WASHINGTON – Justice Clarence Thomas reported two trips last year on private jets provided by Dallas billionaire Harlan Crow – the first such flights he has disclosed, after revelations earlier this year that the real estate mogul had provided luxury trips to him for years.

One of the trips was justified by security concerns, after a draft leaked of the ruling that would soon overturn abortion rights, according to Thomas’ ethics filing released by the Supreme Court on Thursday.

Thomas’ lavish secret trips with Crow, revealed in April by ProPublica, sparked an intense debate about Supreme Court ethics.

The two trips last year were not vacations. Both were for speeches in Dallas at conferences held by the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative group.

The first was in February 2022. Crow provided meals and a private flight back to Washington, D.C., during what Thomas described on his filing as an “unexpected ice storm.”

The second was in May.

“Because of the increased security risk following the Dobbs opinion leak, the May flights were by private plane for official travel as filer’s security detail recommended noncommercial travel whenever possible,” Thomas wrote in an explanatory note.

Crow is chairman of one of North Texas’ most successful private investment firms, Crow Holdings, which has almost $29 billion in assets under management, including real estate and securities. His late father, the legendary Trammell Crow, developed the Dallas Market Center, Atlanta’s Peachtree Center and San Francisco’s Embarcadero Center.

He has shrugged off allegations of unethical behavior by Thomas, not just over the undisclosed luxury vacations but other instances of financial support that surfaced in recent months.

That includes paying at least $150,000 in boarding school tuition for a Thomas grandnephew who the justice was raising.

Crow also purchased the home where Thomas’s mother lives.

“Clarence Thomas has been the target of a 32-year-old campaign to destroy him personally,” he told The Dallas Morning News in May.

Crow called the justice and his wife, Ginni Thomas, a prominent conservative activist, “dear friends” since 1996 and the justice “one of the greatest Americans of our time.”

“Justice Thomas and Ginni never asked for any of this hospitality. We have never asked about a pending or lower court case, and Justice Thomas has never discussed one, and we have never sought to influence Justice Thomas on any legal or political issue,” he said.