“Textbook Billionaire Scam”: Harlan Crow Cut Tax Bill With Clarence Thomas Gifts

Turns out that billionaire Harlan Crow’s relentless gift-showering (read: warm, beautiful friendship) toward Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas wasn’t enough on its own—it was also part of a tax break bonanza for the Republican megadonor.

Once again, ProPublica has revealed even more troubling details about the billionaire’s shady dealings with one of the most powerful members of the U.S. government. It seems that Crow has, for years, likely pretended that his 162-foot yacht, the Michaela Rose, was a chartering business in order to avoid paying taxes—and Thomas’s voyages on the ship helped maintain the facade.

Decades ago, Crow and his family had formed a company, Rochelle Charter Inc., in order to lease out their superyacht, ProPublica details. And from data between 2003 to 2015, the company reported losing money in 10 of the 13 years; the net losses reached nearly $8 million, with about half flowing to Harlan himself. The deductions helped the family offset income elsewhere, saving the Crows from paying taxes. The pattern echoes what billionaires often do with their private jets (which, of course, was another vehicle used by Crow to taxi Thomas and the justice’s family around the world).

The yacht tax breaks, among other loopholes, enabled Crow to pay an average income tax rate of 15 percent during the time period, lower than that of many middle-class workers in America.

The kicker is that while these sorts of deductions can only be had by a purported business operator, it doesn’t seem like the Michaela Rose was a legitimate business pursuit. ProPublica spoke to about a dozen former crew members of the ship, and none of them said they were aware of the superyacht ever being chartered. Cross-checking that with schedules for three different years, the boat seemingly was only ever used to cruise Crow’s family, friends, and executives of his company around.

And that’s not all. As recently as 2019, an attorney representing the supposed yacht chartering company, Rochelle Carter, filed an application with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Success with such an application requires basic things like, you know, showing that the Michaela Rose was actually being used commercially.

The attorney attached a brochure as proof. “This magnificent yacht has cruised the oceans of the world with a graceful and gentle motion found only on the most superior seagoing vessels,” the pamphlet said, boasting of the boat’s “fine, seakindly hull” and “mahogany paneled formal dining room” that seats 16. But, ProPublica notes, it said nothing about chartering.

The USPTO was, naturally, not satisfied, up until the attorney provided new supposed evidence—screenshots from websites like Superyachts.com and LiveYachting.com, showing “links and references to yacht ‘Charter’ services offered in connection with Applicant’s MICHAELA ROSE mark,” according to the attorney. The USPTO caved and approved the trademark. As ProPublica points out, neither website actually guarantees that the ship was a business. The former hosts profiles for hundreds of ships—regardless of whether they can be chartered. The latter just encouraged users to contact a broker to find out if a boat could be chartered.

“Based on what information is available, this has the look of a textbook billionaire tax scam,” Senate Finance Committee Chair Ron Wyden told ProPublica. “These new details only raise more questions about Mr. Crow’s tax practices, which could begin to explain why he’s been stonewalling the Finance Committee’s investigation for months.”

Such a scandal adds to the Mount Everest of malfeasance festering within Crow and Thomas. Thomas has received secret and lavish gifts for decades from the Nazi memorabilia–collecting billionaire and GOP donor Harlan Crow, including luxurious island-hopping excursions on superyachts, tuition payments for his grandnephew’s private schooling, and even a secret deal in which Crow bought Thomas family property and proceeded to upgrade it while Thomas’s mother still lived in it. Separately, meanwhile, Thomas’s aide collected Venmo payments, allegedly for a “Christmas Party” hosted by the justice, from a string of high-rolling lawyers with cases before the Supreme Court.

The blood between Representatives Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene has gotten so bad that their colleagues are worried the two will get into a fistfight “at any moment.”

The once–work besties have been at each other’s throats for months, with Greene calling Boebert a “little bitch” on the House floor and Boebert voting to oust Greene from the House Freedom Caucus. And things are nowhere close to settling down.

“A fistfight could break out at any moment,” Tennessee Representative Tim Burchett told The Daily Beast.

He then creepily added that, as a fan of professional wrestling, “it’s entertaining to think that a fistfight could break out at any movement. I kind of dig that.”

Another Republican lawmaker told The Daily Beast that while it’s certain the two women will eventually attack each other, it’s unclear who will win. “They will be nailing that coffin shut,” the lawmaker said, “and one of them is still in there kicking and screaming!”

