I consider Clarence Thomas a friend, and I’m shocked by recent reports

Oh, come on! Where’s the evidence that Justice Clarence Thomas is corrupt? Show me proof of him selling his vote on the Supreme Court!

Unfortunately, it is not that simple.

The real problem is that none of us can ever again get away from wondering.

The smell of financial corruption around Thomas is now stronger than the longstanding fear that his votes on the high court are dictated by his hatred of the liberals who put him through painful nomination hearing dominated by Anita Hill’s charges of sexual harassment.

The smell of financial favors is also now stronger than puzzlement about Thomas’s unyielding loyalty to a hardline Republican agenda that made former President Trump call Thomas his favorite justice.

Thomas’s one-sided rulings on guns, abortion and race have long provoked critics who suggest he is motivated by something other than the facts, legal precedent, and fair application of a 236-year-old Constitution to life in contemporary America.

During his 31 years on the court, Thomas’s rulings stand outside of mainstream public opinion and certainly black public opinion. He is also apart from prior decisions by conservative Supreme Court justices.

But Thomas’s rulings have been in line with a rich, reclusive Republican donor, who ingratiated himself to Thomas by purchasing property from the justice, by giving him free travel on private jets and ritzy vacations on private yachts.

That patron, Harlan Crow, also financed a documentary about Thomas. And before that, he gave the justice a Bible once owned by Frederick Douglass and served as trustee of a think tank that gave Thomas a bust of President Lincoln — items worth more than $30,000.

And last week it was reported that Crow also purchased private property from Justice Thomas — without Thomas reporting the transaction.

All the while, Crow’s generosity effectively fenced Thomas into surrounding himself with people pushing an extreme conservative legal agenda. Those people included the head of the right-wing Federalist Society, Leonard Leo. Crow was a major supporter of Leo’s group.

Yet Thomas never reported the gilded travel or the property purchases. He dismissed this shower of golden tributes as “personal hospitality from close personal friends.”

And he failed to appreciate the limiting influence on his thinking that came from allowing himself to be surrounded by far-right players.  

That’s why news of his hidden financial deals now overwhelms questions about his judicial rulings.

The apparent lack of transparency by Thomas, the senior member of the current Supreme Court, falls deep into the smoky realm of conspiracy theories that lead people to conclude that elites led by super-rich, inside players control all of government, including justices with lifetime tenure on the Supreme Court.

So far, Thomas has avoided being punished for bringing disgrace on himself.

An even bigger issue is whether he will go unpunished for harming the reputation of the court, a pillar of American life, the basis of our claim to be a nation of laws, not men.

There is no sign that Chief Justice John Roberts is going to step up to the damage being done to the court by Thomas’s lack of accountability.

Republican political leaders in Congress also prefer to turn their eyes away from Thomas’s bad behavior. Their comments are limited to castigating reporters, attacking them as liberals out to get a conservative justice.

But the facts now show Thomas has damaged the court.

It doesn’t matter if you are conservative or liberal. We can all agree Democracy does not work when the Supreme Court becomes a gated community, limited to the opinions of rich people and their powerful minions.

It is difficult for me to see Thomas in this light.

I’ve known him for 40 years — and for most of that time, during which I wrote news columns and magazine stories about him, we also became friends. He has always been gracious to my children, as a guest in my home and even at my birthday party.  

To hear some tell it, a column I wrote about Thomas for The Washington Post in 1981 brought him to the attention of Republican power players in the Reagan administration and ultimately led President George H.W. Bush to appoint him to the Supreme Court.

As two black men who came of age after the Civil Rights Movement, I remain fascinated by Justice Thomas’s rise from rural poverty in tiny Pin Point, Ga., to the position he now holds as the most powerful black man in the federal government. 

He is a man who can recite Malcolm X by heart and expresses black nationalist positions on the depth of black self-sufficiency when liberated from interference by white racism and white do-gooders.

That’s why, to me, Justice Thomas has always represented the best ideals of what black men — like the two of us — could achieve in modern America with hard work and thick skin.  

But if these recent stories are true about how he allowed himself to become captive of a far-right legal coterie, he must be sanctioned for the sake of the court’s reputation and, yes, for the good of the country. 

There is an old Latin saying that translates into English as “Corruption of the best is worst of all.”

That’s how I feel about my old friend.

Juan Williams is an author, and a political analyst for Fox News Channel.