Earlier this month, “Silent” Clarence Thomas had some thoughts at an event hosted by former Republican U.S. Sen. Orrin Hatch’s foundation. Justice Thomas slams cancel culture, ‘packing’ Supreme Court:
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas said he’s concerned efforts to politicize the court or add additional justices may erode the institution’s credibility.
Thomas, the most senior justice on the nine-member court, said he often worries about the long-term repercussions of trends such as “cancel culture” and a lack of civil debate.
“I’m afraid, particularly in this world of cancel culture attack, I don’t know where you’re going to learn to engage as we did when I grew up,” he said. “If you don’t learn at that level in high school, in grammar school, in your neighborhood, or in civic organizations, then how do you have it when you’re making decisions in government, in the legislature, or in the courts?”
“You can cavalierly talk about packing or stacking the court. You can cavalierly talk about doing this or doing that. At some point the institution is going to be compromised,” he told an audience of about 500 people at an upscale hotel in Salt Lake City.
The man is totally lacking in any self-awareness. He has been compromising the institution of the Supreme Court since his confirmation hearings (he introduced “long dong silver” into the American lexicon with his pornography viewing habits). He has since been the most unethical Supreme Court Justice in modern American history.
“By doing this, you continue to chip away at the respect of the institutions that the next generation is going to need if they’re going to have civil society,” Thomas said.
In addition to condemning “cancel culture,” Thomas also blasted the media for cultivating inaccurate impressions about public figures — including himself, his wife and late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.
Ginni Thomas, Justice Thomas’s wife and a longtime conservative activist, has faced scrutiny this year for her political activity and involvement in groups that file briefs about cases in front of the Supreme Court, as well as using her Facebook page to amplify partisan attacks.
Oh, this seditious biotch did way more than just post support for the MAGA/QAnon insurrectionists on January 6, 2021. She was an active participant and adviser to the Coup Plotters in the Trump White House.
The Washington Post reported, Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court justice, says she attended Jan. 6 ‘Stop the Steal’ rally before Capitol attack:
Virginia Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, for the first time has publicly acknowledged that she participated in the Jan. 6, 2021, “Stop the Steal” rally on the Ellipse that preceded the storming of the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob, raising questions about the impartiality of her husband’s work.
In an interview with the conservative Washington Free Beacon that was published Monday, Thomas, who goes by Ginni, said she was part of the crowd that gathered on the Ellipse that morning to support President Donald Trump. Trump was claiming falsely that widespread voter fraud had delivered the presidency to Democrat Joe Biden — a falsehood he continues to repeat.
Thomas said she was at the rally for a short time, got cold and went home before Trump took the stage at noon that day.
[In] February 2021, Thomas apologized to her husband’s former law clerks after a rift developed among them over her election advocacy of Trump and endorsement of the Jan. 6 rally that led to violence and death at the Capitol.
“I owe you all an apology. I have likely imposed on you my lifetime passions,” Thomas wrote to a private Thomas Clerk World email list of her husband’s staff over his three decades on the bench.
[In] December, Ginni Thomas was among a group of conservative leaders who signed a letter criticizing the work of the bipartisan House committee as “overtly partisan political persecution.” The next month, the Supreme Court decided on Trump’s request to deny the committee White House records that Biden had ordered be released. Instead of recusing himself from the case, Clarence Thomas was the only justice to say he would grant Trump’s request.
Clarence Thomas was the lone dissenter because he was hoping to prevent his wife’s texts to Mark Meadows from discovery by the January 6 Committee. This was a clear case for recusal, which he failed to do. It is unethical and corrupt.
Bob Woodward and Robert Costa report at the Washingon Post, Virginia Thomas urged White House chief to pursue unrelenting efforts to overturn the 2020 election, texts show:
Virginia Thomas, a conservative activist married to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, repeatedly pressed White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows to pursue unrelenting efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election in a series of urgent text exchanges in the critical weeks after the November vote, according to cGinni”opies of the messages obtained by The Washington Post and CBS News.
The messages — 29 in all — reveal an extraordinary pipeline between Virginia Thomas, who goes by Ginni, and President Donald Trump’s top aide during a period when Trump and his allies were vowing to go to the Supreme Court in an effort to negate the election results.
