{"id":161465,"date":"2026-08-25T12:49:47","date_gmt":"2026-08-25T20:49:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/2026\/08\/25\/clarence-thomas-turns-up-on-ted-cruzs-podcast-still-sore-about-getting-caught-with-all-those-undisclosed-gifts\/"},"modified":"2026-08-25T12:49:47","modified_gmt":"2026-08-25T20:49:47","slug":"clarence-thomas-turns-up-on-ted-cruzs-podcast-still-sore-about-getting-caught-with-all-those-undisclosed-gifts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/2026\/08\/25\/clarence-thomas-turns-up-on-ted-cruzs-podcast-still-sore-about-getting-caught-with-all-those-undisclosed-gifts\/","title":{"rendered":"Clarence Thomas Turns Up On Ted Cruz\u2019s Podcast, Still Sore About Getting Caught With All Those Undisclosed Gifts"},"content":{"rendered":"

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 \u201cVerdict with Ted Cruz<\/a>\u201d \u2014 a rare sit-down, timed with all the coincidence of a book launch \u2014 and thanked a sitting United States senator for having his back.<\/p>\n

Against what, exactly? Well, if you\u2019ve followed Supreme Court scandals over the last few years you know, it\u2019s the reporting that revealed Thomas spent two decades accepting luxury travel and other largesse from GOP megadonors and declining to tell anyone about it.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u2019re one of the people who actually stands up, particularly at times when others seem to wither, and I appreciate it,\u201d Thomas told Cruz. \u201cAnd 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,\u201d he said. \u201cSo I really appreciate that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cruz, never one to leave a compliment unreturned, called it \u201cpowerful coming from you because you\u2019re someone who knows what that\u2019s like and has done so in a way that has been world-changing.\u201d<\/p>\n

And it\u2019s fascinating that Thomas refers to it as \u201cunder attack,\u201d as though the ProPublica reporters who documented the roughly $500,000 Indonesia vacation aboard Harlan Crow\u2019s superyacht<\/a> were the ones who\u2019d 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<\/a>. <\/p>\n

The gifts kept surfacing. Crow bought three properties from Thomas<\/a>, including the house where Thomas\u2019s mother lived rent-free; he paid private-school tuition for the grandnephew<\/a> Thomas was raising \u201cas a son.\u201d By our count, the undisclosed benefits ran to something like $5.8 million<\/a>. 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<\/a>, then doubled down<\/a>. Thomas eventually amended his disclosures<\/a> (better than before, nowhere near where they need to be) and then reporters just kept finding more vacations<\/a>. Thomas was also a member of a\u00a0fancy rich person club<\/a>, and had\u00a0bunches of billionaire friends<\/a>\u00a0that lavished him with pricey gifts.\u00a0Even the RV<\/a>\u00a0Thomas uses to establish his everyman bona fides was financed by a rich buddy, via a \u201cloan\u201d that was\u00a0never paid back<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Thomas\u2019s ethics issues run deeper than mere money. His wife, right-wing operative Ginni Thomas, keeps her own file. She sent her \u201cLOVE\u201d to the January 6th crowd<\/a> hours before the Capitol was stormed, fired off 29 texts to Mark Meadows<\/a> 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<\/a> that she and her husband simply don\u2019t discuss her work, which got harder to swallow when it emerged Clarence had helped talk her off the ledge, telling her to \u201ckeep holding on\u201d<\/a>. And Clarence heard a case involving the January 6th committee\u2019s records and was the lone dissent! Recusal is for other people.<\/p>\n

Not that Thomas is the only one with recent ethics issues. Justice Samuel Alito flew a \u201cStop the Steal\u201d flag over his house and then blamed his wife<\/a>, 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\u2019s tariff cases<\/a>. Justice Neil Gorsuch had his own convenient real estate deal and became the loudest voice against any ethics code with teeth<\/a>. The Court did, under pressure, adopt its first-ever code of ethics in 2023<\/a> \u2014 a document with no enforcement mechanism, which is another way of saying no code at all.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cpolitical smear job\u201d<\/a> on Fox News \u2014 \u201cthey\u2019re not looking at any other judges,\u201d a claim that has aged poorly given the Alito and Gorsuch entries above \u2014 and added that the real problem was that \u201can African-American is not allowed to be a conservative.\u201d<\/p>\n

As for why Thomas materialized on a senator\u2019s podcast at all, wouldn\u2019t you know it \u2014 Cruz has a book out. Going Further: The Incomparable Clarence Thomas<\/em>, 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.<\/p>\n

Earlier:<\/strong> Paragon Of Virtue Clarence Thomas Has Been Given Half A Million In Value Off The Record<\/a>
Clarence Thomas Has Forgotten More Vacations Than You\u2019ll Ever Know<\/a>
Supreme Court Adopts Ethics Code. Who Is Going To Enforce It? WHO KNOWS?!?!?<\/a>
Ginni Thomas\u2019s Jan. 6th Committee Testimony Paints A Bleak View Of Marriage<\/a>
Sam Alito\u2019s Son Was Quietly Working At Treasury While His Dad Ruled On Trump\u2019s Tariffs<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, host of\u00a0The Jabot podcast<\/a>, and co-host of\u00a0Thinking Like A Lawyer<\/a>. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email\u00a0her<\/a>\u00a0with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter\u00a0@Kathryn1<\/a>\u00a0or Bluesky\u00a0@Kathryn1<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The post Clarence Thomas Turns Up On Ted Cruz\u2019s Podcast, Still Sore About Getting Caught With All Those Undisclosed Gifts<\/a> appeared first on Above the Law<\/a>.<\/p>\n

