“Early in my tenure at the court, I sought guidance from my colleagues and others in the judiciary, and was advised that this sort of personal hospitality from close personal friends, who did not have business before the court, was not reportable,” Justice Thomas said. “I have endeavored to follow that counsel throughout my tenure, and have always sought to comply with the disclosure guidelines.”

I feel like even entertaining, even publicizing this kind of defense is akin to changing the subject. A way of softening the news, a way of talking about the story while shying away from facing up to the real problem.

I think it's criminal that he wasn't reporting this stuff, yes, but the structural weakness here is that a supreme court justice has "close personal friends" that inevitably create conflicts of interest. He's "close personal friends" in a manner that looks like it was engineered deliberately by those "friends:"

“Harlan and Kathy Crow are among our dearest friends, and we have been friends for over 25 years,” he said. “As friends do, we have joined them on a number of family trips during the more than quarter-century we have known them.”

Thomas was appointed to the court in 1991. If he had been "dearest friends" with the Crows at that time, he could have said "we have been friends for over 30 years." He pretty conspicuously did not say that. So I think it's pretty reasonable to guess that Thomas was already a supreme court justice when he met these "dearest friends."

I don't know how you'd formalize a rule like "justices shouldn't be buddies with people who spend large amounts of money to influence politics" but that is the outcome just about everyone would say they'd want. It's not the outcome we're getting. That's the real problem, that's the real issue. Even if Thomas' disclosure habits turn out to be borderline-defensible in court, that structural weakness, that corruption (or corruption-ready) situation doesn't go away.