Documentary filmmaker Ken Burns started trending on social media Friday for showing in a photograph with Supreme Court docket Justice Clarence Thomas and billionaire David Koch.
Nonetheless, Burns stated he doesn’t have a relationship with Thomas, apart from taking the picture. Koch has funded one among Burns’ documentaries.
“Round ten years in the past, Ken was stopped and requested to take {a photograph} with a Supreme Court docket Justice and David Koch, who was a supporter of public tv and would later present some funding for his movie, The Vietnam Battle. So he took the picture, as he has accomplished with many, many others. Aside from the taking of that {photograph} and innocuous pleasantries, that’s the extent of his contact with Justice Thomas,” a spokesperson for Burns wrote in a press release to The Hollywood Reporter.
The picture appeared in a ProPublica article published Friday that described beforehand unknown particulars concerning the relationship between Thomas and Koch, claiming that Thomas attended a minimum of two donor occasions for the Koch’s libertarian political community and was requested to talk to encourage donations. Burns isn’t talked about within the article, apart from showing within the lead picture, which the article says was taken on the Bohemian Grove, an all-men’s retreat in Northern California.
The article itself additionally attracted consideration as the most recent in a sequence of controversies for the Supreme Court docket justice. In ProPublica articles published earlier this 12 months, the publication reported on years of luxurious journeys that Thomas had reportedly accepted from Harlan Crow, an actual property magnate and main Republican donor, and never disclosed to the Supreme Court docket. Thomas later disclosed the journeys and defended his prior omission, saying that the data had been “inadvertently omitted.”