Greene and Boebert seemed to be good friends when they both first arrived on Capitol Hill, but they have since ruptured pretty spectacularly. They first began to diverge over continuing aid for Ukraine: Boebert supported it, while Greene was opposed.

Greene has also ingratiated herself with establishment Republicans, although both women still embrace far-right beliefs. Things came to a head during the interminable vote for speaker of the House in January. The pair reportedly got into a massive argument in a Capitol bathroom, when Greene accused Boebert of taking money from McCarthy for her reelection campaign but then refusing to vote for him for speaker.

But things started to get really ugly in June, when Boebert introduced articles of impeachment against Joe Biden under a privileged resolution, meaning there had to be a vote on the measure within two days (the measure ultimately was referred to a committee and is still there). Greene had introduced articles of impeachment against Biden in May, which have also yet to go anywhere. Greene publicly accused Boebert of copying her articles and ended up confronting her colleague on the House floor.

“I’ve donated to you, I’ve defended you. But you’ve been nothing but a little bitch to me,” Greene reportedly told Boebert in the middle of the House floor. “And you copied my articles of impeachment after I asked you to co-sponsor them.”

Boebert got her revenge a few weeks later, when she voted alongside the majority of the House’s far-right contingent to boot Greene from the Freedom Caucus. Greene’s comments to Boebert were apparently a major factor in the group’s decision.

This may bite the caucus in the butt, though. Greene was a strong fundraiser for the group, and she has proven to be a powerful influence among establishment Republicans. She could easily turn the rest of the GOP against the caucus.

Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds on Friday signed into law a six-week abortion ban, turning it into a political spectacle at a conservative summit with several 2024 hopefuls, in a move widely seen as a bid for vice president.

She held the signing ceremony at the conservative Family Leadership Summit, where 2024 Republican candidates including Mike Pence, Nikki Haley, Tim Scott, Asa Hutchinson, and Vivek Ramaswamy were interviewed by erstwhile Fox News host Tucker Carlson earlier in the day. (Ron DeSantis is also on deck.)

Reynolds saw this as the perfect opportunity to make a show of taking away people’s health care, signing the bill on a stage with dozens of people.

State lawmakers passed the radical ban, which targets people before they know they are pregnant, overnight Tuesday, after Reynolds called a special session with the sole purpose of banning abortion. The new law is hugely unpopular, with hundreds of Iowans showing up at the state Capitol to protest the bill as it was being debated.

Many suspect that Reynolds is vying for a vice presidential nod. During testimony on Tuesday, one constituent called her out for using the abortion ban to “score political points.”

The law will ban nearly all abortions in Iowa. It technically makes exceptions for rape, but only if the attack is reported to law enforcement or a health provider within 45 days. There are also exceptions for incest and for cases where the fetus is nonviable or the pregnancy puts the patient’s life at risk. However, as reporter Jessica Valenti pointed out, the rules for an exception could put the patient’s life further at risk.

Even if a patient is miscarrying, they can only get an abortion if the fetus’s heartbeat has stopped. In many cases, waiting for fetal demise is what causes patients to develop sepsis.

Although the law goes into effect immediately, it could be blocked in a matter of days. A group that includes the ACLU of Iowa, Planned Parenthood North Central States, and local abortion provider the Emma Goldman Clinic sued to block the law the day after it passed the state legislature. A district court judge said he hoped to issue a ruling on Monday.

The lawsuit asks the court to assess the abortion ban’s constitutionality. Reynolds had previously signed a six-week abortion ban in 2018, but that measure was struck down the following year in the courts. After Roe v. Wade was overturned, Reynolds asked the courts to reinstate the 2018 ban, but the state Supreme Court was deadlocked on the issue and left a law banning abortion after 20 weeks in place. The new law could be struck down in the same manner as the first six-week ban.

MAGA Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene only voted for the defense budget because House Speaker Kevin McCarthy promised her a key committee seat.

House Republicans on Friday passed a national defense bill packed with bigoted amendments targeting abortion, LGBTQ rights, and diversity generally. Four Democrats broke ranks to help vote the bill through, but it wasn’t clear until the final vote whether enough Republicans would unite behind the measure.

Normally a staunch McCarthy ally, Greene was actually planning on voting against the bill as recently as Thursday night—until the speaker promised her a seat on the House-Senate conference committee for the defense budget, CNN’s Manu Raju reported.