On Nov. 10, after news organizations had projected Joe Biden the winner based on state vote totals, Thomas wrote to Meadows: “Help This Great President stand firm, Mark!!!…You are the leader, with him, who is standing for America’s constitutional governance at the precipice. The majority knows Biden and the Left is attempting the greatest Heist of our History.”
When Meadows wrote to Thomas on Nov. 24, the White House chief of staff invoked God to describe the effort to overturn the election. “This is a fight of good versus evil,” Meadows wrote. “Evil always looks like the victor until the King of Kings triumphs. Do not grow weary in well doing. The fight continues. I have staked my career on it. Well at least my time in DC on it.”
Thomas replied: “Thank you!! Needed that! This plus a conversation with my best friend just now… I will try to keep holding on. America is worth it!”
It is unclear to whom Thomas was referring. (See below).
The messages, which do not directly reference Justice Thomas or the Supreme Court, show for the first time how Ginni Thomas used her access to Trump’s inner circle to promote and seek to guide the president’s strategy to overturn the election results — and how receptive and grateful Meadows said he was to receive her advice. Among Thomas’s stated goals in the messages was for lawyer [Krazy Kraken Lady] Sidney Powell, who promoted incendiary and unsupported claims about the election, to be “the lead and the face” of Trump’s legal team.
The text messages were among 2,320 that Meadows provided to the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. The content of messages between Thomas and Meadows — 21 sent by her, eight by him – has not previously been reported. They were reviewed by The Post and CBS News and then confirmed by five people who have seen the committee’s documents.
Meadows’s attorney, George Terwilliger III, confirmed the existence of the 29 messages between his client and Thomas. In reviewing the substance of the messages Wednesday, he said that neither he nor Meadows would comment on individual texts. But, Terwilliger added, “nothing about the text messages presents any legal issues.”
Ginni Thomas did not respond to multiple requests for comment made Thursday by email and phone.
Justice Thomas, who has been hospitalized for treatment of an infection, did not respond to a request for comment made through the Supreme Court’s public information office.
It is unknown whether Ginni Thomas and Meadows exchanged additional messages between the election and Biden’s inauguration beyond the 29 received by the committee. Shortly after providing the 2,320 messages, Meadows ceased cooperating with the committee, arguing that any further engagement could violate Trump’s claims of executive privilege. Committee members and aides said they believe the messages may be just a portion of the pair’s total exchanges.
A spokesman for the committee declined to comment. The revelation of Thomas’s messages with Meadows comes three weeks after lawyers for the committee said in a court filing that the panel has “a good-faith basis for concluding that the President and members of his Campaign engaged in a criminal conspiracy to defraud the United States” and obstruct the counting of electoral votes by Congress.
Thomas has publicly denied any conflict of interest between her activism and her husband’s work on the Supreme Court. “Clarence doesn’t discuss his work with me, and I don’t involve him in my work,” she said in an interview with the Washington Free Beacon, a conservative outlet, for an article published March 14.
Jane Mayer at the New Yorker destroyed Ginni Thomas’ denial of any conflict of interest between her activism and her husband’s work on the Supreme Court earlier this year. Is Ginni Thomas a Threat to the Supreme Court?: Behind closed doors, Justice Clarence Thomas’s wife is working with many groups directly involved in controversial cases before the Court.
The New York Times Magazine followed up with its own reporting, The Long Crusade of Clarence and Ginni Thomas: The Supreme Court justice and his wife battled for years for a more conservative America. New reporting shows how far she was willing to go after Donald Trump’s 2020 election loss.
Woodward and Costa then go into a long tick-tock of text messages exchanged.
Meadows might not have been Thomas’s only contact inside the Trump White House that week. On Nov. 13, she texted Meadows about her outreach to “Jared,” potentially a reference to Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior White House adviser. She wrote, “Just forwarded to yr gmail an email I sent Jared this am. Sidney Powell & improved coordination now will help the cavalry come and Fraud exposed and America saved.” The messages provided to the House select committee do not show a response by Meadows.
Kushner did not respond to a request for comment.
[On] Nov. 14, Thomas sent Meadows material she said was from Connie Hair, chief of staff to Rep. Louie Gohmert. It is not clear if she was passing on a message from Hair or sharing Hair’s perspective as guidance for Meadows. The text message seems to quote Hair’s belief that “the most important thing you can realize right now is that there are no rules in war.”
