paoletta omb ESQ

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bad code see bak // TWO

NO MERRI

SEE GINNI

see SMOKEY JOE STAFFER ORIGIN

Mark Paoletta, the CFPB’s chief legal officer

FREEZE FAIL NOT FIRED 4 25

see vast RW conspir

reps ginni ~ Jan 6

he says he is on clerk listserv

cassidy H liar?! nope passantino michael best firm

see impoundment BS DOGE VOUGHT

see LE0 [clarence bad oil pting Crow]

when did he work for pence, why stopped? 2018

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clerks = "the cabal"? feeder to clarence et al? ted olson and silberman?

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Christopher Lewis @ Slate: How the Legal Mastermind of Trump’s Most Damaging Policies Stays Anonymous

Mark Paoletta is not a household name. Despite this, over the past decade, he has quietly become one of the conservative legal movement’s most influential operators, making Paoletta an underrated political power in his own right.

Over a career spanning roles in both House and Senate Republican leadership, the George H.W. Bush White House, the courts, and conservative advocacy organizations, Paoletta has formulated and defended expansive legal theories of presidential power, molding governing reality. Today he is helping Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought reshape the federal bureaucracy. Understanding why he matters means understanding that the modern federal government is shaped not only by elected officials but also by attorneys who craft legal arguments justifying government action.

There are two central components to Paoletta’s dangerous philosophy: fury at the independence of the civil service, and belief in nearly unlimited presidential authority. Close D.C. watchers should recognize these as the calling cards of Voughtism. Indeed, Vought and Paoletta are close allies—Vought executes the dubious budgetary procedures; Paoletta handles the legal arguments. As Politico’s Sophia Cai rightly points out, “If Russ Vought sees his question to dismantle the federal bureaucracy as a race against time, his lawyer sidekick Mark Paoletta is holding the stopwatch.” As Cai goes on to mention, Paoletta has been the center of Vought’s team, ensuring that funds are withheld from furloughed workers and redirected to Donald Trump’s ridiculous vanity projects.

Between the two Trump administrations, Paoletta bided his time as a senior fellow at Vought’s Center for Renewing America, the Trump-aligned think tank that effectively was another administration in waiting. There, alongside other Trump officials, like Ken Cuccinelli and Kash Patel, Paoletta wrote multiple articles about impoundment and expanding executive authority. One of those pieces bemoaned Congress’ constraints on the president’s ability to spend. He specifically claimed that the Impoundment Control Act “reverses an understanding of the Constitution’s allocation of executive and congressional spending authority dating to the Founding. The ICA is unconstitutional.”

For the record, this is nonsense. Fundamentally, what makes a legislature powerful is its control over taxing and spending, the power of the purse. That goes back to precolonial Parliament and the Magna Carta—at best, Paoletta is staggeringly ignorant of the “history and tradition” that conservative legalists claim to adore; at worst, his arguments indicate that he is an unrepentant monarchist (at least when a MAGA king is on the throne). Paoletta uses the real estate he is allotted to rationalize why presidents should be able to usurp the constitutional authority of other co-equal branches of government.

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SMOKEY JOE STAFFER ORIGIN

Paoletta began his career as Chief Counsel for Oversight and Investigations for the House Energy and Commerce Committee from September 1997 until January 2007.^[5]

During his tenure as Chief Counsel for Oversight and Investigations, Paoletta managed nearly 200 investigative hearings.^[5] In a report released in February 2007, Congressman Joe Barton (R-Texas), Ranking Member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, released a compilation of the Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee's work from 2001 through 2006 that served "as a road map through many of the great government and corporate scandals of this decade."^[6][7]

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no lnx in orig

Letter from Washington

The Technocrat Engineering a Vast Expansion of Trump's Power

How Russell Vought, an author of Project 2025, is using a once low-profile budget office to decimate federal agencies, fire vast numbers of workers, and test the rule of law.

By Andy Kroll

October 17, 2025

:{“He has centralized decision-making power to an extent that he is the Commander-in-Chief,” a senior official said of Vought.