Greene ultimately voted for the bill, and later confirmed that McCarthy’s offer is why she changed her mind. When Raju asked whether McCarthy’s proffered deal was what “got [her] there,” Greene replied, “Right, because I have the opportunity to continue to do what I did this week.”

“And I want that opportunity,” she continued. “I think that’s an important opportunity for me to have to represent not only the people in my district, but the people all over America that do not want their tax dollars spent on an NDAA that funds a foreign war.”

Greene was referring to aid for Ukraine, which has been a point of contention among Republicans, many of whom want to stop sending funds and supplies to Kyiv as it fends off the Russian invasion.

McCarthy’s deal with Greene is yet another sign of just how much the speaker has ceded to his party’s farthest-right wing. McCarthy made multiple deals with the House Freedom Caucus in order to become speaker, and he is constantly bowing to them as he tries to carry out his agenda.

Even though the Freedom Caucus technically kicked Greene out, she’s still ideologically aligned with them. And McCarthy needs to keep them all happy in order to keep the gavel.

When you get impeached twice, found liable for sexual abuse and defamation, and indicted numerous times it’s a lot easier to go ahead and try asking the courts to stop investigating you. Such is the strategy of Donald Trump.

CNN reports that the former president is seeking a new court order to pretty much stop the Fulton County, Georgia, investigation into his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

Trump’s lawyers are filing to try throwing out all the evidence collected last year by a special grand jury, ban prosecutors from presenting that evidence to a new grand jury, and disqualify District Attorney Fani Willis from court proceedings.

The brazen demands come from a legal team that claims that allowing the investigation to proceed would lead to “a violation of [Trump’s] fundamental constitutional rights,” as he “seeks his Party’s nomination for the Presidency of the United States.” The lawyers filed petitions to both the Fulton County Superior Court and the Georgia Supreme Court.

It makes sense that Trump’s legal team is getting desperate: the Georgia grand jury is expected to announce on Tuesday whether Trump and his associates should face criminal charges for trying to overthrow the election.

The Georgia investigation has been going on for the better part of two years, hearing from 75 witnesses, including Trump advisors, his former attorneys and aides, and Georgia officials. The special grand jury, which heard evidence for some seven months, recommended indicting more than a dozen individuals—of which Trump is suspected to be among.

All to say, the process has been a long and arduous one, not something flippant nor inherently infringing upon Trump’s constitutional rights, just because it took so long that he’s now running for president for the third time in a row.

Trump’s lawyers have made similar filings in other legal cases he faces. Earlier this week, his legal team asked for a delay in the trial where he faces 37 charges for seizing and mishandling top secret government and military documents. They have argued that it’s impossible to try the case in the lead-up to the 2024 election.

Meanwhile, on Tuesday, the Justice Department deemed Trump not immune from E. Jean Carroll’s second defamation lawsuit against him, dating back to 2019.

The Biden administration announced Friday it will forgive $39 billion in student debt, just weeks after the ultraconservative Supreme Court tried to block such a move.

The Supreme Court in June ruled 6–3 against Joe Biden’s original student loan forgiveness plan, but it appears the president refuses to give up. His administration implemented a series of fixes to the student loan repayment system that is expected to help more than 800,000 people with student debt.

The Biden administration counted payments for borrowers who had made partial or late payments, and for people who had paused their payments under certain circumstances, such as if they were a student or unemployed, but continued to pay the interest. These types of payments previously went uncounted, according to the government.

“For far too long, borrowers fell through the cracks of a broken system that failed to keep accurate track of their progress towards forgiveness,” U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona said in a statement.

The fix has a far more limited scope than Biden’s original plan, which would have canceled up to $20,000 of student debt for up to 43 million people, but the move is still noteworthy.

Biden had originally cited the Heroes Act of 2003 as the law that gave him the authority to cancel student debt. That measure permits the secretary of education to “waive or modify” student loan provisions under the circumstances of a national emergency. Debt relief opponents had argued that the act was not applicable because it was no longer a national emergency.

The new plan hinges on the Higher Education Act, which allows Biden to direct the education secretary to “compromise, waive, or release loans under certain circumstances.”

Republicans are furious that Biden has found a way around both them and the Supreme Court. Biden “is intentionally thumbing his nose at the U.S. Supreme Court and our Constitutional separation of powers,” tweeted Virginia Representative Ben Cline.

Tennessee Senator Marsha Blackburn tweeted, “This administration has no respect for our institutions.”

But Democrats hailed the move, especially Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, who had previously pushed the HEA as the law to underpin student loan forgiveness. “This action is what it looks like when the Education Department is on the side of working people,” she tweeted.

