Andy Kroll, a reporter with ProPublica, is being honored on Sunday for his investigative work on exposing ethically dubious practices among Supreme Court justices. The report uncovered Justice Clarence Thomas's failure to report expensive vacations and travel from a Republican mega donor and developer. According to the report, the justice of more than three decades traveled on a private jet, staying in luxurious facilities every year without disclosing the trips. One destination was in the Adirondacks on St. Regis Lake. Kroll, who previously wrote for Rolling Stone, focuses on politics, money, power and democracy. He is being honored with the Museum of Political Corruption’s Nellie Bly award Sunday at WAMC Performing Arts Studio, The Linda. I spoke with Kroll about the honor and the work that led to this this week.
This was a big team effort that we brought half a dozen reporters, research reporters, multiple editors too. My colleagues, Justin Elliott, Josh Kaplan and Alex Mierjeski, in particular, got on the trail of this pattern of gifts and trips and other kind of lavish perks that Justice Clarence Thomas was receiving often from one particular person, a billionaire named Harlan Crow. And, you know, I think it was old fashioned shoe leather reporting. Though shoe leather reporting updated for the digital era, the era of social media. I think if you look at the reporting that our team did, you'll see not only the hallmarks of knocking on doors, calling 1000s of people, people slamming the door on your face, people hanging up on you, but also using online tools, especially our colleague Alex Mierjeski, finding photographic evidence of, say, Clarence Thomas on a trip in Southeast Asia, or Clarence Thomas wearing these polo shirts that were connected to trips with Harlan Crow that Thomas had gone on. And so, you had this great combination of, again, kind of classic Woodward and Bernstein investigative reporting, but also really cutting-edge stuff online and using all of these great new tools available to journalists like us.
ProPublica has published several pieces about Thomas since the initial report about other billionaires who have supported his lifestyle, and Thomas admitted that he should have disclosed the trips from Harlan Crow. What else came out after that initial report? And what do you think remains?
Oh, good question. A lot of new information. A lot of pre revelatory disclosures came out after that first story. I think Clarence Thomas and the billionaire was the title of that story of ProPublica. Our team surfaced information about how Harlan Crow had purchased Clarence Thomas's mother's house in Georgia. Other trips that he had gone on Harlan crow had helped pay tuition for a young family member of Clarence Thomas's that Thomas and his wife, Ginni Thomas, were sort of raising as a son. But it wasn't just Clarence Thomas, as you rightly pointed out, our team also published a really fantastic story about Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito. Justice Alito had gone on a luxury salmon fishing junket to the other side of the country, and that travel had been paid for by a different billionaire, in this case, a hedge fund investor named Paul Singer. Alito had not disclosed that he had taken this private jet flight across the country, and he not only had he done it on a plane used by Singer, but he had done it at the invitation of a really important figure named Leonard Leo, someone who is a prominent activist, a fundraiser and the architect of the conservative super majority on the Supreme Court now. So yes, the Supreme Court reporting that our team did multiple justices, multiple donors, and really highlighting this failure to disclose information that the justices were supposed to disclose so that the public can take this information into account. And that was the real failure of the justices. And since our stories came out, the Supreme Court has put in place the first ethics code in its history. Now there's some work to do there on making it more enforceable, but that's real impact that I think helps the functioning of the court and hopefully the public’s trust in the court.
Was there anything in your reporting that surprised you as you worked through it?
Oh gosh, lots of things. Yeah, there were always little surprises and revelations and head turning moments. One of the big breakthroughs, I think for a lot of us, was trying to understand the why. Why did Justice Thomas accept all these gifts and not disclose them? Why did Harlan Crow or Paul Singer or some other wealthy individuals lavish the justices with these gifts and what was going on there? You know, as far as we could tell, with Harlan Crow, for instance, there wasn't a specific ask that he was making to the justice. And Crow, for the record, has repeatedly denied that there was any kind of quid pro quo or that business was discussed. He has said that he and Justice Thomas are friends. They share common interests, and he was just helping his friends travel the world and being a good host. So, we wanted to know why, and I think we got a really interesting answer in our long story about Leonard Leo, that was part of the larger friends of the court series we did, and that came from a Republican lawyer named George Conway, sort of famous now for being an anti-Trump conservative. But what Conway told us was that there was a real fear that justices like the late Antonin Scalia, Clarence, Thomas, Justice Alito, that, you know, they were unhappy as justices, that they felt that they were underpaid or undervalued, and there was a concern that they would one day just say, you know, ‘I'm done with this, and I'm going to go into private practice, or I want to go write books or just go out and make money,’ And so there was a belief that these justices needed to feel befriended. They needed to feel comfortable. They needed to feel loved by people outside of the court, and that was part of the reason for the way that they were, you know, welcomed and lavished with attention and this fine lifestyle, was to try to keep them on the bench, to achieve conservative outcomes on the bench. I thought that was just a fascinating kind of intellectual breakthrough that helped explain why all this stuff, with the gifts and the travel and the perks was happening in the first place.
