Margaret Crow survived the sinking of the SS Athenia, the first British ship sunk by Nazi Germany during World War II.
[9] Crow is a member of the founding committee of the Club for Growth and has served on the board of the American Enterprise Institute since 1996.
[8] In 2009, Crow mounted an unsuccessful multimillion-dollar campaign to block the establishment of a publicly owned convention hotel in Dallas.
[17] Harlan Crow also donated to many Conservative Democrats, Including Josh Gottheimer, Henry Cuellar, Kyrsten Sinema, Joe Manchin, Jim Costa, Vicente Gonzalez, Jared Golden, Ed Case, Elissa Slotkin,[18] Dean Phillips, Abigail Spanberger, Susie Lee, Lou Correa, Scott Peters and Josh Harder.
[26] The Intercept and Project on Government Oversight reported in 2023 that Crow and his family purchased citizenship in St. Kitts and Nevis through the citizenship-by-investment program in 2012, raising concerns about the billionaire's ability to shelter assets and obscure financial transactions by taking advantage of the island nation's banking secrecy laws.
[27][28] In addition to providing initial funding for his wife's founding of Liberty Central in 2009;[14] in 2023, ProPublica reported that Crow had given lavish gifts to Associate Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas over a period of 20 years.
[35] Legal experts cited by ProPublica say that Thomas did not disclose the gifts, violating a financial disclosure law and ethical norms for judges.
[38][39][40][41][42] Crow's backyard garden features what he named the 'Garden of Evil',[43] which is home to at least 20 statues of authoritarian leaders and Communist icons including Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Fidel Castro, Mao Zedong, Karl Marx, Hosni Mubarak, Josip Broz Tito, Nicolae Ceausescu, Walter Ulbricht, Gavrilo Princip, Bela Kun, and Che Guevara.
[47] Crow also owns original paintings by Claude Monet, Rembrandt Peale, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Winston Churchill, and Dwight D.
[48] Crow's private library contains a collection of 8,500 books and manuscripts including historical documents from Juan Ponce de León, Christopher Columbus, Amerigo Vespucci, George Washington, Robert E. Lee, and all the signers of the United States Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States.
[49] In a February 2024 letter to Crow, Senate Finance Committee Chair Ron Wyden asked for justification for Crow's tax deductions, writing that “Any effort to mischaracterize a yacht used as a pleasure craft as a business is a run of the mill tax scam, plain and simple.
[50] Committee investigators determined that the yacht was not legally licensed to be chartered out for the transportation of passengers for hire in the United States.