This article is a collaboration between The New Yorker and ProPublica.*

On the afternoon of February 12th, Russell Vought, the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, summoned a small group of career staffers to the Eisenhower Executive Office Building for a meeting about foreign aid. A storm had dumped nearly six inches of snow on Washington, D.C. The rest of the federal government was running on a two-hour delay, but Vought had offered his team no such reprieve. As they filed into a second-floor conference room decorated with photos of past O.M.B. directors, Vought took his seat at the center of a worn wooden table and laid his briefing materials out before him.

Vought, a bookish technocrat with an encyclopedic knowledge of the inner workings of the U.S. government, cuts an unusual figure in Trump’s inner circle of Fox News hosts and right-wing influencers. He speaks in a flat, nasally monotone and, with his tortoiseshell glasses, standard-issue blue suits, and corona of close-cropped hair, most resembles what he claims to despise: a federal bureaucrat. The Office of Management and Budget, like Vought himself, is little known outside the Beltway and poorly understood even among political insiders. What it lacks in cachet, however, it makes up for in the vast influence it wields across the government. Samuel Bagenstos, an O.M.B. general counsel during the Biden Administration, told me, “Every goddam thing in the executive branch goes through O.M.B.”

The O.M.B. reviews all significant regulations proposed by individual agencies. It vets executive orders before the President signs them. It issues workforce policies for more than two million federal employees. Most notably, every penny appropriated by Congress is dispensed by the O.M.B., making the agency a potential choke point in a federal bureaucracy that currently spends about seven trillion dollars a year. Shalanda Young, Vought’s predecessor, told me, “If you’re O.K. with your name not being in the spotlight and just getting stuff done,” then directing the O.M.B. “can be one of the most powerful jobs in D.C.”

During Donald Trump’s first term, Vought (whose name is pronounced “vote”) did more than perhaps anyone else to turn the President’s demands and personal grievances into government action. In 2019, after Congress refused to fund Trump’s border wall, Vought, then the acting director of the O.M.B., redirected billions of dollars in Department of Defense money to build it. Later that year, after the Trump White House pressured Ukraine’s government to investigate Joe Biden, who was running for President, Vought froze two hundred and fourteen million dollars in security assistance for Ukraine. “The President loved Russ because he could count on him,” Mark Paoletta, who has served as the O.M.B. general counsel in both Trump Administrations, said at a conservative policy summit in 2022, according to a recording I obtained. “He wasn’t a showboat, and he was committed to doing what the President wanted to do.”

After the pro-Trump riots at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, many Republicans, including top Administration officials, disavowed the President. Vought remained loyal. He echoed Trump’s baseless claims about election fraud and publicly defended people who were arrested for their participation in the melee. During the Biden years, Vought labored to translate the lessons of Trump’s tumultuous first term into a more effective second Presidency. He chaired the transition portion of Project 2025, a joint effort by a coalition of conservative groups to develop a road map for the next Republican Administration, helping to draft some three hundred and fifty executive orders, regulations, and other plans to more fully empower the President. “Despite his best thinking and the aggressive things they tried in Trump One, nothing really stuck,” a former O.M.B. branch chief who served under Vought during the first Trump Administration told me. “Most Administrations don’t get a four-year pause or have the chance to think about ‘Why isn’t this working?’ ” The former branch chief added, “Now he gets to come back and steamroll everyone.”

At the meeting in February, according to people familiar with the events, Vought’s directive was simple: slash foreign assistance to the greatest extent possible. The U.S. government shouldn’t support overseas anti-malaria initiatives, he argued, because buying mosquito nets doesn’t make Americans safer or more prosperous. He questioned why the U.S. funded an international vaccine alliance, given the anti-vaccine views of Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. The conversation turned to the United States Institute of Peace, a government-funded nonprofit created under Ronald Reagan, which worked to prevent conflicts overseas; Vought asked what options existed to eliminate it. When he was told that the U.S.I.P. was funded by Congress and legally independent, he replied, “We’ll see what we can do.” (A few days later, Trump signed an executive order that directed the O.M.B. to dismantle the organization.)

