Welcome back to the podcast, Bride, Swindle, or Steel. I'm Alexandra Ragi, and today I'm speaking with the editor responsible for shepherding the recent story about the extraordinary gifts and travel accepted by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, as well as real estate deals that were

advantageous to family members. Jesse Isinger has been on the podcast before to talk about his

book, The Chicken Shit Club, Why the Justice Department fails to prosecute executives. He's a Pulitzer

Prize winning investigative journalist and currently a senior editor and reporter at ProPublica. Thank you for joining me,

Jesse. Hi, thanks for having me back. Can you talk us through this story and a little bit of detail

on how ProPublica uncovered it? In the middle of last year, I was asked to do something that I've never

done before, which is cover politics, edit political coverage. I've been a

business and financial reporter and editor my whole career going back to before there was an

internet in the early 1990s. So this was a daunting task. I began assembling a team at ProPublica to look at it. And we pretty clearly,

by the end of the year, knew that we wanted to spend the year looking at something about the

judiciary. We have felt now for a number of years that the judiciary was undercovered.

You refer to my book that I was on the podcast

last talking about, which was why we don't prosecute white-collar criminals in the appropriate

way in this country and why we have a problem that I've come to think of as elite impunity.

And part of the reason I was really struck with is that the appellate courts wield enormous

amount of influence and power over white-collar criminals. And the realization I had was that they

get almost no journalistic scrutiny. The workings of the Second Circuit in New York or the D.C.

Circuit, which are the two most important business courts

after the Supreme Court. People don't know any of the judge's names. They don't know how they

come to their conclusions. No, almost nothing about it. We assigned reporters to do this.

I assigned two reporters, Justin Elliott and Josh Kaplan, And they convinced me that we should look at the

Supreme Court first. And I was a little reluctant because I thought that the Supreme Court

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