California Representative Mark Takano called to keep up the momentum. “I applaud the Biden Administration’s commitment to student debt forgiveness, despite the Supreme Court’s efforts to rip away desperately needed relief from millions of borrowers,” he said. “We must continue to fight for student loan borrowers and get them the relief they deserve.”

It was always leading up to this. The rife misinformation, the skewed financial incentives, the promises for something greater, something worthwhile, something of purpose: Musk’s acquisition of Twitter is now, for all intents and purposes, a multilevel marketing scheme:

Musk’s explanation comes after a stream of Twitter’s verified users—often far-right and conspiratorial ones—received thousands of dollars for helping bring eyeballs to embedded ads within Twitter’s interface.

As per Musk, the apparent big catch is that verified users only make money off of other verified users, creating what amounts to the combination of an MLM and conspiratorial echo chamber.

While some users like Brian Krassenstein—known first as an anti-Trump content factory, now as a generically liberal voice is also quite friendly toward the rest of the Twitter Blue community—have made money, many of the Twitter payments to “content creators” seem to have gone to users who have whipped up hateful and dangerous conspiracies. These users have also been at the forefront of implicitly or explicitly prodding more people to join the subscription program helping keep Musk’s Twitter Blue afloat.

Ian Miles Cheong, a far-right user who once used his massive platform to falsely identify an innocent Black man as the “number one suspect” in the shooting of two police officers, said he received over $16,000 from Twitter.

“I hear some asking, ‘Why aren’t liberals and leftists getting paid for Twitter? Why is it just people Elon seems to like?’” Cheong tweeted when announcing the news. “Oh I don’t know, could it be because they boycotted Twitter Blue, refused to sign up for monetization, and staged failed walkoffs to Mastodon and elsewhere?”

“Twitter Monetization For Creators Is REAL,” sensationalist provocateur Benny Johnson also celebrated, announcing his nearly $10,000 paycheck from the Big Tech elite billionaire.

“That’s insane! I need in on this,” one user tweeted in response.

“Just sign up for subscriptions in Twitter Blue — the rest happens automatically,” Johnson responded, spreading the good word about the product. “Really easy! Do it,” he urged. Johnson repeated such assurances of the billionaire’s lackluster product to similarly wistful repliers.

And such is the undergirding framework of Twitter: the few profiting most from Musk’s takeover ambling to enchant the many into buying into the whole scheme too. A scheme whose promises grow bigger the more that people join, but whose actual rewards remain largely at the top. Twitter, indeed, is an MLM.

The first rollout of paychecks comes after Musk’s competitor, Zuckerberg’s Threads, announced over 100 million sign-ups. Musk has maintained that the timing is coincidental, but something else to keep in mind is Musk often has not told the truth and is making up Twitter policy as he goes. “Any kind of content monetization we’ve done in the past was based on a revenue model,” one former Twitter executive who worked on creator partnerships said. “This just feels pulled out of thin air for a specific subset of creators that he wanted to placate.”

A Florida Republican politician suggested that Pride images are “anti-Christian” hate symbols and called for the government to immediately “crush” Pride Month.

Anthony Sabatini, who currently serves as the chair of the Lake County Republican Party, slammed Pride Month as “anti-American” and proposed ways the state government could effectively end LGBTQ pride celebrations.

“There’s a great reset going on. And I say, well, if you look around, really, I think the great reset is a gay reset. I mean, if you look at Pride Month, that’s pretty much, like, the whole program,” Sabatini, who is running for Congress, said at an event. It is not clear when the event took place, but video of his speech was posted to Twitter on Friday by liberal activist Lauren Windsor.

“We have to end Pride Month, okay?” Sabatini continued to applause from the audience. “We have to crush Pride Month. It has to go away.”

“It’s time to crush Pride Month and the businesses that promote that toxic anti-American garbage.”

Sabatini suggested the Florida government should pass a law banning all counties, school boards, city commissions, and even businesses from promoting Pride Month in any way. He pointed to the city of Mount Dora, which marked Pride by hanging rainbow banners along the streets.

“First we need to crush Pride Month” by banning people from spending state or local funds on it, Sabatini said. “We need to bend our civil rights laws to make it actionable legally for when they do do that because it’s an anti-Christian hate symbol.”