<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n

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 \u201cVerdict with Ted Cruz<\/a>\u201d \u2014 a rare sit-down, timed with all the coincidence of a book launch \u2014 and thanked a sitting United States senator for having his back.<\/p>\n

Against what, exactly? Well, if you\u2019ve followed Supreme Court scandals over the last few years you know, it\u2019s the reporting that revealed Thomas spent two decades accepting luxury travel and other largesse from GOP megadonors and declining to tell anyone about it.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u2019re one of the people who actually stands up, particularly at times when others seem to wither, and I appreciate it,\u201d Thomas told Cruz. \u201cAnd 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,\u201d he said. \u201cSo I really appreciate that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cruz, never one to leave a compliment unreturned, called it \u201cpowerful coming from you because you\u2019re someone who knows what that\u2019s like and has done so in a way that has been world-changing.\u201d<\/p>\n

And it\u2019s fascinating that Thomas refers to it as \u201cunder attack,\u201d as though the ProPublica reporters who documented the roughly $500,000 Indonesia vacation aboard Harlan Crow\u2019s superyacht<\/a> were the ones who\u2019d 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<\/a>. <\/p>\n

The gifts kept surfacing. Crow bought three properties from Thomas<\/a>, including the house where Thomas\u2019s mother lived rent-free; he paid private-school tuition for the grandnephew<\/a> Thomas was raising \u201cas a son.\u201d By our count, the undisclosed benefits ran to something like $5.8 million<\/a>. 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<\/a>, then doubled down<\/a>. Thomas eventually amended his disclosures<\/a> (better than before, nowhere near where they need to be) and then reporters just kept finding more vacations<\/a>. Thomas was also a member of a\u00a0fancy rich person club<\/a>, and had\u00a0bunches of billionaire friends<\/a>\u00a0that lavished him with pricey gifts.\u00a0Even the RV<\/a>\u00a0Thomas uses to establish his everyman bona fides was financed by a rich buddy, via a \u201cloan\u201d that was\u00a0never paid back<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Thomas\u2019s ethics issues run deeper than mere money. His wife, right-wing operative Ginni Thomas, keeps her own file. She sent her \u201cLOVE\u201d to the January 6th crowd<\/a> hours before the Capitol was stormed, fired off 29 texts to Mark Meadows<\/a> 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<\/a> that she and her husband simply don\u2019t discuss her work, which got harder to swallow when it emerged Clarence had helped talk her off the ledge, telling her to \u201ckeep holding on\u201d<\/a>. And Clarence heard a case involving the January 6th committee\u2019s records and was the lone dissent! Recusal is for other people.<\/p>\n

Not that Thomas is the only one with recent ethics issues. Justice Samuel Alito flew a \u201cStop the Steal\u201d flag over his house and then blamed his wife<\/a>, 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\u2019s tariff cases<\/a>. Justice Neil Gorsuch had his own convenient real estate deal and became the loudest voice against any ethics code with teeth<\/a>. The Court did, under pressure, adopt its first-ever code of ethics in 2023<\/a> \u2014 a document with no enforcement mechanism, which is another way of saying no code at all.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cpolitical smear job\u201d<\/a> on Fox News \u2014 \u201cthey\u2019re not looking at any other judges,\u201d a claim that has aged poorly given the Alito and Gorsuch entries above \u2014 and added that the real problem was that \u201can African-American is not allowed to be a conservative.\u201d<\/p>\n

As for why Thomas materialized on a senator\u2019s podcast at all, wouldn\u2019t you know it \u2014 Cruz has a book out. Going Further: The Incomparable Clarence Thomas<\/em>, 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.<\/p>\n

Earlier:<\/strong> Paragon Of Virtue Clarence Thomas Has Been Given Half A Million In Value Off The Record<\/a>
Clarence Thomas Has Forgotten More Vacations Than You\u2019ll Ever Know<\/a>
Supreme Court Adopts Ethics Code. Who Is Going To Enforce It? WHO KNOWS?!?!?<\/a>
Ginni Thomas\u2019s Jan. 6th Committee Testimony Paints A Bleak View Of Marriage<\/a>
Sam Alito\u2019s Son Was Quietly Working At Treasury While His Dad Ruled On Trump\u2019s Tariffs<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

\"\"Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, host of\u00a0The Jabot podcast<\/a>, and co-host of\u00a0Thinking Like A Lawyer<\/a>. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email\u00a0her<\/a>\u00a0with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter\u00a0@Kathryn1<\/a>\u00a0or Bluesky\u00a0@Kathryn1<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 \u201cVerdict with Ted Cruz\u201d \u2014 a rare sit-down, timed with all the coincidence of a book launch \u2014 and thanked a sitting United States senator for having his […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":161445,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-161465","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-above_the_law"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/xira.com\/p\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/IMG_5243-1-scaled-e1623338814705-620x568-hHj2fN.jpg?fit=620%2C568&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161465","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=161465"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161465\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/161445"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=161465"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=161465"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=161465"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}