PBS News Hour

GEOFF BENNETT: Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is facing questions again about his failure to disclose transactions with a Republican megadonor.

A new report by ProPublica details a 2014 real estate deal in which Harlan Crow's company paid $133,000 to Thomas and his family to buy the home where the justice's mother lived.

Like the luxury vacations uncovered by ProPublica last week, the sale went unreported on Justice Thomas' financial disclosure forms.

Gabe Roth is the executive director of Fix the Court, a group that advocates for court reforms, and joins us now.

So, Gabe, this $133,000 transaction between Justice Thomas and Harlan Crow, which Justice Thomas didn't disclose, as the law requires, this marks the first known instance of payments between the two men.

What are the implications?

GABE ROTH, Executive Director, Fix the Court: Well, it appears, from what we know so far -- and I think there's more information that's going to be coming out in terms of how exactly the $133,000 was delineated or just divided between the Thomas family and among the properties.

But the federal law is very clear.

It says that to, follow the financial disclosure law that was passed in 1978 after Watergate, filers, including Supreme Court justices, have to provide a brief description, a date and the value of any purchase, sale or exchange of real estate that exceeds $1,000.

So this is obviously more than $1,000.

Even if you divide the property up several ways, it's more than $1,000.

So this is a violation of that statute.

And there should be repercussions for that.

GEOFF BENNETT: If Justice Thomas had reported it, would that have put him in the clear, ethically speaking, or do you see other potentially deeper ethical transgressions here in this close relationship between Justice Thomas and Harlan Crow, given that Mr. Crow has been a Republican megadonor for years?

GABE ROTH: Love the leading question.

Yes, I think -- I think that that's pretty clear that I think there's more than just the statutory violation the real estate.

I mean, the $500,000 valued trip via private plane and yacht to Indonesia and the trips to New Zealand and East Texas and Upstate New York, I mean, it's -- there's nothing like this on the Supreme Court, at least since Scalia passed away, where you have a single individual reaping such largess from another individual, the latter being, the one giving the gifts, having a clear political bent and wanting the court to do certain things, even if he might not have had any cases.

So I think we should be expecting more ethically from our justices.

And it's a real shame that what we have shown over the course of several weeks with these ProPublica reports is that our justices are just thumbing their nose to whatever ethical, very weak, but whatever ethical rules exist, and that we're not in the good place when that's happening.

GEOFF BENNETT: Well, we should say the Supreme Court did not immediately respond to our request for comment.

But Mr. Crow told ProPublica in a statement that he bought the property because his "intention is to one day create a public museum at the Thomas home dedicated to telling the story of our nation's second Black Supreme Court justice."

Do Mr. Crow's intentions take away from Justice Thomas' obligations to report the sale?

GABE ROTH: I don't think so.

I don't care how generous Harlan Crow thinks he is in being this philanthropist that's -- he also put up some money for a library wing in Savannah named after Thomas.

He turned the cannery where Thomas' family worked into museum outside Savannah in a place called Pin Point, where Thomas was born.

I'm not -- it doesn't interest me that he's using his wealth to be -- quote, unquote -- "philanthropic" with regards to Thomas' story.

The fact that a single individual is spending hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars helping out a guy on the Supreme Court, just that sentence - - I mean, forget all the other details.

Someone is spending millions of dollars to assist somebody on the Supreme Court with something.

That, in and of itself, is enough to raise a ton of ethical questions.

And I really think we might only be scratching the surface here.

I would expect more details to be coming out about not only Thomas, but some of the other justices, right?

I think there's now a cottage industry.

It used to be just me.

But I think now there's a cottage industry of individuals who are looking into the justices -- and, look, remember, they're 2,500 lower court judges too -- into the justices and judges' past and their financial disclosures to see if they're -- our top legal officials, at a time when the courts have outsized power, to see if these officials are in fact being fully honest and ethical and following the letter of the disclosure and ethics laws.

GEOFF BENNETT: At the start of our conversation, you said that there should be repercussions.

But there is no way to enforce Supreme Court justices to comply with disclosure laws.

And, short of impeachment, there's no penalty that's applicable to them.

So what then is the remedy?

GABE ROTH: I mean, I think -- honestly, I think we have reached the point where the attorney general should appoint a special counsel.

So there is within the financial disclosure law the ability for either the head of the Judicial Conference, which depending on how you read it, is either a judge out in Oklahoma or Chief John Roberts himself, or the head of the Department of Justice to bring an investigation to refer this issue for an investigation.

And that could lead to up to a $50,000 fine, which probably -- again, probably not going to happen, or even up to a year in prison for falsifying records willfully.

I don't know if this is willful or not.

i don't know if Justice -- I assume Justice Thomas is probably willfully doing it.

But I think we need to have some sort of investigation.

And I know we probably have special counsel fatigue in this country right now.

But I don't see anyone else, not Merrick Garland, who almost was on the Supreme Court, not the members of the Judicial Conference, who don't want to piss off their fellow justices.

I think that you're going to have to have some neutral third party investigate this, because we really don't know the extent of this ethical issue.

But, at the very least, everyone who's talking about it realizes that it's a major problem, and it's really impugning the integrity of our top court, at a time when the court, especially after the leak and all these opinions reversing precedent, can least afford to fall even lower in the public's esteem.

GEOFF BENNETT: Gabe Roth is executive director of Fix the Court.