News/Commentary

Clarence Thomas insider throws cold water on pearl-clutching Super Bowl ring report: ‘It was a replica’

August 9, 2023 | | Print Article

The New York Times has once again been accused of publishing false allegations about Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

The latest lie was published on July 9th, when the Times ran a story claiming that billionaire Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones had gifted Thomas with a Super Bowl ring, among other things.

“Over the years, he [Thomas] flew in Mr. Jones’s private jet. Mr. Jones gave him a Super Bowl ring. He attended the Cowboys’ training camp, and when the team played in Washington, he sat in the owner’s box,” the Times breathlessly reported.

A couple weeks later, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram picked up the Times’ story and ran its own asking why Thomas had been gifted such an expensive item.

The Dallas Morning News reportedly also got in on the smear.

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Yet new revelations show that all these reports were based on a fabrication.

“It was a replica ring,” Teton Capital CEO David Sokol, a member of the Horatio Alger Association who’s reportedly known both Thomas and Jones for years, told Fox News this week.

“People are just looking for ways to attack conservative Supreme Court members. They just run with stuff even when they know it’s not accurate,” he added.

Sokol isn’t alone in saying this. A former Thomas staffer who worked with him around the time the ring was gifted to him also said the same.

“It was a replica, it had hardly any value. It was just used as a paperweight. I was there, I was working for the justice at the time, and I can assure you it was just a replica. I saw it, I held it, I handled it,” the staffer remarked.

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Mark Paoletta, a longtime Thomas friend and also biographer, likewise said to Fox News that the latest smear is just “another one of those sloppy stories where reporters want to believe the most ridiculous allegations” against Justice Thomas.

“Justice Thomas appreciated receiving a replica Super Bowl ring from the Cowboys, and that’s all it was as is clear from the photos. He used it as a paperweight. How could New York Times reporters get this so wrong?” he said.

According to him, ProPublica is currently planning its own hit piece on Thomas:

Paoletta added that the only reason the left hates Thomas so much is because of the color of his skin.

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“Justice Thomas triggers the Left because he is a Black conservative who has never bowed to the left’s demand that he thinks a certain way based on the color of his skin,” Paoletta explained.

“It’s offensive and racist, but that’s what the Left demands. And the media have now amped up these attacks and smears because Justice Thomas’ jurisprudence is now consistently garnering a majority on the Court. This has nothing to do with ethics. It’s all about trying to undermine the Court’s integrity now that it is no longer acting like a super legislature implementing left-wing policies,” he added.

Concluding his remarks, he called for the Times to apologize.

“I expect the New York Times to issue a retraction on this falsehood, and an apology to Justice Thomas,” he said.

The Times and other far-left media organizations have been relentlessly attacking Thomas ever since he helped rule affirmative action unconstitutional in June.

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Part of the anger stems from the devastating concurrence he wrote in which he demolished the idea of racial preferences in college admissions:

The rest of the anger stems from the fact that he’s black. Because he’s black, and affirmative action mainly benefitted black people, some even view him as a “race traitor.”

The leftist media also came after Thomas after Roe v. Wade was repealed. In a hit piece published in April, ProPublica accused Thomas of accepting gifts from another billionaire, Harlan Crow.

“For more than two decades, Thomas has accepted luxury trips virtually every year from the Dallas businessman without disclosing them, documents and interviews show,” the report from ProPublica read.

“A public servant who has a salary of $285,000, he has vacationed on Crow’s superyacht around the globe. He flies on Crow’s Bombardier Global 5000 jet. He has gone with Crow to the Bohemian Grove, the exclusive California all-male retreat, and to Crow’s sprawling ranch in East Texas. And Thomas typically spends about a week every summer at Crow’s private resort in the Adirondacks,” it continued.

The piece added that the “extent and frequency of Crow’s apparent gifts to Thomas have no known precedent in the modern history of the U.S. Supreme Court.”

There was just one glaring problem. Thomas is reportedly good friends with Crow, and there’s no rule stating that it’s illegal for a judge to accept gifts from a friend …

Vivek Saxena
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