The O.M.B. staffers had tried to anticipate Vought’s desired outcome for more than seven billion dollars that the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development spent each year on humanitarian assistance, including disaster relief and support for refugees and conflict victims. During the campaign, Trump had vowed to defund agencies that give money to people “who have no respect for us at all,” and Project 2025 had accused U.S.A.I.D. of pursuing a “divisive political and cultural agenda.” The staffers proposed a cut of fifty per cent.

Vought was unsatisfied. What would be the consequences, he asked, of a much larger reduction? A career official answered: less humanitarian aid would mean more people would die. “You could say that about any of these cuts,” Vought replied. A person familiar with the meeting described his reaction as “blasé.” Vought reiterated that he wanted spending on foreign aid to be as close to zero as possible, on the fastest timeline possible. Several analysts left the meeting rattled. Word of what had happened spread quickly among the O.M.B. staff. Another person familiar with the meeting later told me, “It was the day that broke me.”

What Vought has done in the nine months since Trump took office goes much further than slashing foreign aid. Relying on an expansive theory of Presidential power and a willingness to test the rule of law, he has frozen vast sums of federal spending, terminated tens of thousands of federal workers, and, in a few cases, brought entire agencies to a standstill. In early October, after Senate Democrats refused to vote for a budget resolution without additional health-care protections, effectively shutting down the government, Vought became the face of the White House’s response. On the second day of the closure, Trump shared an A.I.-generated video that depicted his budget director—who, by then, had threatened mass firings across the federal workforce and paused or cancelled twenty-six billion dollars in funding for infrastructure and clean-energy projects in blue states—as the Grim Reaper of Washington, D.C. “We work for the President of the United States,” a senior agency official who regularly deals with the O.M.B. told me. But right now “it feels like we work for Russ Vought. He has centralized decision-making power to an extent that he is the Commander-in-Chief.”

At the start of Trump’s second term, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, which promised to slash spending and root out waste, dominated the headlines. A gaggle of tech bros, with little government experience, appeared to be marching into federal buildings and, with the President’s blessing, purging people and programs seen as “woke” or anti-Trump. The sight of Musk swinging a chainsaw onstage at a conservative conference captured the pell-mell approach, not to mention the brutality, of the billionaire’s plan to bring the federal government to heel.

But, according to court records, interviews, and other accounts from people close to Vought, DOGE’s efforts were guided, more than was previously known, by the O.M.B. director. Musk bragged about “feeding U.S.A.I.D. into the wood chipper,” but the details of the agency’s downsizing were ironed out by Vought’s office. When DOGE took aim at obscure quasi-government nonprofits, such as the United States Institute of Peace, O.M.B. veterans saw Vought’s influence at work. “I can’t imagine that the DOGE team knew to target all these little parts of the government without Russ pointing them there,” the former O.M.B. branch chief told me. Vought also orchestrated DOGE’s hostile takeover of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, crippling a regulator that Republicans had hoped to shutter during Trump’s first term. “DOGE is underneath the O.M.B.,” Michelle Martin, an official with Citizens for Renewing America, a grassroots group founded by Vought, said in May, according to a video of her remarks. “Honestly, a lot of what Elon began pinpointing . . . was at the direction of Russ.”

Vought, who declined to be interviewed for this story, voiced concerns about some of DOGE’s tactics—cancelling budget items that the O.M.B. had wanted to keep, for instance—but he mostly saw the department as a useful battering ram. An Administration official who has worked with Vought and Musk told me that DOGE showed Vought it was possible to ignore legal challenges and take dramatic action. “He has the benefit of Elon softening everyone up,” the official told me. “Elon terrified the shit out of people. He broke the status quo.”

Vought is a stated opponent of the status quo. One of the few prominent conservatives to embrace the label of “Christian nationalist,” he once told an audience that “the phrasing is too accurate to run away from the term. . . . I’m a Christian. I am a nationalist. We were meant to be a Christian nation.” American democracy, he has said, has been hijacked by rogue judges who make law from the bench and by a permanent class of government bureaucrats who want to advance “woke” policies designed to divide Americans and silence political opponents. “The stark reality in America is that we are in the late stages of a complete Marxist takeover of the country, in which our adversaries already hold the weapons of the government apparatus,” Vought said in 2024, during a conference hosted by the Center for Renewing America, a nonprofit think tank that he also founded. “And they have aimed it at us.”

