When Donald Trump appealed to the Supreme Court to prevent the White House from releasing vital documents to the January 6th Committee, Clarence Thomas was the only Supreme Court Justice who voted in favor of Trump. Many people have been wondering why Thomas voted the way he did. Was it because he was trying to protect his wife, Ginny Thomas, from being implicated in the insurrection? Facts on the infamous attack on our democracy are still continuing to come out-- but it's already no secret that Ginni Thomas was an active supporter of the insurrection, as she was in contact and closely associated with John Eastman shortly prior to the insurrection.
And who is John Eastman? For starters, he was Clarence Thomas’ law clerk on the Supreme Court. Eastman is very close friends with Clarence Thomas and Ginny Thomas. They socialize together very frequently. It has also known that John Eastman was the lawyer behind the memo on how Trump could stay in office even though trump lost the election. According to the New York Times, John Eastman was a little-known but respected conservative lawyer. Then he became influential with Donald Trump — and counseled him on how to retain power after losing the election. According to the NYT, within two months of Eastman appearing on Mark Levin's Fox News talk show, Eastman was sitting in the Oval Office for an hour-long meeting with Trump. Then, after the November election, Eastman wrote the infamous memo on how the former fuck could stay in power. It was the blueprint for a coup.
As Trump continues to hint at another run in 2024, the NYT reports that Eastman remains a bridge between the former president and the continuing efforts by some of his supporters to promote specious allegations of widespread election fraud in 2020 and to undercut faith in the electoral system. He has Trump’s ear, but he also has Clarence Thomas’ ear, which one would think would be grounds for Thomas to recuse himself from any cases involving Trump.
But it's not Clarence that is the primary problem here- it's his vocal right-wing activist wife, Ginni. Ginni Thomas has declared that America is in existential danger because of the “deep state” and the “fascist left,” which includes “transsexual fascists.” Thomas, a lawyer who runs a small political-lobbying firm, Liberty Consulting, has become a prominent member of various hard-line groups. Her political activism has caused controversy for years. For the most part, it has been dismissed as the harmless action of an independent spouse. But now the Court appears likely to secure victories for her allies in a number of highly polarizing cases—on abortion, affirmative action, and gun rights.
After the Mrs. Thomas deleted her Facebook posts praising the January 6 insurrectionists, it was reported that she had also been agitating about Trump’s loss on a private listserv, Thomas Clerk World, which includes former law clerks of Justice Thomas’s. The online discussion had been contentious. John Eastman, a former Thomas clerk and a key instigator of the lie that Trump actually won in 2020, was on the same side as Ginni Thomas, and he drew many strong rebukes. According to Wapo, Thomas eventually apologized to the group for causing internal rancor. Artemus Ward, a political scientist at Northern Illinois University and a co-author of “Sorcerers’ Apprentices,” a history of Supreme Court clerks, believes that the incident confirmed Ginni Thomas' outsized role. “Virginia Thomas has direct access to Thomas’s clerks,” Ward said. Clarence Thomas is now the Court’s senior member, having served for thirty years, and Ward estimates that there are “something like a hundred and twenty people on that Listserv.” In Ward’s view, they comprise “an élite right-wing commando movement.” Justice Thomas, he says, doesn’t post on the Listserv, but his wife “is advocating for things directly.” Ward added, “It’s unprecedented. I have never seen a Justice’s wife as involved.”
Supreme Court judges are required to recuse themselves from any case in which their spouse is “a party to the proceeding” or is “an officer, director, or trustee” of an organization that is a party to a case. Ginni Thomas has not been a named party in any case on the Court’s docket; nor is she litigating in any such case. But she has held leadership positions at conservative pressure groups that have either been involved in cases before the Court or have had members engaged in such cases.
Ginni Thomas has been one of the directors of C.N.P. Action, a dark-money wing of the conservative pressure group the Council for National Policy. C.N.P. Action, behind closed doors, connects wealthy donors with some of the most radical right-wing figures in America. Ginni Thomas has also been on the advisory board of Turning Point USA, a pro-Trump student group, whose founder, Charlie Kirk, boasted of sending busloads of protesters to Washington on January 6. Stephen Gillers, a law professor at N.Y.U. and a prominent judicial ethicist, told me, “I think Ginni Thomas is behaving horribly, and she’s hurt the Supreme Court and the administration of justice. It’s reprehensible. If you could take a secret poll of the other eight Justices, I have no doubt that they are appalled by Virginia Thomas’s behavior."
Thomas also currently serves on the advisory board of the National Association of Scholars, a group promoting conservative values in academia, which has filed an amicus brief before the Court in a potentially groundbreaking affirmative-action lawsuit against Harvard. And, though nobody knew it at the time, Ginni Thomas was an undisclosed paid consultant at the conservative pressure group the Center for Security Policy, when its founder, Frank Gaffney, submitted an amicus brief to the Court supporting Trump’s Muslim travel ban.
Ginni Thomas has recently been an active voice denouncing the very legitimacy of the January 6 congressional committee. On December 15th, she and sixty-two other prominent conservatives signed an open letter to Kevin McCarthy, the House Minority Leader, demanding that the House Republican Conference excommunicate Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger for their “egregious” willingness to serve on the committee. The statement was issued by an advocacy group called the Conservative Action Project, of which Ginni Thomas has described herself as an “active” member.
According to Norman Eisen, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who, between 2009 and 2011, served as the special counsel and special assistant to the President for ethics and government reform, “It is hard to understand how Justice Thomas can be impartial when hearing cases related to the upheaval on January 6th, in light of his wife’s documented affiliation with January 6th instigators and Stop the Steal organizers.” He argues that “Justice Thomas should recuse himself, given his wife’s interests in the outcome of these cases.”
In January 2019, Ginni Thomas also used her connections to get her political associate Frank Gaffney a meeting with Trump at the White House. White House staff had not been informed that Gaffney’s non-profit group had been paying Ginni Thomas' consulting firm several hundred thousand dollars in fees for the previous two years. A participant in the meeting told the New Yorker that Trump considered Ginni Thomas “a wacko,” adding, “She never would have been there if not for Clarence. She had access because her last name was Thomas.”
The White House meeting was held in the Roosevelt Room, and by all
accounts it was uncomfortable. Thomas opened by saying that she didn’t
trust everyone in the room, then pressed Trump to purge his
Administration of disloyal members of the “deep state,” handing him an
enemies list that she and Groundswell had compiled. Some of the
participants prayed, warning that gay marriage, which the Supreme Court legalized in 2015, was undermining morals in America.
In October, 2018, Ginni Thomas led a panel discussion during a confidential session of the Council for National Policy. She was secretly filmed telling the group, “The deep state is serious, and it’s resisting President Trump.” She declared twice that her adversaries were trying “to kill people,” and drew applause by saying, “May we all have guns and concealed carry to handle what’s coming!”
Ginni Thomas has held so many leadership or advisory positions at
conservative pressure groups that it’s hard to keep track of them. And
many, if not all, of these groups have been involved in cases that have
come before her husband. Ginni Thomas' web site lists the National Association of
Scholars—the group that has filed an amicus brief in the lawsuit against
Harvard—among her “endorsed charities.” The group’s brief claims that
the affirmative-action policies used by the Harvard admissions
department are discriminatory. Though the plaintiffs have already lost
in two lower courts, they are counting on the Supreme Court’s new
conservative super-majority to side with them, even though doing so
would reverse decades of precedent.
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