From [HERE] Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden has escalated his investigation into billionaire Harlan Crow’s tax treatment of luxury trips provided to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, according to a letter sent to Crow’s attorney on Monday.

In the letter, Wyden, a Democratic Senator from Oregon, expressed concern that Crow may have improperly benefitted from business-expense tax deductions for lavish gifts, including luxury travel:

I am deeply concerned that Mr. Crow may have been showering a public official with extravagant gifts, then writing off those gifts to lower his tax bill. This concern is only heightened by the Committee’s recent discovery of additional undisclosed international travel on Mr. Crow’s private jet by Justice Thomas. As I consider legislative solutions to curb potentially abusive deductions, I am offering you one final opportunity to address the tax treatment of yacht and jet trips involving Justice Thomas.

Last month, Wyden joined fellow Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse — Chairman of the Judiciary Subcommittee on Federal Courts — in asking US Attorney General Merrick Garland to appoint a special counsel to investigate possible ethics and tax violations connected with a spate of high-end gifts Thomas had previously failed to disclose. According to that letter, these gifts included multiple free trips on a private jet, yacht travel, lodging, tuition payments for a family member of Thomas, and real estate transactions.

The senators wrote at the time:

We do not make this request lightly. The evidence assembled thus far plainly suggests that Justice Thomas has committed numerous willful violations of federal ethics and false-statement laws and raises significant questions about whether he and his wealthy benefactors have complied with their federal tax obligations. Presented with opportunities to resolve questions about his conduct, Justice Thomas has maintained a suspicious silence.

Justice Thomas’ trips with Crow were first revealed in a ProPublica report that alleged Thomas had failed to disclose numerous gifts from Crow and others including vacations, flights on private jets, tuition payments for his great nephew’s education, and loan forgiveness. The report ignited a firestorm over judicial independence and the ties between wealthy elites and the nation’s highest court. [MORE]

UNCLE TOM MUST BE DOING SOMETHING RIGHT IF PROPAGANDI IS AFTER HIM. Justice Thomas destroyed the emotional clogic of freedumb/slavery advocates in the case New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen. In the opinion he also dropped a few “revelation sandwich” reminders for serious, responsible Black individuals to consider in light of the facts that the quality of Black citizenship is so low that; no matter what the law says, Blacks are prohibited from possessing guns, Blacks are subject to omnipresent interference by cops with their freedom of movement and their right to be left the fuck alone, Black people are 3 times more likely than whites to be murdered by cops and the police have no legal duty to protect any particular citizen from harm unless they are in custody (“the public duty doctrine”). Said factors exist in a legal context in which law enforcement is uncontrollable by citizens, generally unaccountable to them, can’t be hired or fired by citizens and has irresponsible, limitless power over people to take life on the street as they see fit while providing a compulsory “service” that citizens have no “right” to decline. While discussing the existence of the right to carry weapons for self-defense against public confrontation during Reconstruction, Justice Thomas discussed the historical need for Blacks to vigorously defend themselves in a violent, racist society:

In the years before the 39th Congress proposed the Fourteenth Amendment, the Freedmen’s Bureau regularly kept it abreast of the dangers to blacks and Union men in the postbellum South. The reports described how blacks used publicly carried weapons to defend themselves and their communities. For example, the Bureau reported that a teacher from a Freedmen’s school in Maryland had written to say that, because of attacks on the school, “[b]oth the mayor and sheriff have warned the colored people to go armed to school, (which they do,)” and that the “[t]he super- intendent of schools came down and brought [the teacher] a revolver” for his protection. Cong. Globe, 39th Cong., 1st Sess., 658 (1866); see also H. R. Exec. Doc. No. 68, 39th Cong., 2d Sess., 91 (1867) (noting how, during the New Or- leans riots, blacks under attack “defended themselves . . . with such pistols as they had”).

Witnesses before the Joint Committee on Reconstruction also described the depredations visited on Southern blacks, and the efforts they made to defend themselves. One Virginia music professor related that when “[t]wo Union men were attacked . . . they drew their revolvers and held their assailants at bay.” H. R. Rep. No. 30, 39th Cong., 1st Sess., pt. 2, p. 110 (1866). An assistant commissioner to the Bureau from Alabama similarly reported that men were “rob- bing and disarming negroes upon the highway,” H. R. Exec. Doc. No. 70, 39th Cong., 1st Sess., 297 (1866), indicating that blacks indeed carried arms publicly for their self- protection, even if not always with success. See also H. R. Exec. Doc. No. 329, 40th Cong., 2d Sess., 41 (1868) (describ- ing a Ku Klux Klan outfit that rode “through the country . . . robbing every one they come across of money, pistols, papers, &c.”); id., at 36 (noting how a black man in Tennes- see had been murdered on his way to get book subscriptions, with the murderer taking, among other things, the man’s pistol).

Blacks had “procured great numbers of old army muskets and revolvers, particularly in Texas,” and “employed them to protect themselves” with “vigor and audacity.” S. Exec. Doc. No. 43, 39th Cong., 1st Sess., at 8. Seeing that government was inadequately protecting them, “there [was] the strongest desire on the part of the freedmen to secure arms, revolvers particularly.” H. R. Rep. No. 30, 39th Cong., 1st Sess., pt. 3, at 102.

On July 6, 1868, Congress extended the 1866 Freedmen’s Bureau Act, see 15 Stat. 83, and reaffirmed that freedmen were entitled to the “full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings concerning personal liberty [and] personal security . . . including the constitutional right to keep and bear arms.” §14, 14 Stat. 176 (1866) (emphasis added). That same day, a Bureau official reported that freedmen in Kentucky and Tennessee were still constantly under threat: “No Union man or negro who attempts to take any active part in politics, or the improvement of his race, is safe a single day; and nearly all sleep upon their arms at night, and carry concealed weapons during the day.” H. R. Exec. Doc. No. 329, 40th Cong., 2d Sess., at 40. [MORE]