Post Reports is the daily podcast from The Washington Post. Unparalleled reporting. Expert insight. Clear analysis. Everything you’ve come to expect from the newsroom of The Post, for your ears. Martine Powers and Elahe Izadi are your hosts, asking the questions you didn’t know you wanted answered. Published weekdays around 5 p.m. Eastern time.
The Supreme Court’s potential conflict-of-interest problem
The potential conflicts of interest keep stacking up for the Supreme Court. Today we break down the recent reports about issues such as luxury vacations gifted to Clarence Thomas and the occupation of John Roberts’s wife.
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First, it was revealed that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has been accepting luxury gifts from a Republican mega-donor. Then, Justice Neal Gorsuch sold his home to a lawyer whose cases appear in front of the Supreme Court. And now, Justice John Roberts is under scrutiny because his wife makes money as a legal recruiter, pairing lawyers up with law firms. In each of these cases, critics say the justices failed to appropriately disclose these financial gains.
Journalist Robert Barnes walks us through the details of these conflict-of-interest cases, what the current disclosure requirements entail, and the options legal experts have posed for how to make a more ethical Supreme Court.