Scalia Accepted 70 Undisclosed Gifts, Like Thomas: U.S. Senator

US Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-Rhode Island) has revealed the late US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia accepted and did not disclose dozens of trips paid for by special interest advocates in a fashion similar to the decades-worth of undisclosed luxury travel, vacations and trips of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, David Badash of the New Civil Rights Movement reported for Raw Story.

Photo Insert: Senator Whitehouse says Scalia took “more than seven dozen” of these undisclosed luxury vacations.

In a video that has gone viral on social media – over 1.6 million views in less than 24 hours – Senator Whitehouse says Scalia took “more than seven dozen” of these undisclosed vacations.

“The personal hospitality problems I’ve been pursuing began with Justice Scalia, who took more than seven dozen undisclosed hunting vacations. Most people know of two, the one where he was on the Air Force Two manifest with Dick Cheney and the one where he died,” Sen. Whitehouse said in his remarks during Tuesday’s Judiciary Committee hearing on Supreme Court ethics.

Scalia, a hardcore conservative, died in February of 2016 during a quail hunting vacation, reportedly “at an $800-per-night Texas hunting lodge among still-unknown companions,” a lodge owned by the chairman and CEO of a multi-billion dollar manufacturing company.

Calling Scalia’s vacation gifts “systematized,” Whitehouse, who has been focused on judicial reform for years, revealed there had been “seventy-plus,” and explained the process the justice would use to get invited.

“Some intermediary would ask the owner of an expensive resort, often a commercial property, to extend to Scalia a personal invitation to the resort, even where the owner was someone he’d never met. Scalia treated it as ‘personal hospitality’ because of the ‘personal’ invitation, and failed to disclose the vacations,” Whitehouse said.

“Gun industry advocates, fossil fuel folks, and Republican political figures often tagged along.”

Whitehouse made the case against Scalia with 10 exhibits. “No reasonable reading of the term ‘personal hospitality’ (we’ve covered this,) but the Supreme Court let this go on for years,” said Whitehouse.

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