Ginni Thomas, Wife Of Justice Clarence Thomas, Endorsed The January 6 Sedition

by

With all the other crazy shit that happened on January 6, this story did not receive nearly the attention that it deserved.

Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and a right-wing nut lobbyist, was a cheerleader for the seditious insurrection to overturn the election and American democracy on January 6 (that is, until people died, she really wants you to know).

Slate’s Supreme Court reporter, Mark Joseph Stern, reported Ginni Thomas, Wife of Clarence, Cheered On the Rally That Turned Into the Capitol Riot:

On [the morning of January 6], Ginni Thomas—wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas—endorsed the rally in Washington demanding that Congress overturn the election. She then sent her “LOVE” to the demonstrators, who violently overtook the Capitol several hours later. Two days later, Thomas amended her post with the addendum: “[Note: written before violence in US Capitol].” By that point, five people involved in the insurrection, including a Capitol Police officer, had died.

Thomas, a conservative lobbyist and zealous supporter of Donald Trump, has fervently defended the president over the last four years. On her Facebook page, she frequently promotes baseless conspiracy theories about a “coup” against Trump led by Jewish philanthropist George Soros, a frequent target of anti-Semitic hate. Thomas draws many of these theories from fringe corners of the internet, including an anti-vax Facebook group that claimed Bill Gates would use the COVID vaccine to kill people. In recent months, she also amplified unsubstantiated corruption claims against Joe Biden while insisting, falsely, that the Obama administration illegally spied on Trump’s 2016 campaign, then tried to rig the election against him.

In turn, Trump has rewarded Thomas with an extraordinary amount of access to the Oval Office. Her advocacy group Groundswell got an audience with the president in early 2019.

According to the New York Times, the meeting was arranged after Clarence and Ginni Thomas had dinner with the Trumps. (Clarence Thomas and Trump appear to be quite friendly: The justice took his clerks to meet with the president in the Oval Office at least once; Ginni attended as well.)

At the White House, Groundswell’s members lobbied Trump against transgender service in the military, which he already prohibited in 2017. The ban took effect in 2019, around the time of Groundswell’s meeting, after the Supreme Court lifted lower court orders blocking it by a 5–4 vote. (Clarence Thomas did not recuse himself from the case; he has never recused from any case because of his wife’s lobbying activities.) The New York Times also reported that Ginni Thomas compiled lists of federal employees whom she deemed insufficiently loyal to the president. She sent her lists to Trump, urging him to fire the disloyal employees, though he seems to have largely ignored her. He has, however, stacked his administration with former Thomas clerks.

Throughout the 2020 campaign, Thomas remained active on Facebook, condemning Black Lives Matter, opposing COVID-19 shutdowns, and touting the “Walk Away” movement, which purports to spotlight Democrats who became Republicans under Trump. (At least two individuals featured in the “Walk Away” series, both Black, were actually models from royalty-free stock photos.) She also campaigned for Trump in person—and, according to the Intercept, spearheaded a dark-money operation to support the president. Cleta Mitchell, the Republican lawyer who participated in Trump’s shakedown of the Georgia secretary of state, led the project.

After Nov. 3, Thomas grew uncharacteristically quiet on Facebook; she did not share popular conspiracy theories about election fraud, perhaps because election challenges would inevitably come before her husband. She provided her clearest statement yet on Jan. 6, when she enthusiastically endorsed the D.C. rally designed to make Congress overturn the election result and give Trump a second term. There is no evidence that Thomas personally attended the rally, and her posts indicate that she watched the events on TV from another location.

Note: A rumor that Ginni Thomas funded 80 buses to transport insurrectionists to D.C. on January 6 is not true. Snopes reports:

The rumor stems from the unproven assertion made by Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, who claimed on Twitter two days before the riots (before deleting the tweet after they turned violent) that he and his organizations — both Turning Point USA and Turning Point Action USA — would be sending “80+ buses full of patriots to DC to fight for this president.” The link to Thomas gained prominence online when it was promoted virally in a user-submitted blog post on the left-wing site DailyKos. That post’s argument stems from tweets tying Thomas to Turning Point USA and other right-wing political organizations involved in the rally.

