Daily Times

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 $500,000 — 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.