OPINION:
After Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was accused last week of accepting luxury gifts from a top Republican donor — accused, mind you — Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, New York Democrat, declared that he should be thrown off the Supreme Court.
“This is beyond party or partisanship,” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said on Twitter. “This degree of corruption is shocking — almost cartoonish. Thomas must be impeached.”
An investigation by ProPublica alleged that Justice Thomas took luxury trips and traveled on yachts and private jets owned by Dallas billionaire Harlan Crow. The publication said Justice Thomas never disclosed the travel. He says it was all above board and adhered to the court’s rules.
But whatever. Who in the Democratic Party decided that Ms. Ocasio-Cortez was the right messenger here? She is also being investigated for allegedly accepting lavish gifts. And it’s more than accusations.
Documents released last month by the Congressional Ethics Committee show she begged for free tickets — worth $70,000 — to the Met Gala, the world’s No. 1 social and fashion event. She then stiffed the makers of her dress and the hotel where she stayed for months, then sought to cover up the whole mess, according to the House investigators looking into possible ethics violations.
Here’s how it went down. The 33-year-old former bartender decided she wanted to rub elbows with the rich and beautiful people in Manhattan at the 2021 annual Met Gala. So the media darling traded off her position to get an invite, helped along “after much prodding by her campaign staffer.”
She cozied up to the super-famous Vogue’s Anna Wintour, who runs the Gala, and got an invitation for herself and her boyfriend that said they’d be “guests of Vogue.”
But the documents from the Congressional Ethics Committee — which last month extended its inquiry — showed her lawyers had cautioned her against attending the Gala as Vogue’s guest, noting that she couldn’t accept a gift that large. The rule is clear: Lawmakers are prohibited from accepting gifts from companies that use lobbyists, which Vogue’s parent company, Advance Media Publications, does.
In a message to her staff, an attorney for Ms. Ocasio-Cortez advised her how she could attend legally. “The Congresswoman could accept an invitation from [the Met], but not from Vogue,” he wrote. “Since Advance Publications is a registered lobbyist, we’ll need to be extra careful!”
But the congresswoman went anyway. Then the alleged cover-up began.
“The day after the gala … Vogue staffers reached out to AOC’s office to inform them they had received a number of media inquiries about the nature of the congresswoman’s attendance and to say they were telling outlets she had been Wintour’s personal guest instead of saying she was a guest of the magazine,” the Daily Mail wrote.
The documents also show that Ms. Ocasio-Cortez was billed $1,300 for her dress, but her staff was able to talk $1,000 off the price tag, along with getting the price of her $635 shoes knocked down by listing them as rentals. The socialist then failed to pay back thousands of dollars in bills from the Gala night, including $344.85 in makeup costs that had to be passed on to a collections agency as “extremely overdue.”
She also took so long to pay back $477.73 for hairstyling that a rep for the stylist “reached out to her staff and said ‘it would look terrible if we had to file a complaint with the NY Dept of Labor against Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez,’” the Mail reported. It took her nearly a year to pay that bill, Business Insider reported.
And it took eight months for her to pay more than $1,000 for transportation that was footed by Conde Nast. Plus, she took nearly a year to pay $4,602.92 in bills at the Carlyle Hotel from the evening, according to the Post.
“In addition, a publicist associated with the company that supplied Ocasio-Cortez with her rental items — a gown, a handbag and shoes — provided a final invoice to the campaign staffer in September 2021 for about $990, but it went unpaid for months. The company then identified in April that $5,579.99 worth of unpaid goods and services had been provided to Ocasio-Cortez and her partner for the event, the report said,” NBC News reported.
By the way, it’s worth noting that Ms. Ocasio-Cortez paid her bills only after House investigators began looking into all this.
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez ought to remember the adage about people who live in glass houses.
• Joseph Curl covered the White House and politics for a decade for The Washington Times. He can be reached at josephcurl@gmail.com and on Twitter @josephcurl.
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