While we point out that Kirk, no stranger to false claims, has provided no evidence of his organization’s funding of 80 buses to the rally, the link to Thomas — based on her work with Turning Point USA — is out-of-date even if Kirk is telling the truth. It is true that Thomas was once on the “Advisory Council” for Turning Point USA, a body that has at times included over 75 people, but she has not served in that role since at least early 2019, according to Turning Point USA’s website.

Ginni Thomas’ activism on matters that come before her husband raises thorny ethical issues. Federal law requires justices to recuse themselves from any proceeding in which their “impartiality might reasonably be questioned.” It also compels justices to recuse if their spouse has “an interest that could be substantially affected by the outcome” of the case. In the coming months and years, Democrats will likely pressure Clarence Thomas to recuse himself from high-profile cases or to resign altogether. If Thomas steps down under Biden, progressives can restore a 5–4 divide on the Supreme Court, giving Chief Justice John Roberts control once again. Given Thomas’ staunch refusal to recuse thus far, though, there is little chance that he will take any steps to remediate his conflicts of interest, let alone retire during the presidency of a man he openly despises.

In all likelihood, Ginni Thomas will face no consequences for cheerleading a rally that sought to overturn an election, then laid siege to the Capitol in a failed insurrection. Her husband will ignore the controversy and continue to rule on cases that involve his wife’s lobbying efforts. We may never know how much influence a conspiracy theorist has on the highest court’s most conservative justice.

Today, several news organizations including the Washington Post, report Ginni Thomas apologizes to husband’s Supreme Court clerks after Capitol riot fallout:

Conservative political activist Virginia Thomas told her husband Justice Clarence Thomas’s former law clerks that she was sorry for a rift that developed among them after her election advocacy of President Donald Trump and endorsement of the Jan. 6 rally in D.C. that resulted in violence and death at the Capitol.

“I owe you all an apology. I have likely imposed on you my lifetime passions,” Thomas, who goes by Ginni, recently wrote to a private Thomas Clerk World email list of her husband’s staff over his three decades on the bench.

“My passions and beliefs are likely shared with the bulk of you, but certainly not all. And sometimes the smallest matters can divide loved ones for too long. Let’s pledge to not let politics divide THIS family, and learn to speak more gently and knowingly across the divide.”

A sampling of posts made to the group were shared with The Washington Post by a member upset with some of the pro-Trump messages written by Ginni Thomas and others in the lead-up and aftermath of the election. Thomas did not respond to requests for comment. Several former clerks, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the listserv is private, verified the dispute in what is normally an affable setting meant to celebrate achievements of the clerk “family.”

Besides the friction there, Thomas has drawn outrage among liberals for public political commentary on her “Ginni Thomas” Facebook page. Her comments there celebrated Trump’s supporters who assembled in D.C. on Jan. 6, hundreds of whom stormed the Capitol, resulting in the deaths of five people.

In the early morning post, Thomas encouraged her Facebook followers to watch the day’s events unfold on conservative news media, writing, “LOVE MAGA people!!!!”

She added in another: “GOD BLESS EACH OF YOU STANDING UP or PRAYING.”

Thomas later appended an apparent disclaimer that said, “[Note: written before violence in US Capitol],” according to Mark Joseph Stern of Slate.com, who first wrote about the posts. The Facebook account is no longer visible.

Additionally, there have been unfounded charges on social media that Ginni Thomas played a role in helping to pay for bus transportation for some of those attending the rally. Reporters at The Washington Post, the New York Times and elsewhere, including Stern, found those claims were false.

Thomas’s political commentary has made her a controversial figure; most Supreme Court spouses stay out of politics. But she was active in conservative causes before she met Clarence Thomas, and they married in 1987, before he was on the bench, first on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and then the Supreme Court.