“This war is psychological. PSYOP,” the text from Thomas states.
Hair said Thursday that she did not have any specific recollection of that text message.
On Nov. 19, which would be a crucial day for Sidney Powell as she spoke at a news conference at the Republican National Committee, Thomas continued to bolster Powell’s standing in a text to Meadows.
“Mark (don’t want to wake you)… ” Thomas wrote. “Sounds like Sidney and her team are getting inundated with evidence of fraud. Make a plan. Release the Kraken and save us from the left taking America down.”
[In] that same exchange, Thomas also at one point offered Meadows advice on managing the West Wing staff.
“Suggestion: You need to buck up your team on the inside, Mark,” Thomas wrote. “The lower level insiders are scared, fearful or sending out signals of hopelessness vs an awareness of the existential threat to America right now. You can buck them up, strengthen their spirits.”
Woodward and Costa then go into another long tick-tock of text messages exchanged.
The text exchanges with Thomas that Meadows provided to the House select committee pause after Nov. 24, 2020, with an unexplained gap in correspondence. The committee received one additional message sent by Thomas to Meadows, on Jan. 10, four days after the “Stop the Steal” rally Thomas said she attended and the deadly attack on the Capitol.
What was tweeted on January 5 and 6? There had to have been messages sent.
In that message, Thomas expresses support for Meadows and Trump — and directed anger at Vice President Mike Pence, who had refused Trump’s wishes to block the congressional certification of Biden’s electoral college victory.
“We are living through what feels like the end of America,” Thomas wrote to Meadows. “Most of us are disgusted with the VP and are in listening mode to see where to fight with our teams. Those who attacked the Capitol are not representative of our great teams of patriots for DJT!!”
“Amazing times,” she added. “The end of Liberty.”
“Morning Joe” co-host Willie Geist on Friday asked Bob Woodward whether he found any indication that that Clarence Thomas shared his wife’s views. Bob Woodward: ‘There’s an implication’ that Ginni Thomas discussed election conspiracies with her husband:
“We don’t know that, and at the same time the Jan. 6 committee, as demonstrated by these texts, is very aggressive and going after the actual story,” Woodward said. “There will be a question: Do they want to subpoena Ginni Thomas, and that is about as delicate, I mean, you can almost hear the air vibrate when you raise that possibility.”
Post columnist Eugene Robinson pointed to one text where Ginni Thomas tells Meadows that she had discussed election issues with her “best friend,” by which both she and her husband have publicly referred to one another, and he asked Woodward how he interpreted that comment.
“He has publicly called her his best friend, and so there’s an implication there,” Woodward said.
Co-host Mika Brzezinski agreed.
“It seems like she’s intonating towards him,” she said, “but we don’t know.”
Jane Mayer, who profiled Ginni Thomas in January for The New Yorker, agreed.
“After talking with her ‘best friend,’ which is how the Thomases refer to one another, Justice Thomas’s wife militates relentlessly for the president’s chief of staff to overturn a presidential election,” Mayer wrote.
Robert Costa, who co-wrote The Post story with Woodward, wrote, “Woodward and I both see this as an unprecedented entanglement between a top official in the Exec Branch and the spouse of a Justice. They are privately discussing strategy, lawyers, managing WH staff, and conspiracy theories.” ‘Truly extraordinary level of corruption’: Legal experts weigh in on Ginni Thomas’ texts to Mark Meadows:
Legal experts quickly weighed in on the bombshell reporting, which came as Clarence Thomas may or may not still be hospitalized.
Adam Blickstein, who worked in public affairs for the Department of Justice, alluded to the situation when he noted, “We now have more information about Ginni Thomas’ illegal attempt to overturn the 2020 election than we do about Clarence Thomas’ current medical condition.”
“One of the most important questions in politics right now: what did Clarence Thomas know, and when did he know it?” he asked.
Election law lawyer Rick Hasen described it as “astounding” and political scientist Norman Ornstein responded, “Clarence Thomas should resign.”
Clarence Thomas should resign
— Norman Ornstein (@NormOrnstein) March 24, 2022
Attorney and Daily Beast columnist Wajahat Ali did not think Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) should wait for Thomas to resign, counselingthat “Democrats should impeach Clarence Thomas.” Former public defender Kumar Roa agreed, saying “Impeach Clarence Thomas.”
The watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) said, “this seems like a big deal.”
“The Supreme Court voted 8-1 that Trump couldn’t block the Jan 6th committee from getting docs. The one vote against was Clarence Thomas. Mark Meadows turned over texts from Thomas’s wife Ginni Thomas urging efforts to overturn the election. What else was afraid would come out?” CREW wondered.
Slate legal correspondent Mark Joseph Stern was shocked when he went through the text messages.
“Ginni Thomas urged Mark Meadows to overturn the 2020 election by any means necessary—while her husband was ruling on cases attempting to overturn the election. A truly extraordinary level of corruption,” he wrote. “Look at the absolutely deranged conspiracy theories Ginni Thomas pushed. Fringe doesn’t begin to cover it. She promoted conspiracy theories from a Sandy Hook truther plus QAnon stuff.”
Calls for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas to resign—or face impeachment proceedings—mounted late Thursday after text messages revealed that his wife urged former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows to aggressively pursue efforts to overturn the 2020 election results. Watchdogs say if Clarence Thomas won’t resign, ‘Congress must move to impeach’:
Thomas was the only justice to publicly argue that the high court should have granted former President Donald Trump’s motion to block the National Archives from handing White House documents over to a congressional panel investigating the January 6 attack. The Supreme Court ultimately rejected Trump’s request.
Sarah Lipton-Lubet, executive director of the Take Back the Court Action Fund, said in a statement Thursday night that “if one thing is clear” from the newly revealed text messages, “it’s that there’s much more to the story of Ginni Thomas’ participation in the January 6 attack that the House Select Committee and the American public deserve to know.”
“Given that Justice Thomas has already made known he won’t recuse himself from cases related to his wife’s right-wing activism, and the damning evidence of his wife’s involvement in this attack on our democracy, Thomas is clearly unfit to serve on the nation’s highest court,” said Lipton-Lubet. “Clarence Thomas must immediately resign from his seat on the Supreme Court.”
“If he refuses, Congress must move to impeach him,” she added. “The integrity of the court, our judicial system, and our democracy as a whole depends on it.”
At the very least, the new revelations demonstrate why Thomas “must recuse from any Supreme Court cases or petitions related to the January 6 Committee or efforts to overturn the election,” argued Gabe Roth, executive director of the nonpartisan advocacy group Fix the Court.
“Democrats should be loudly drawing attention to the fact that the wife of a sitting Supreme Court justice supported Trump’s coup attempt.”
“Ginni’s direct participation in this odious anti-democracy work, coupled with the new reporting that seems to indicate she may have spoken to Justice Thomas about it, leads to the conclusion that the justice’s continued participation in cases related to these efforts would only further tarnish the court’s already fading public reputation,” Roth said.
Former Ted Cruz staffer Amanda Carpenter said that Thomas’ husband, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, has some splainin’ to do about his recent decisions.
https://twitter.com/amandacarpenter/status/1507132950927880195?cxt=HHwWhsC9leHbtOopAAAA
https://twitter.com/amandacarpenter/status/1507134294376030210?cxt=HHwWhIC90fqpteopAAAA
https://twitter.com/amandacarpenter/status/1507315055012069379?cxt=HHwWhoC-qc7Dh-spAAAA
https://twitter.com/amandacarpenter/status/1507353887963033604?cxt=HHwWiMC5rf6XmespAAAA
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Jesse Wegman writes at the NY Times, “Ginni and Clarence Thomas Have Done Enough Damage”, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/25/opinion/ginni-clarence-thomas-trump.html
(Excerpt)
The most obvious way for justices to demonstrate that independence in practice, of course, is to recuse themselves from any case in which their impartiality might reasonably be questioned. It does not matter whether there is, in fact, a conflict of interest; the mere appearance of bias or conflict should be enough to compel Justice Thomas or any other member of the court to step aside.
Many of them have over the years, out of respect for the court as an institution and for the public’s faith in their probity. Just this week, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson vowed that if confirmed she would recuse herself from an upcoming case challenging Harvard’s affirmative-action policies, because of her multiple personal and professional connections to the university. Legal-ethics experts are not even in agreement that her recusal would be necessary, but Judge Jackson is right to err on the side of caution.
