Retired Justice Anthony Kennedy has filed two 2023 disclosures, an original and an amendment after Fix the Court started poking around, neither of which has been reported on.

In the former, Kennedy listed $5,200 worth of travel gifts, i.e., seven free airplane flights. His son-in-law John told us that he and Kennedy’s daughter — and not John’s company, CVC Capital, as originally thought — paid for the flights out of their “own private account,” which means that the justice didn’t need to list them, hence the amendment.

The problem is the value: $5,200.

If you add up the seven flights, it’s 9.9 hours of flight time. Fix the Court can confidently say that putting a person on a private plane does not cost a mere $525/hour. (No one calls their Delta SkyMiles, e.g., a “private account,” so I’ll presume it’s something like NetJets and have asked John to confirm.) The cost could easily have been 10 times that.

And yet, thanks to a March 2024 update to the AO’s disclosure instructions (also on p. 38), the misleading math is permitted:

“Note: In the case of gifts related to travel, the filer’s estimate of value should be made in reference to the most analogous commercially available substitute (e.g., transportation aboard a private aircraft should be valued at the cost of a first-class ticket for a similar route on a commercial air carrier […]).”

After all the judiciary has been through, fairly and unfairly, over the last two years, one would think that permitting judicial officers to hide the true value of their gifts of travel by listing the cost of much cheaper accommodations would be out of bounds. And yet, it’s not.

Fix the Court has asked the Financial Disclosure Committee to reconsider the language. (And, yes, Justice Thomas still thinks private jets are unreportable “facilities,” but that’s another story.)