John Oliver Offers Clarence Thomas Payout He Thinks He Can’t Refuse

Television host John Oliver has offered Clarence Thomas a busload of reasons to resign immediately, amid mounting reports that the Supreme Court justice secretly accepted lavish gifts from Republican billionaires for decades.

Thomas has refused to recuse himself from cases despite widespread concerns that his opinions can be swayed by the gifts. So Oliver offered a solution Sunday night at the end of his comedy-news show Last Week Tonight: He would personally pay Thomas $1 million a year and give him a new $2.4 million luxury R.V.—if he resigns within 30 days.

Oliver quipped that Thomas was overworked, from “stripping away women’s rights to hearing January 6 cases you definitely shouldn’t be hearing, to potentially helping roll back decades of federal regulations.”

“You deserve a break, you know, away from the meanness of Washington so you can be surrounded by the regular folks whose lives you made demonstrably worse for decades,” Oliver said.

“I think you’re thinking, what would my friends say if I take this offer? Will they judge me as they sit in their boardrooms and megayachts and Hitler shrines? Will they still treat me to luxury vacations and sing songs about me off their phones? Well, that’s the beauty of friendship, Clarence. If they’re real friends, they’ll love you no matter what your job is. So I guess this might be the perfect way to find out who your real friends actually are.”

A series of ProPublica reports last year revealed that Thomas has accepted millions of dollars in gifts from Republican billionaire megadonors—and reported none of it on his financial disclosure forms. Thomas reportedly began accepting this steady stream of gifts just a few months after he publicly complained that Supreme Court justice salaries are too low.

One of those generous souls is billionaire Harlan Crow, who has been friends with Thomas for more than two decades. In that time, Crow—a Nazi memorabilia collector—has repeatedly lavished Thomas with expensive gifts. These include island-hopping yacht vacations, private school tuition for Thomas’s nephew, and buying and renovating a Thomas family property, where Thomas’s mother still lives.

Crow also regularly brought Thomas as his guest to the Bohemian Grove, which ProPublica has previously described as a “secretive all-men’s retreat in Northern California” that attracts major corporate and political players.

By 2003, Thomas’s wife, Ginni, had begun working at the Heritage Foundation and was making a salary in the low six figures. The Heritage Foundation is part of the Koch brothers’ network. By at least 2010, Clarence Thomas began secretly participating in Koch donor network events, which put him in touch with wealthy and influential conservatives.