouse in Georgia. If Thomas were a powerful senator, not a judge, it’s difficult to imagine that that sale would’ve stayed a secret for as long as it did.
There’s still a lot more to be done on this. We’re still hard at work reporting not only on Thomas, but on all of the justices.