Republicans across the country are steadily making the U.S. more hostile to LGBTQ people, and Florida is leading the charge. State lawmakers have passed laws expanding “Don’t Say Gay,” banning discussions of personal pronouns in schools, and prohibiting transgender people from using the bathroom that aligns with their gender on any public property. Meanwhile, Governor Ron DeSantis earlier this month shared what is possibly the most bigoted ad ever for his presidential campaign.

And it’s not just at the state level. The Supreme Court ruled in June that businesses can refuse to serve LGBTQ people, which has already spurred more discrimination. And on Friday, the House of Representatives passed a defense budget that bans the Department of Defense from flying Pride flags or reimbursing travel costs for service members who seek gender-affirming care.

The House of Representatives on Friday passed a defense budget that was loaded with Republican amendments aimed at furthering their culture wars.

The House voted 219–210 for the newly extreme bill, which now bans the Department of Defense from flying Pride flags, funding diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, and reimbursing travel costs for service members who need to get an abortion.

Four Democrats broke ranks to vote with Republicans. Here are the Democrats who voted for the defense budget in all its bigoted glory.

• Donald Davis of North Carolina
  
• Jared Golden of Maine
  
• Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington
  
• Gabe Vasquez of New Mexico
  

This is not the first time that some of these members have sided with Republicans. Golden and Perez voted in May to repeal President Joe Biden’s student debt relief program and to end the federal student loan repayment freeze. Davis also voted Thursday to include the Pride flag ban amendment in the defense budget.

Two Democrats—one poised to be the party’s next anointed Kyrsten Sinema—helped Republicans codify Donald Trump’s policy banning the Defense Department from displaying Pride flags.

The amendment to the national defense bill came from Republican Representative Ralph Norman, as part of the stream of culture war issues the party took up before they voted to shove another nearly trillion more dollars into the military industrial complex.

In a 218–213 vote late Thursday, the House approved the amendment that would ban members of the armed forces or civilian employees from displaying any flag other than the American, or other limited approved flags like state or military service ones, or flags of another country that is “an ally or partner of the United States.” The amendment was widely interpreted as one targeting Pride flags in particular.

A Norman aide noted that while the Pentagon hasn’t flown a Pride flag, the goal of the amendments is to get ahead of the trend of more and more agencies displaying Pride flags, even simply on social media accounts. Acts as extreme as the Navy having a rainbow Twitter banner during Pride month this year were enough to light the fire underneath 218 House members to put the foot down on letting anyone imagine that military members might be gay.

The amendment codifies a Trump-era (and Biden-upheld) policy that bans Pride flags from military bases. Such an amendment even got three Republican dissenters in Representatives Brian Fitzpatrick, Mike Lawler, and Marcus Molinaro.

Still, two Democrats decided the bigoted ban was one worth adding to the defense bill: Michigan’s Elissa Slotkin and North Carolina’s Don Davis.

Davis may be triangulating as he anticipates unfavorable gerrymandering from state Republicans. Nevertheless a weak excuse, as it is politically inept for Democrats to legitimize such causes as anything more than paltry culture war. Relatedly, Davis also joined eight Democrats—including those who voted against student debt relief—in approving Republican Chip Roy’s amendment to ban funds from going towards teaching critical race theory.

Such urgent priorities these Democrats bravely gave credence to.

Slotkin, for her part, said her vote was “to ban hateful flags from flying on military bases, particularly the Confederate flag,” arguing that the most sound way to ban “hateful flags” was by pursuing a near-universal flag ban.

Slotkin may very well have believed her vote to be more about banning hateful symbols at the relatively smaller expense of banning Pride flags. Even if that was the case—and considering that the entire Democratic caucus otherwise voted against the amendment—the vote adds to a broader record of the Democrats’ heir-apparent Michigan Senate candidate dissenting against other caucus-wide causes.

Previously, Slotkin has opposed student debt assistance on a vote supported by 93 percent of the caucus, voted against 85 percent of her caucus on whether the United States should simply study the impact of its sanctions on other countries, voted to overturn locally enacted criminal justice and voting rights reforms in Washington, D.C., and even voted against 94 percent of her caucus to bar security clearance from anyone who has used cannabis.

Slotkin also does not openly support Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, or abolishing the death penalty. And now, she has signed on to a Republican-led bill that bans members of the armed service from displaying a Pride flag.

Michigan is part of Democrats’ growing midwestern blue wall—a region where the party has shown, over and over again, how strong commitments to progressive causes can actually manifest into meaningful change for millions of people. But Slotkin is proving over and over again her incongruence with that possibility.

This article has been updated.