{The central struggle of our time, he says, pits the defenders of this “post-constitutional” order—what he calls the “cartel” or the “regime,” which in his telling includes Democrats and Republicans—against a group of “radical constitutionalists” fighting to destroy the deep state and return power to the Presidency and, ultimately, the people. Vought counts himself as a member of the latter group, which, in his view, also includes right-wing stalwarts such as the political strategist Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s mass-deportation campaign. “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” he said in a private speech in 2023. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work, because they are increasingly viewed as the villains.”}:

The ultimate radical constitutionalist, Vought says, is Donald Trump. In Vought’s view, Trump, the subject of four indictments during his time out of office, is a singular figure in the history of the American republic, a once persecuted leader who returns to power to defeat the deep state. “We have in Donald Trump a man who is so uniquely positioned to serve this role, a man whose own interests perfectly align with the interests of the country,” Vought said in his 2024 speech. “He has seen what it has done to him, and he has seen what they are trying to do to the country. That is nothing more than a gift of God.” As Bannon put it, sitting onstage with Vought at a closed-door conference in 2023, Trump is “a very imperfect instrument, right? But he’s an instrument of the Lord.”

In Vought’s vision for the U.S. government, an all-powerful executive branch would be able to fire workers, cancel programs, shutter agencies, and undo regulations that govern air and water quality, financial markets, workplace protections, and civil rights. The Department of Justice, meanwhile, would shed its historical independence and operate at the direction of the White House. All of this puts Vought at the center of what Steve Vladeck, a law professor at Georgetown, described to me as the Trump Administration’s “complete disregard” for the law. “The President has no authority to not spend money Congress has appropriated—that’s not a debate,” he told me. “The President has no authority to fire civil servants who are protected by statute—that’s not a debate.” He added, “We are seeing exertions of executive power the likes of which we have never seen in this country.”

Vought, who is forty-nine, has spent his entire adult life in Washington. He met his wife, Mary, on Capitol Hill, where they both eventually worked for Mike Pence, at the time a Republican congressman from Indiana. (The Voughts divorced in 2023.) Yet, after nearly thirty years in the nation’s capital, he still views himself as an outsider. He once described his upbringing, in Trumbull, Connecticut, as “blue collar” and his parents as part of America’s “forgotten men and women.”

Vought’s father, Thurlow, served in the Marines and worked as an electrician. His mother, Margaret, spent more than twenty years as a schoolteacher and administrator. Before they married each other, Vought’s parents had both been widowed in their thirties and left to raise families on their own; Russ was their only child together. In 1981, when Russ was four, one of Thurlow’s daughters died in a car crash. Not long after the accident, Thurlow had a religious awakening. “That completely changed the direction of our immediate family,” one of Vought’s half sisters later wrote on social media.

Vought’s mother helped launch a Christian school, where the curriculum relied heavily on the Bible. One history book the school considered using included the instruction to “Defend the statement that all governmental power and authority come from God.” America was built on Judeo-Christian values, she told a local newspaper, and if the American people gave up on those values “then they’re going to have to pay the price based on sin, sickness, disease and anarchy.”

Vought attended a private Christian high school, then went to Illinois to study at Wheaton College, which is known as the “evangelical Harvard.” He moved to Washington after graduation and, in 1999, landed a job in the office of Phil Gramm, a Republican senator from Texas. Vought, who started in the mailroom, would later say that working for Gramm laid the “conservative foundation” for the rest of his life.

Gramm was an uncompromising budget hawk. He was famous for the “Dickey Flatt test,” named after a printer Gramm knew in Texas. For every dollar of federal spending, Gramm said, lawmakers must ask themselves: Did it improve the lives of people like Dickey Flatt? (In Gramm’s estimation, the answer was often no; every year, he introduced legislation designed to ruthlessly slash the budget.) Years later, when Vought testified before Congress, he said that people like his parents “have always been my test for federal spending. Did a particular program or spending increase help the nameless wagon pullers across our country, working hard at their job, trying to provide for their family and future?”