Judicial ethics experts generally say the views of a judge’s spouse should not be attributed to the jurist, although they can create an appearance problem. Thomas, who is the senior member of the Supreme Court’s conservative majority, has never recused himself because of his wife’s public comments about an issue.

Thomas has made clear her opposition to the Affordable Care Act, for instance, and other initiatives of the Obama administration. This summer, she tried to get the small Virginia town of Clifton to take down a Black Lives Matter banner. “Let’s not be tricked into joining cause with radical extremists seeking to foment a cultural revolution because they hate America,” she wrote to town leaders.

She has been a delegate to the Republican National Convention. And after first endorsing Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) for president, she became an ardent Trump supporter, meeting with the president at the White House to advise on political appointees. When Trump gathered supporters at the White House to celebrate his acquittal at his first Senate impeachment trial, she was among those invited.

She does not appear to have made public comments about the election results while the Supreme Court disposed of Trump-related challenges. [You can bet Clarence got an earful at home].

But on the clerk email list, she appears crestfallen by Trump’s defeat.

“Many of us are hurting, after leaving it all on the field, to preserve the best of this country,” she wrote. “I feel I have failed my parents who did their best and taught me to work to preserve liberties.”

The Thomas Clerk World email group, usually filled with congratulatory notes about job changes and promotions and baby announcements, has a blue-ribbon membership.

Former Thomas clerks played significant roles in the Trump administration and were heavily represented in Trump’s choices for the federal judiciary — more than any other justice’s former acolytes. Some clerks are prominent in conservative media, and among law professors.

Clarence Thomas is not said to be active in the group chats — one former clerk could not remember ever seeing a comment from the justice — and the person who supplied the posting to The Post added: “Ginni does not speak for CT.”

The internal discord concerned pro-Trump postings and former Thomas clerk John Eastman, who spoke at the rally and represented Trump in some of his failed lawsuits filed to overturn the election results.

After one law professor posted an article from Christianity Today about how rioters usurped religious symbols in the storming of the Capitol, former clerk Wendy Stone Long called it “offensive drivel” and wondered why it was shared.

“Many of my friends and I had been praying our knees off that January 6 would see light and truth being shed on what we believe in our hearts was likely a stolen election,” and that eventually “President Trump would be determined to be the legitimate winner,” wrote Long, a two-time U.S. Senate candidate from New York.

“Many of us marched peacefully and yes, many also prayed and shared another important message, ‘Jesus saves,’ ” she added.

Long did not respond to a request for comment.

Eastman parted ways with Chapman University, where he served as dean of the law school, after speaking at the rally. He wrote to the clerks group: “Rest assured that those of us involved in this are working diligently to ascertain the truth.”

That brought an angry response from Stephen F. Smith, a law professor at Notre Dame.

“If by ‘truth’ you mean what actually happened, as opposed to a false narrative, then I agree,” Smith wrote. “I hope (and trust) that you — and everyone on this list — agree that the search for truth doesn’t in any way justify insurrection, trying to kidnap and assassinate elected officials, attacking police officers, or making common cause with racists and anti-Semites bent on wanton violence and lawlessness.”

Smith declined to comment about his post, and Eastman did not respond to requests for comment.

Thomas seemed to be seeking a peacemaking role in her Jan. 18 message to clerks.

“I would ask those of you on the contrary side to have grace and mercy on those on my side of the polarized world, and feel free to call and talk to me individually about where I failed you as a friend here. I probably need more tutoring,” she wrote.

“Otherwise, on behalf of both of us, be assured of our love for each of you.”

Clarence Thomas and his wife Ginni have long been one of the most unethical “power couples” in Washington, D.C., likely surpassed only by Mitch McConnell and his wife, Elaine Chao. See, To ‘drain the swamp,’ start with the Washington swamp’s power couple.





Discover more from Blog for Arizona

Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.