Politixia
Justice Clarence Thomas does not do podcasts, or, really, much media of any kind. So it was a small event when he turned up this week on “Verdict with Ted Cruz” — a rare sit-down, timed with all the coincidence of a book launch — and thanked a sitting United States senator for having his back.
Against what, exactly? Well, if you’ve followed Supreme Court scandals over the last few years you know, it’s the reporting that revealed Thomas spent two decades accepting luxury travel and other largesse from GOP megadonors and declining to tell anyone about it.
“You’re one of the people who actually stands up, particularly at times when others seem to wither, and I appreciate it,” Thomas told Cruz. “And more personally, when we, my wife and I, were under attack for obvious reasons, you and Mike Lee and some of the other friends would stand up,” he said. “So I really appreciate that.”
Cruz, never one to leave a compliment unreturned, called it “powerful coming from you because you’re someone who knows what that’s like and has done so in a way that has been world-changing.”
And it’s fascinating that Thomas refers to it as “under attack,” as though the ProPublica reporters who documented the roughly $500,000 Indonesia vacation aboard Harlan Crow’s superyacht were the ones who’d done something untoward, and not the justice who left all of it off the disclosure forms federal law requires him to file. Thomas has been nursing this grievance since the story broke, his first real explanation for the whole thing boiled down to my rich friends told me it was fine.
The gifts kept surfacing. Crow bought three properties from Thomas, including the house where Thomas’s mother lived rent-free; he paid private-school tuition for the grandnephew Thomas was raising “as a son.” By our count, the undisclosed benefits ran to something like $5.8 million. When the Senate Finance Committee asked Crow to itemize any of it, his Gibson Dunn lawyers told the Senate to take their chances with contempt, then doubled down. Thomas eventually amended his disclosures (better than before, nowhere near where they need to be) and then reporters just kept finding more vacations. Thomas was also a member of a fancy rich person club, and had bunches of billionaire friends that lavished him with pricey gifts. Even the RV Thomas uses to establish his everyman bona fides was financed by a rich buddy, via a “loan” that was never paid back.
Thomas’s ethics issues run deeper than mere money. His wife, right-wing operative Ginni Thomas, keeps her own file. She sent her “LOVE” to the January 6th crowd hours before the Capitol was stormed, fired off 29 texts to Mark Meadows urging him to keep fighting the result, leaned on Arizona and Wisconsin lawmakers, and corresponded with coup lawyer John Eastman. She told the January 6th Committee that she and her husband simply don’t discuss her work, which got harder to swallow when it emerged Clarence had helped talk her off the ledge, telling her to “keep holding on”. And Clarence heard a case involving the January 6th committee’s records and was the lone dissent! Recusal is for other people.
Not that Thomas is the only one with recent ethics issues. Justice Samuel Alito flew a “Stop the Steal” flag over his house and then blamed his wife, declined to recuse from the relevant cases, and, as recently as this spring, had a son quietly working at Treasury while Alito sat on Trump’s tariff cases. Justice Neil Gorsuch had his own convenient real estate deal and became the loudest voice against any ethics code with teeth. The Court did, under pressure, adopt its first-ever code of ethics in 2023 — a document with no enforcement mechanism, which is another way of saying no code at all.
Which brings us back to Cruz, whose defense of Thomas has always run on the same fuel. In April 2023, he called the scrutiny a “political smear job” on Fox News — “they’re not looking at any other judges,” a claim that has aged poorly given the Alito and Gorsuch entries above — and added that the real problem was that “an African-American is not allowed to be a conservative.”
As for why Thomas materialized on a senator’s podcast at all, wouldn’t you know it — Cruz has a book out. Going Further: The Incomparable Clarence Thomas, his admiring biography of the justice, hit shelves the day after the episode dropped. So the on-air thank-you for defending Thomas doubles as a plug for the hardcover, paid version of that defense.
Earlier: Paragon Of Virtue Clarence Thomas Has Been Given Half A Million In Value Off The Record
Clarence Thomas Has Forgotten More Vacations Than You’ll Ever Know
Supreme Court Adopts Ethics Code. Who Is Going To Enforce It? WHO KNOWS?!?!?
Ginni Thomas’s Jan. 6th Committee Testimony Paints A Bleak View Of Marriage
Sam Alito’s Son Was Quietly Working At Treasury While His Dad Ruled On Trump’s Tariffs
Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, host of The Jabot podcast, and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter @Kathryn1 or Bluesky @Kathryn1
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