I don't think many people realize or really understand how tricky and time consuming that investigative journalism can be. With this piece, what was your experience collecting sources and, you know, piecing it all together?
Oh, I, like my colleagues on this project, you know, we had a success rate in terms of phone calls returned, emails answered and doors kept open. That was probably, you know, one out of every 100 maybe even worse, maybe one out of every 500. I've heard my colleagues, Josh Kaplan and Justin Elliott and Brett Murphy, talk about so much work that they did to try to get people to open up and, you know, it was just exhausting. And sometimes you feel almost like a telemarketer. You're just on the phone all day long, calling people, calling people, and have people say no, having people, you know, yell at you and hang up the phone or politely say, ‘go away.’ And it's, it's exhausting work, but that's the nature of what we do, and things that are important, things that will change the public discussion, things that will have real impact. Don't come easy, and anyone who does this work knows that you can't expect to make five phone calls and get five revelatory answers. That is just not the nature of this work, and that's why it's so important to have reporters who have the time and the space and the latitude to be able to do this because it takes a long time and it's grinding, but sometimes at the end of that, you find something that is really revelatory and important to the public.
You're here for an event, to receive the Nellie Bly award. It's an award for investigative journalism on corruption. What does it mean to you to have your work honored in such a way?
Well, I think it's amazing that the Museum of Political Corruption gives this award out in the name of Nellie Bly, who's obviously a historic, legendary figure in investigative journalism that has impact in the world. And it's a huge honor to get an award named after someone so important and influential. It's fantastic to just be recognized for this work about the Supreme Court and the people around it, you know. And I hope it I'll also say, if you look at the past winners of this award, it's extremely humbling. There are some absolute legends in investigative journalism who received the award, and I think it's, again, flattering and humbling for all of us to just be in the same breath as those people. And hopefully, we can have a good conversation about our work and about the award and continue to kind of help people understand what's going on the Supreme Court, what more there is to be done from a reporting perspective. And also, you know what the public should know and keep in mind when they think about the Supreme Court and all of these decisions that have been coming down.
And you just published your first book, A Death on W Street: The Murder of Seth Rich and the Age of Conspiracy. It's about the death of the DNC staffer and the conspiracy theories that clouded it. What does that incident tell us about the current political moment?
We are in one of the most precarious political moments, I think, in modern history. I say that because right now we're seeing the collision of online misinformation in rumors. You're seeing polarization that is fueled by the way we get information today. It's not from three television networks and newspapers in print. It’s increasingly through social media, online news sites that may not even be news sites, but masquerade as such. We are in an era in which politics feels tribal. It doesn't feel like you can have that conversation across a partisan divide in quite the same way one could in the past. And yet, there are people who are still out there, whether they're journalists or they're lawyers or they're activists who are fighting to defend Capital ‘T’ Truth, who believe in it as a sacrosanct thing and not as a, you know, a sort of concept to be played around with. And all of those things collided in the story of Seth Rich. And there is even a sort of true crime, nonfiction force to that story, which was what drew to me in the first place. But it, you know, sadly, it’s more timely than ever, these ideas of fighting for truth in a politics that can feel as angry and divisive as ever, and trying to find a way through that and out of that. So yeah, I wish it weren't as timely and apropos as it is, but that that's just the nature of our country right now,
ProPublica investigative reporter Andy Kroll, will be honored on Sunday with the Museum of Political Corruption’s Nellie Bly award at WAMC Performing Arts Studio, The Linda.
