US Supreme Court justice received lavish trips from billionaire Republican, report shows

US Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has accepted years of luxury travel trips from a billionaire Republican, according to a report Thursday, including yachting in New Zealand and private jet flights across the globe.

Staunch conservative Thomas, the longest-serving justice on the court, went on one trip to Indonesia that alone was likely worth US$500,000 (about RM2.2 million) – paid for by real estate tycoon Harlan Crow, according to the non-profit ProPublica news outlet.

The ProPublica investigation, based on interviews and reviews of photographs and other documents, showed "the Supreme Court is the least accountable part of our government," legal reform action group Fix the Court said.

"Nothing is going to change without a wholesale, lawmaker-led reimagining of its responsibilities when it comes to basic measures of oversight," the group's director Gabe Roth said in a statement.

The 74-year-old Thomas also joined Crow – whose friendship with the justice the New York Times in 2011 called "unusual and ethically sensitive" – for trips to an exclusive all-male wilderness resort in California and to properties in Texas and New York state over the past two decades.

Crow told ProPublica that his gifts to Thomas were "no different from the hospitality we have extended to our many other dear friends," and that the two had never discussed pending cases.

Ethical standards 

Crow has made more than US$10 million in donations to Republican political groups, ProPublica said, including half a million dollars to a conservative lobbying group founded by Thomas' wife Ginni Thomas.

Ginni Thomas' involvement in politics has drawn its own scrutiny for reports she took part in Donald Trump-led efforts to illegally overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.

Justice Thomas, who was nominated for the court in 1991 after a confirmation process in which he was accused of sexual harassment by a former aide, joined the majority of judges who ruled to overturn the national right to abortion last year.

He also went further than his colleagues, saying the conservative-dominated court should also examine its rulings on contraception and same-sex marriage.

In response to Thursday's report, Democratic Senator Dick Durbin said Thomas's "behavior is simply inconsistent with the ethical standards the American people expect of any public servant, let alone a Justice on the Supreme Court."

White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said, "I'm not going to comment from here. There are other bodies of government who should be dealing with this."

Thomas declined to comment to ProPublica, which also tweeted a clip of a documentary in which he said he liked driving around rural corners of America more than travelling abroad.

"I don't have any problem with going to Europe, but I prefer the US," he said. "I prefer the Walmart parking lots to the beaches and things like that. I'd come from regular stock and I prefer that."