Didn’t Clarence Thomas know?

If you want to enrich yourself using your influence as a public official, make sure to funnel the bounty through your son first!

CNN’s John King on Thursday hyped up the “blockbuster” and “bombshell report” by ProPublica this week painting Thomas as a decadent fat cat peddling his position on the Supreme Court in exchange for a jet-setting lifestyle with “Republican mega donor” Harlan Crow.

The report alleged that Thomas had accepted “gifts” from Crow that were worth potentially millions of dollars in the form of private air travel, yachting expeditions, and resort stays.

It’s every bit as outrageous as when Joe Biden traded a State Dinner invite for a beach resort stay paid for by one of his donors.

(Wait . . . nobody was outraged about that.)

Or when anti-cop Democrat Cori Bush used campaign funds to pay her husband $60,000 for “security services,” even though he wasn’t licensed to perform the job.

(Oops, the media didn’t find that too scandalous either.)

California Rep. Maxine Waters has created an entire business scheme out of raising money for her campaigns and then funneling more than a million dollars of it to her daughter.

New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez was literally prosecuted by the Justice Department for pulling government strings on behalf of a rich friend. A hung jury saved him. None of his fellow Democrats even called on him to resign.

Guess John King missed those blockbusters.

Nevertheless, ProPublica reported that luxury vacations “appeared nowhere on Thomas’ financial disclosures” and said that “his failure to report the flights appears to violate a law passed after Watergate that requires justices, judges, members of Congress and federal officials to disclose most gifts, two ethics law experts said. He also should have disclosed his trips on the yacht, these experts said.”

That sounds awfully concerning.

But a closer look at the details shows, of course, this was not a “bombshell,” either.

There are in fact laws that require gift disclosures of federal office holders, but up until last month it wasn’t clear to what extent they applied to Supreme Court justices and they didn’t specify luxury transit or resort property stays.

The most recent international jaunt hosted by Crow that was included in ProPublica’s report was in the summer of 2019.

Now the new rules are more specific about gifts that sitting justices are required to disclose.

And Thomas said in a Friday statement that he planned on following those new instructions.

But more importantly, he noted that Crow has been a friend of Thomas and his wife for decades and has had no business before the court.

The ProPublica report never suggested as much, but it did go into vivid detail about “custom polo shirts” that Crow would bestow upon his guests.

“ProPublica found photographs of Thomas wearing at least two of those shirts,” the report said.

“In one, he wears a blue polo shirt embroidered with the Michaela Rose’s logo and the words ‘March 2007’ and ‘Greek Islands.’ ”

Hopefully, under the new rules, we won’t have to rely on ProPublica to uncover these urgent matters.

But the real question is: With all the media pearl-clutching about who Clarence Thomas is friends with generate any curiosity about other cozy relationships, including who is paying the president’s son Hunter?

Eddie Scarry is a columnist for The Federalist.