WASHINGTON — Harlan Crow, the Dallas investor whose lavish secret trips with Justice Clarence Thomas have sparked an intense debate about Supreme Court ethics, is a GOP megadonor with many friends in high places.
In the last three decades, the billionaire real estate magnate has donated $14.7 million to candidates and campaign committees, including at least $13 million to Republicans.
His largesse is probably far higher. As a co-founder of Club for Growth, an influential anti-tax group whose beneficiaries include Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, he has given unknown but likely huge sums of “dark money” that isn’t subject to disclosure.
For the donations that are listed on federal and state reports, the recipient list is a who’s who that includes the last three governors of Texas, the state’s last four senators, and dozens of Republicans in the U.S. House and Senate.
In Austin, Texas, Crow has bet heavily on Gov. Greg Abbott — $216,800 in all, starting with $20,000 in late 2001 when, as a former justice on the Texas Supreme Court, Abbott was running for attorney general.
Unlike federal law, Texas has no cap on donations, so whopping checks are not unusual.
Patterns are hard to discern in Crow’s outlays.
Records from the Federal Election Commission and OpenSecrets, which tracks money in politics, show donations to some of the most conservative Republicans on the ballot, and to moderates from both parties.
In the last three years, Crow has given $20,000 to Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Texas, a target of the GOP House campaign arm to which Crow has given $1.4 million.
Cuellar is among the most conservative Democrats in Congress, a high-ranking member of the Appropriations Committee, and the only Texas Democrat in Congress on Crow’s donation list.
Crow has also donated $25,000 to Rep. Tony Gonzales of San Antonio, the most moderate Texas Republican in Congress. He’s one of 14 of 25 Texas Republicans in the House who count Crow as a donor.
In 2012 alone, Crow maxed out to Louie Gohmert, the outspoken Texas tea partier who left Congress in January.
He also backed a pair of congenial Utah Republicans, Sen. Orrin Hatch and Jon Huntsman Jr., a former governor who served as ambassador to China under Democratic President Barack Obama.
Crow has given $1.1 million to the National Republican Senatorial Committee, which aids candidates for Senate, and $700,000 to the Republican National Committee.
Roughly $10 million of Crow’s donations have gone to federal candidates and committees since 1990. Most is in his name. Some is from his wife, Kathy Crow.
Records compiled by OpenSecrets show $4.7 million at the state level, all but $355,000 in Texas, where Crow has supported generations of GOP leaders. A number of times, beneficiaries ended up as rivals:
—Kay Bailey Hutchison: In 2009, Crow pumped $110,000 into the senator’s bid to oust Gov. Rick Perry, a fellow Republican, in three chunks between June and December.
—Rick Perry: Crow provided $157,230, including $5,230 toward a short-lived presidential campaign in 2012. The first check, for $5,000, came in 1997 when Perry was running for lieutenant governor. Three checks for $25,000 and another for $50,000 would come his way during his stint as governor.
—Sen. Ted Cruz: $31,600, starting in March 2011, two months after Cruz joined the race to fill the seat that Hutchison was vacating.
—David Dewhurst: Cruz nabbed the Senate nomination in an upset over the lieutenant governor — who over the years has collected $294,000 in campaign donations from Crow, starting with $25,000 in 2001. Dewhurst joined the Senate race four months after Cruz, at which point Crow soon maxed out to him, too, with checks totaling $5,000.
—Sen. John Cornyn: $425,000 to his campaigns and affiliated political action committee. The first $8,500 came when he was running for attorney general in 1998, four years before his election to the Senate.
There are notable omissions, too.
Crow has given nothing to Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick or state Attorney General Ken Paxton, for instance.
Undisclosed luxury trips
Crow, 74, is chairman of one of North Texas’ most successful private investment firms, Crow Holdings, which has almost $29 billion in assets under management, including real estate and securities. His late father, the legendary Trammell Crow, developed the Dallas Market Center, Atlanta’s Peachtree Center and San Francisco’s Embarcadero Center.
On Thursday, a ProPublica investigation revealed that Crow has provided numerous luxury trips to Thomas, none of which the justice disclosed.
Through a spokesman, Crow declined to discuss their relationship or how he chooses recipients for campaign donations.
In a written statement, Crow called the Thomases “dear friends” since 1996 and the justice “one of the greatest Americans of our time.”
“Justice Thomas and Ginni never asked for any of this hospitality. We have never asked about a pending or lower court case, and Justice Thomas has never discussed one, and we have never sought to influence Justice Thomas on any legal or political issue,” he said.
Nor, he added, did any other guest on these trips, “and I would never invite anyone who I believe had any intention of doing that.”
In a statement released by the court on Friday, Thomas defended the lack of disclosure, saying that based on advice from other jurists early in his tenure, he believed that “this sort of personal hospitality from close personal friends, who did not have business before the Court, was not reportable.”
“Harlan and Kathy Crow are among our dearest friends … As friends do, we have joined them on a number of family trips during the more than quarter century we have known them,” he said.
Calls were already mounting in Congress and the judicial branch for tighter ethics disclosure rules for judges. Thomas vowed to comply with whatever guidelines are in place.
Beyond Texas
Outside Texas, Crow’s biggest campaign donations have been:
—$25,000 to Lee Zeldin, a congressman and Donald Trump ally, for last year’s losing bid for New York governor.
—$100,000 to the Florida Republican Party in 2010.
—$25,900 to Meg Whitman, a former Disney executive now serving as President Joe Biden’s ambassador to Kenya, when she was the GOP nominee for California governor in 2010.
—$25,000 to Ken Cuccinelli for his 2013 run for Virginia governor. As state attorney general, he led efforts to overturn the Affordable Care Act and defended an anti-sodomy law.
—$15,000 for Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s successful 2021 campaign.
Some notable donations on the Democratic side:
—$10,800 to Barbara Mallory Caraway, a former state House member in Dallas, in her bids to unseat longtime Dallas congresswoman Eddie Bernice Johnson in the Democrat primary. Johnson retired this year.
—$250 to Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign (though Crow also donated $2,000 that cycle to President George H.W. Bush, the incumbent.)
The Bush family:
—$25,000 to George P. Bush for failed bid to unseat Paxton in the 2022 primary, and $52,000 in 2013 when he ran for land commissioner.
—$500 in 1997 to Jeb Bush, for his Florida governor’s race.
—$5,600 to Pierce Bush for a failed 2020 congressional campaign in Houston.
—$18,000 for George W. Bush’s gubernatorial bids, $2,000 when he ran for president in 2000, and another $4,000 toward his reelection.
There’s no sign of Crow supporting former President Trump financially.
He and his wife have given over $30,000 to Liz Cheney — the former Wyoming congresswoman who became a pariah within the GOP by voting to impeach Trump after the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol.
Over a third of that came after the impeachment vote, as she struggled to keep her seat over Trump’s opposition.
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