Justice Thomas has paid lip service to this ideal. “I think the media makes it sound as though you are just always going right to your personal preference,” he said in a speech last year. “That’s a problem. You’re going to jeopardize any faith in the legal institutions.”
Bench memo to the justice: You know what jeopardizes public faith in legal institutions? Refusing to recuse yourself from numerous high-profile cases in which your wife has been personally and sometimes financially entangled, as The New Yorker reported in January. Especially when you have emphasized that you and she are melded “into one being.” Or when you have, as The Times Magazine reported last month, appeared together with her for years “at highly political events hosted by advocates hoping to sway the court.”
Ms. Thomas’s efforts, and her husband’s refusal to respond appropriately, have been haunting the court for years, but this latest conflagration shouldn’t be a close call. “The texts are the narrowest way of looking at this,” Stephen Gillers, a New York University law professor and one of the nation’s foremost legal-ethics experts, told me. “She signed up for Stop the Steal. She was part of the team, and that team had an interest in how the court would rule. That’s all I need to know.” He said he has over the years resisted calling for Justice Thomas’s recusal based on his wife’s actions, “but they’ve really abused that tolerance.”
Yes, married people can lead independent professional lives, and it is not a justice’s responsibility to police the actions of his or her spouse. But the brazenness with which the Thomases have flouted the most reasonable expectations of judicial rectitude is without precedent … Ms. Thomas has repeatedly embroiled herself in big-ticket legal issues and with litigants who have wound up before her husband’s court. All the while, he has looked the other way, refusing to recuse himself from any of these cases. For someone whose job is about judging, Justice Thomas has, in this context at least, demonstrated abominably poor judgment.
If Justice Thomas were sitting on any other federal court in the country, he would likely have been required by the code of judicial ethics to recuse himself many times over. But the code does not apply to Supreme Court justices, creating a situation in which the highest court in the land is also the most unaccountable.
This is not tolerable. For years, Congress has tried in vain to extend the ethics code to the Supreme Court. For the sake of fundamental fairness and consistency, the code must apply to all federal judges; it would at the very least force the hand of those like Justice Thomas who seem unmoved by any higher sense of duty to the institution or to the American people who have agreed to abide by its rulings.
The court is in deep trouble these days, pervaded by what Justice Sonia Sotomayor recently called the “stench” of partisanship — a stench arising in no small part from the Thomases’ behavior. It is hard to imagine that the other justices, regardless of their personal politics, aren’t bothered.
No one should have to choose between their devotion to their spouse and their duty to the nation. But Justice Thomas has shown himself unwilling or unable to protect what remains of the court’s reputation from the appearance of extreme bias he and his wife have created. He would do the country a service by stepping down and making room for someone who won’t have that problem.
Greg Sargent writes, “‘Morning Joe’ shock over Ginni Thomas points to a hidden Jan. 6 truth”, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/03/25/joe-scarborough-ginni-thomas-mark-meadows-texts/
Meadows texted to Ginni Thomas that the “King of Kings” would ultimately “triumph” in the quest to overturn the election, which Meadows characterized as “a fight of good versus evil.” Thomas, a longtime conservative activist, replied: “Thank you!! Needed that!”
This sparked serious consternation on “Morning Joe,” with host Joe Scarborough delivering an emotional diatribe about it. “Think about the sickness of this,” Scarborough said Friday. “He summons the name of Jesus Christ for his help in overturning American democracy!”
The sentiment is understandable. But what this level of shock really indicates is this: We haven’t paid enough attention to the role of right-wing Christian nationalism in driving Trump’s effort to destroy our political order, and in the abandonment of democracy among some on the right more broadly.
In invoking Jesus’ support for Trump’s effort to overturn the election, Meadows — who handled evangelical outreach in the White House — was not merely making an offhand comment. He was speaking in a vein that has held wide currency among the Christian nationalist right throughout the Trump years, right through the insurrection attempt.
Sarah Posner, a scholar of the Christian right, has extensively documented the role of that movement in supporting and lending grass-roots energy to the effort to overturn the election procedurally, and even in fomenting the insurrection itself.
The rhetoric from the Christian right about Trump has long sounded very much like that exchange between Meadows and Thomas. In a piece tracing that rhetoric, Posner concludes that for many on the Christian right, Trump was “anointed” by God as “the fulfillment of a long-sought goal of restoring the United States as a Christian nation.”
