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Amid a growing series of false financial statements and unreported real estate deals by Clarence Thomas, a national newspaper has unearthed yet another misstatement in the Supreme Court justice’s financial disclosures.
The Washington Post reported Sunday that Thomas in recent years has attributed hundreds of thousands of dollars in rental income to a real estate company that was dissolved in 2006.
The firm — Ginger, Ltd., Partnership — was shut down that year and replaced with a similarly named company, Ginger Holdings, LLC.
But in the years since then, Thomas made no mention of the new firm in his financial filings, attributing between $270,000 and $750,000 in rental income to the defunct company in that time, The Post reports.
The newspaper points out this misstatement could be consistent with a simple paperwork error. But it adds to the growing body of examples of a high-level public official who has made a number of false statements while reporting the details of his interests in real estate and other financial matters to the public.
Thomas’s financial activities have fallen under greater scrutiny since the investigative outlet ProPublica reported earlier this month that he accepted vacations from Harlan Crow, the Texas real estate developer to whom Thomas also sold multiple properties in Savannah, Georgia. These real estate deals were not disclosed on his financial filings for the year 2014, as required by law.
After taking the properties off Thomas’s hands, Crow became the Supreme Court justice’s 94-year-old mother’s landlord, making tens of thousands of dollars of improvements to the home where she still lives.
The home next door — a noted site for loud parties, according to the president of a nearby neighborhood association — was also purchased by Crow and bulldozed, according to ProPublica.
This latest round of financial misstatements aren’t the first by Thomas. In 2011, the justice had to amend years of financial disclosures to add details of his wife’s employment. He said at the time that he had misunderstood the instructions, The Post reports.
Thomas also had to revise reports in 2020 after failing to report reimbursements for trips to speak at two law schools, the newspaper reports.
