(Washington) Figure of the conservative turn of the Supreme Court of the United States, Justice Clarence Thomas fulminated against the “horrible people” in Washington after a series of revelations according to which he had benefited from the largesse of a right-wing billionaire, have reported American media.
These embarrassing revelations provoked a controversy last year over the potential conflicts of interest of the highest American court, at a time when the latter was making a series of shocking decisions on the right to abortion and even the bearing of arms.
“What you’re going to find, especially in Washington, is people who are proud of being horrible,” Clarence Thomas said Friday at a conference in Alabama, in the southern United States, according to the Washington Post and the New York Times.
The judge denounced the “wickedness” and “lies” of which his family was, according to him, the target in this “vile place”, in reference to the capital of the United States, often associated by conservatives with what they describe like the American liberal and bourgeois “establishment”.
The Supreme Court of the United States has been particularly scrutinized since, reshuffled by former Republican President Donald Trump, it annulled the federal guarantee of the right to abortion in June 2022.
This theme is one of those that dominates the current presidential campaign pitting the same Donald Trump against Democratic President Joe Biden.
In the spring of 2023, Clarence Thomas found himself in the storm when an American media revealed that he had accepted, without declaring them, sumptuous gifts from billionaire Harlan Crow, including private jet flights, cruises on a mega-yacht or even the costs of a private school at more than $6,000 per month.
Real estate mogul Harlan Crow is one of the Republican Party’s largest donors.
At the Supreme Court since 1991, Justice Thomas admitted to traveling for free on the businessman’s private jet.
At the time, his lawyer Elliot Berke, however, mentioned errors in the statements made “inadvertently” by his client who had always strived “to respect the law”. The lawyer then described as “ridiculous” the criticisms aimed at Clarence Thomas, criticisms which, he said, came from “left-wing organizations”.
Faced with the scandal, the Supreme Court adopted a code of conduct in November, but most legal commentators immediately noted that this text did not provide for any sanction or enforcement mechanism.