Under Gramm’s tutelage, Vought developed a reputation as a master of the arcane rules that can get legislation passed or killed. He climbed the ranks of the Republican Party, going on to advise Pence, who was then the leader of the House Republican Conference. But the closer Vought got to the center of congressional power, the more disillusioned he became. In the late two-thousands, when Republican lawmakers, who professed to care about deficits and balanced budgets, voted in favor of bills loaded with corporate giveaways and pork-barrel spending, Vought felt that they were abandoning their principles and duping their constituents. He later recalled of this time, “I would say, ‘If there’s an opinion in this leadership room, I’m telling you it’s ninety-five per cent wrong.’ ” A former Capitol Hill colleague of Vought’s told me, “I think he thought the Republican leadership was a bigger impediment to conservative causes than Democrats were.”

In 2010, Vought quit working for House Republicans and helped launch Heritage Action for America, an offshoot of the influential conservative think tank Heritage Foundation. The foundation was known for dense policy papers and its voluminous “Mandate for Leadership” governing guide. Heritage Action had a different purpose—to strong-arm Republicans in Congress into acting more conservatively.

Vought was instrumental in turning Heritage Action into the interest group that congressional Republicans feared most. He picked fights with Party leaders over agriculture subsidies and greenhouse-gas regulations, and published a scorecard that rated how lawmakers voted on key bills. In Heritage Action’s first year, according to a person familiar with Vought’s work there, he came up with an idea for a mailer that attacked Bob Corker, a Republican senator from Tennessee, for his vote to approve a nuclear-weapons treaty with Russia. The mailer featured a photograph of Corker alongside images of Barack Obama, Vladimir Putin, and the Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Heritage Action’s tactics so infuriated the Republican leadership that Senator Mitch McConnell called on Heritage donors to stop funding the group. (McConnell did not respond to a request for comment.)

In 2013, Heritage Action announced a campaign to defund the Affordable Care Act. Vought and his colleagues toured the country, whipping up the grass roots, and poured millions of dollars into advertisements and lobbying. They wanted Republicans in the House and the Senate to insist that any spending bill passed to avert a shutdown must also defund Obamacare. The Republican lawmakers who embraced the strategy came to be known as the “suicide caucus,” and their protest led to a sixteen-day government shutdown. In the end, Republican leaders cut a deal to reopen the government, leaving Obamacare intact.

Heritage Action saw the 2016 Presidential election as an opportunity to put a true conservative back in the White House. The group’s C.E.O., Michael Needham, openly supported Senator Ted Cruz, of Texas, who, three years earlier, had helped orchestrate the shutdown. Trump, at least initially, was treated with disdain. During an appearance on Fox News in 2015, Needham called him a “clown” who “needs to be out of the race.”

Vought and Trump couldn’t have been more different: one was a deacon at his Baptist church; the other was a twice-divorced philanderer who had been caught on camera bragging about grabbing women “by the pussy.” But, after Trump won the election, Vought was offered a job as a senior adviser at the O.M.B., where he’d dreamed of working since his days in Phil Gramm’s office. Years later, Vought would say that, at the time, he had no ambition of one day running the agency. He had planned to help with the transition and some of the O.M.B.’s early efforts, then go to seminary to become a pastor. But, he later said in a podcast interview, “God had other plans.”

In March, 2017, Trump signed an executive order that called for a top-to-bottom reorganization of the federal government. Mick Mulvaney, a former congressman, served as Trump’s first budget director, but, inside the O.M.B., Vought took the lead. According to a former senior staffer at the agency, Vought initially pushed for the President’s plan to eliminate U.S.A.I.D. and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. He also wanted to fold the Department of Health and Human Services, along with food-stamps programs, into a new Department of Health and Public Welfare. “They wanted to call it that because they think it sounds bad,” a former O.M.B. analyst told me. In one meeting, according to a person in the room, Vought asked, “Why do we do economic assistance abroad at all?” The former O.M.B. analyst said, “There were very few, if any, debates where Russ wouldn’t take the most extreme option available to him, the most conservative, the most budget-cutting.”