In this narrative, Trump — despite his glaring and repugnant personal imperfections — became the vessel to carry out the struggle to defeat various godless and secularist infestations of the idealized Christian nation, from the woke to globalists to communists to the “deep state.”
This culminated with the effort to overturn the election and the lead-up to the Jan. 6 rally that morphed into the mob assault. As Posner documents, Christian-right activists developed a “bellicose Christian narrative in defense of Trump’s coup attempt,” investing it with biblical significance and casting it as “holy war against an illegitimate state.”
That illegitimate state, of course, is our democracy. And so, when Thomas and Meadows text about the religious dimensions of the coup attempt, they’re echoing much of what we’ve long heard from the Christian right about it.
“The evidence for White Christian nationalism’s importance to the effort to overthrow the election was right before our eyes on Jan. 6,” Jones told me. “It was in the signs that were carried. It brought a veneer of divine blessing on the violence and the insurrection.”
Christian nationalism has at different times focused on varying enemies of its vision of a Christian nation. But the through line here is that multidenominational, multiracial democracy is producing a country that is unacceptable to the Christian nationalist vision, Jones notes.
Which is why reckoning with the role of this movement in the turn against democracy is important. “It is a violent reclamation movement,” Jones told me. “If we’re going to move into the promise of a multireligious, multiethnic democracy, these forces are going to have to be confronted.”
NBC News adds “Ginni Thomas pressed for GOP lawmakers to protest 2020 election results”, https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/ginni-thomas-pressed-gop-lawmakers-protest-2020-election-results-rcna21644
Shortly after the 2020 election, Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, the conservative activist and wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, sent an email to an aide to a prominent House conservative saying she would have nothing to do with his group until his members go “out in the streets,” a congressional source familiar with the exchange told NBC News.
Thomas told an aide to incoming Republican Study Committee Chairman Jim Banks, R-Ind., that she was more aligned with the far-right House Freedom (sic) Caucus [more accurately described as the House Fascist Caucus], whose leaders just two months later would lead the fight in Congress to overturn the results of Democrat Joe Biden’s victory.
The RSC was long representative of the most conservative House members, but in the past several years, it has been replaced by the tea party-driven Freedom Caucus.
Thomas wrote to the aide that Freedom Caucus members were tougher than RSC members, were in the fight and had then-President Donald Trump’s back, according to the source familiar with the email contents. Until she saw RSC members “out in the streets” and in the fight, she said, she would not help the RSC, the largest caucus of conservatives on Capitol Hill.
Her November 2020 email came in response to a request from the RSC to offer policy recommendations as Banks was set to take the helm of the group in early 2021. But when Thomas portrayed the RSC as soft in its support for Trump and told its members to take to the streets, the aide thanked her for her suggestions and moved on.
NBC News has not independently reviewed the email exchange, but sources said it made no specific references to GOP efforts to overturn the election or block the certification of the Electoral College ballots in Congress on Jan. 6, 2021.
[T]]he email exchange suggests Thomas was pressuring Republicans in Congress to get more aggressive in fighting for Trump at a key moment when the lame-duck president and his inner circle were devising a strategy to overturn the results of the 2020 election and keep him in power.
[T]he Post and CBS also reported on a Nov. 14 text showing that Thomas sent to Meadows material from Connie Hair, Gohmert’s chief of staff. The text message seemed to reference Hair’s belief that “the most important thing you can realize right now is that there are no rules in war.”
“This war is psychological. PSYOP,” Thomas texted.
Just days later, Gohmert appeared at a “Million MAGA March” near the White House and told Trump supporters, “This was a cheated election, and we can’t let it stand.” He talked about “revolution.”
It’s unclear how many other GOP congressional offices Thomas was emailing, texting or calling during the period between Election Day and Jan. 6.
Thomas said she attended the Jan. 6 “Stop the Steal” rally near the White House that preceded the deadly riot at the U.S. Capitol. And her involvement in pressuring and advising leaders in both the executive branch and legislative branch on efforts to overturn the presidential election are raising significant ethical questions about whether her political activism has created a conflict of interest for her husband, Justice Clarence Thomas, who may have to decide additional cases relating to the special House investigation into the Jan. 6 attack.
