With ProPublica’s report that benefactors came out of the woodwork to befriend Justice Clarence Thomas after he complained to a then-Republican Florida Congressman Cliff Stearns in 2000 about his personal financial straits, legal and tax experts noted that the value of the gifts could be considered unreported taxable income to keep him in his role, not simply unreported extravagant gifts.

“He views Thomas as a Supreme Court justice as having a limited salary.  So he provides benefits for him,” George Priest, a Yale Law School professor and a traveling buddy of Thomas and benefactor Harlan Crow, said in the ProPublica story. And that’s where the problem for Thomas lies.  “If there are in fact people saying more or less, ‘We’re offering these goodies to the justice so that he will stay in his role’. . . it sounds like it would be taxable income for him,” said Brian Galle, a law professor at the Georgetown University Law Center who focuses on taxation, told Jacobin.

The big problem with bringing a corruption or tax fraud case against Thomas is proving he knew the intent of the largess and he intentionally misrepresented them as gifts.  “With Thomas, it’s not hard to connect the dots from some of his financial obligations to the conversation with Congressman Stearns to the billionaire buddy program that he was soon enlisted in,” said Gabe Roth, executive director of the judicial reform nonprofit Fix the Court. “[But] a lot of this also comes down to [the idea that] laws are only as strong as the government’s desire to prosecute, and I can’t imagine a situation where Justice Thomas would be prosecuted.”  Basically:  a justice on the Supreme Court can play dumb about the intent of all the gifts he’s received, and because of his feigned ignorance, we cannot enforce the law.  It’s the story of Clarence Thomas’s career.