Republican donor Harlan Crow fired back at critics in a new interview, defending his long friendship with Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and the hospitality he’d shown him over the years.
Crow told The Dallas Morning News that media reports accusing Thomas of unethical behavior — specifically because the justice had not disclosed hospitality extended to him by Crow — had an obvious political slant. He also said that Thomas had never asked him for any of the things he had given, adding that it was “no different from the hospitality we have extended to our many other dear friends.”
“I think it’s a political hit job. I don’t think the media cares really much about Harlan Crow, and I think they’re right. They shouldn’t care much about Harlan Crow,” he said. “But I think that the media, and this ProPublica group in particular, funded by leftists, has an agenda to destabilize the [Supreme] Court. What they’ve done is not truthful. It lacks integrity. They’ve done a pretty good job in the last week or two of unfairly slamming me and more importantly than that, unfairly slamming Justice Thomas.”
Crow went on to assert that while he and Thomas did hold differing opinions on some topics, he had never attempted to use their friendship to influence the justice’s decisions. Interviewer Cheryl Hall asked whether Crow thought the two would still be friends if Thomas were not a Supreme Court justice — and his response was candid: “It’s an interesting, good question. I don’t know how to answer that. Maybe not. Maybe yes. I don’t know.”
Hall also asked Crow about his collection of historical artifacts — which came up in several media reports that attempted to paint him as a Nazi sympathizer — and Crow argued that an accurate picture of history had to include both the good and the bad.
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“We have a lot on slavery. Slavery was a great evil in American history. There’s a lot more about Frederick Douglass here than there is about the bad guys of slavery. You can’t have a library and talk about that without including the bad,” Crow explained, adding, “So yeah, World War II was a fairly big event in American history. We have a bunch of stuff about World War II, including some of our enemies … For somebody to say that I like those guys would be a weird conclusion, but that’s been in the press recently.”
Crow went on to tell a personal story explaining exactly why he would never have been a Nazi sympathizer: “My mom was on a ship that was sunk by Germans during World War II. If you try to kill my mom, I don’t like you. I mean, that’s reasonably obvious. And so the idea that I could have sympathy for Nazism is insane.”
Some of the other artifacts, Crow explained, were symbols of significant historical events — for example, the statues of Soviet dictators were kept to represent what the West had defeated when the Cold War ended.