Justices are subject to a federal law which prohibits them from hearing cases in which their spouses have “an interest that could be substantially affected by the outcome of the proceeding.” 28 U.S.C. section 455. The statute also requires them to disqualify themselves from any proceedings in which their “impartiality might reasonably be questioned.”
Jayne Mayer writes, “Legal Scholars Are Shocked By Ginni Thomas’s “Stop the Steal” Texts”, https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/legal-scholars-are-shocked-by-ginni-thomass-stop-the-steal-texts
(excerpt)
Stephen Gillers, a law professor at N.Y.U. and a prominent judicial ethicist, described the revelations as “a game changer.” In the past, he explained, he had supported the notion that a Justice and his spouse could pursue their interests in autonomous spheres. “For that reason, I was prepared to, and did tolerate a great deal of Ginni’s political activism,” he said. But “Ginni has now crossed a line.” In an e-mail reacting to the texts, Gillers concluded, “Clarence Thomas cannot sit on any matter involving the election, the invasion of the Capitol, or the work of the January 6 Committee.”
Justice Thomas has already participated in two cases related to the 2020 election and its aftermath, despite his wife’s direct involvement in the so-called Stop the Steal efforts. A third case, John Eastman v. Bennie Thompson, may soon reach the Court. Eastman [a former law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas] and a right-wing legal theorist who advised Trump [he is the ajthor of the “Coup Memos”] on ways to challenge the 2020 election results, is arguing that attorney-client privilege shields his records from the congressional committee that is investigating the January 6th insurrection. The case, currently in a federal district court in California, is likely to reach the Supreme Court on appeal.
Gillers’s e-mail to me laid out several reasons for why Thomas must now recuse himself from all such cases. Most narrowly, he said, these cases could “lead to discovery” of inappropriate conduct by Ginni Thomas; as her texts with Meadows demonstrate, “she actively insinuated herself in the events through her texts to Meadows, and perhaps more extensively.” Gillers continued, “That’s enough to require her husband to abstain from participation in any case in which her actions might be further revealed.” Justice Thomas, he said, clearly “has an understandable interest in protecting” his wife. For that reason alone, Gillers explained, “his impartiality might reasonably be questioned, which the law says requires recusal.” More broadly, Gillers argued, “Ginni became part of the team seeking to overturn the election. That team expressly identified, as a critical part of its strategy, appeals to the Supreme Court, and therefore to Clarence.” He added, “Ginni chose to make herself part of the story that the Trump side, her side, would then ask the Court, including her husband, to interpret in its favor.”
Gillers emphasized that it’s impossible to know whether Clarence Thomas could actually be impartial in such cases. But, he argued, the Justice has now forfeited the right to “ask the public to trust his impartiality,” adding, “Now that Ginni’s texts are revealed, Clarence could not sit in any such cases.”
[W]hen I spoke with Stephen Vladeck, a professor at the University of Texas School of Law, he also made note of the federal statute requiring Justices to recuse themselves if a spouse has “an interest” in a proceeding’s outcome. It’s unclear whether any of Ginni Thomas’s scheming was described in the papers that Trump attempted to withhold from investigators. But, Vladeck told me, “if any of her stuff was in the Trump docs, she sure had an interest,” and this would make Justice Thomas’s dissent unethical.
In an e-mail, Bruce Green, an expert in judicial ethics at Fordham Law School, told me that he agrees with Vladeck: “If Justice Thomas knew that his wife’s e-mails were among the records that would be produced, then surely he should have recused himself, because his wife, although not formally a party, had a very direct personal interest in the case—an interest in avoiding the embarrassment that would result (and now has resulted) from the revelation.”
Richard Hasen, an expert in election law who teaches at the University of California, Irvine, also believes that Justice Thomas should never have participated in the case weighing whether Congress had the right to review Trump’s papers. Hasen told me, “Given Ginni Thomas’s deep involvement in trying to subvert the outcome of the 2020 election based upon outlandish claims of voter fraud, and her work on this with not only activists but the former President’s chief of staff, Justice Thomas should not have heard any cases” involving disputes over the 2020 election or Congress’s investigation of the January 6th riots. It has now become clear, Hasen said, that “his spouse’s reputation, and even potential liability, is at stake.”