After two years of trying to sell property he co-owned in rural Colorado, just nine days after being confirmed to the U.S. Supreme Court, Justice Neil Gorsuch found a buyer: the head of a massive multi-national law firm that had cases before the nation’s highest court. Justice Gorsuch disclosed the sale, but not the name of the buyer.
“That box was left blank,” reports Politico‘s Heidi Przybyla.
An attorney for one of the firm’s cases before the Supreme Court “represented North Dakota in what became one of the more highly publicized rulings in recent years, a multistate suit which reversed former President Barack Obama’s plan to fight climate change through the Clean Air Act.”
Gorsuch’s failure to disclose is not as dramatic or extensive as Justice Clarence Thomas’ decades worth of failure to disclose all-expenses-paid luxury travel and vacations with his wife, the right-wing extremist and activist Ginni Thomas, but it establishes a pattern of conservative justices on the Roberts Supreme Court appearing to believe they are above the law.
Politico reports the buyer Justice Gorsuch did not disclose was Brian Duffy, the “chief executive of Greenberg Traurig, one of the nation’s biggest law firms with a robust practice before the high court.”
The firm, with 44 offices, has approximately 2650 attorneys and revenue of $2 billion. Since 1990, it has made over $17 million in political donations, according to data from Open Secrets.
“On April 16 of 2017, Greenberg’s Brian Duffy put under contract the 3,000-square foot log home on the Colorado River and nestled in the mountains northwest of Denver, according to real estate records,” Politico reports. “He and his wife closed on the house a month later, paying $1.825 million, according to a deed in the county’s record system. Gorsuch, who held a 20 percent stake, reported making between $250,001 and $500,000 from the sale on his federal disclosure forms.”
“Gorsuch did not disclose the identity of the purchaser.”
In the Clean Air Act case, “Gorsuch joined the court’s other five conservative judges in agreeing with the plaintiffs — including Greenberg’s client — that the Environmental Protection Agency had overstepped its authority by regulating carbon emissions from power plants in the decision that makes it more difficult for the executive branch to regulate emissions without express authorization from Congress.”
Politico adds, “in reporting his Colorado income, Gorsuch listed as his source only the name that he and his two co-owners gave themselves, Walden Group, LLC. The report didn’t indicate that there had been a real estate sale or a purchaser.”
Image: LBJ Library photo by Jay Godwin via Flickr