Trump’s Cabinet secretaries resisted wholesale cuts. The former senior staffer recalled, “The general counsels at these agencies are calling the White House counsel and saying, ‘We’re not trying to introduce legislation to delete ourselves, are we?’ ” Few of the recommendations in Vought’s final reorganization plan, which was released in 2018, were implemented. But the document now reads like a guide to the second Trump Administration. “I didn’t realize it then,” the former O.M.B. senior staffer told me, “but I was writing the first draft of Project 2025.”

Vought increasingly clashed with the O.M.B.’s staff over proposed cuts to popular programs. Meals on Wheels, the food-delivery program, was a topic of intense debate. Even after O.M.B. staff explained how the program, which received more than nine hundred million dollars in funding from Congress, acted as a lifeline for homebound seniors, Vought and Mulvaney pushed for major cuts that would have hobbled its operations, according to the former O.M.B. senior staffer. The staffer added that it was often hard to reconcile Vought’s deeply held Christian faith—he hosted a prayer session for select colleagues—with his eagerness to cut programs that helped the vulnerable. “It always struck me as a strange thing,” the person said. “There’s compassion, but it only extends to certain people.”

In 2018, Mark Paoletta, a former attorney in the George H. W. Bush White House, joined the O.M.B. as general counsel. Paoletta was best known for publicly defending Clarence Thomas, who, during his Supreme Court confirmation hearing, in 1991, was accused of sexual harassment by his former colleague Anita Hill. Paoletta had worked on Capitol Hill, then entered private practice, where he advised politicians under scrutiny by Congress. Paoletta and Vought quickly forged an alliance. The former O.M.B. branch chief told me that the office’s culture changed after Paoletta arrived. “There was a shift that we were all deep state,” he said. “They thought we were pushing back because we had our own leftist-leaning agenda.” (Paoletta declined to comment.)

It was Vought’s idea to use an obscure budgetary maneuver called a rescission to claw back funds that Congress had already appropriated, according to Paoletta’s remarks at the conservative policy summit. In 2018, at Vought’s urging, Trump sent Congress the largest rescission request in decades, asking lawmakers to roll back more than fifteen billion dollars, including money for U.S.A.I.D.’s Ebola response, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, and an Energy Department loan program for auto manufacturing. O.M.B. employees “looked at us like we were crazy,” Paoletta said. “They just thought it was something they didn’t do.” Once again, Vought’s own party thwarted him: the measure failed by a single vote in the Republican-held Senate.

Vought also encountered resistance inside the White House. When Congress refused to give Trump billions in funding to construct new border fencing, Vought and Paoletta devised a novel strategy. Trump could declare a national emergency at the U.S.-Mexico border, giving him the authority to seize money from other parts of the government. According to Paoletta, John Kelly, the President’s chief of staff, kept the plan from Trump. Paoletta said that Kelly’s message to the O.M.B. was “We don’t want to tell the President he has that authority, because God knows what he’ll do.”

Eventually, Trump badgered Mulvaney, the O.M.B. director, to find him the money for his wall. Mulvaney told the President that he’d been trying to meet with him about the issue, but that Kelly had blocked him. Within days, Trump replaced Kelly with Mulvaney. Vought took over as the acting director of the O.M.B., and money from the Defense Department was tapped to fund the wall. (Kelly did not respond to requests for comment.)

Under Vought, the O.M.B. produced budgets that called for more cuts than any in modern history. Congress all but ignored them. A former staffer in the O.M.B.’s legislative-affairs office recalled that Republicans didn’t believe Trump cared about the sweeping reductions included in his own annual budgets. “They kept saying, ‘The President’s not really pushing this or that cut—that’s a Russ Vought thing, isn’t it?’ ” the legislative-affairs staffer said.

In July, 2019, Trump asked the O.M.B. to freeze hundreds of millions of dollars in security assistance to the government of Ukraine. The request coincided with a phone call Trump had with President Volodymyr Zelensky in which Trump pressured him to investigate Biden and Biden’s son Hunter, who had served on the board of a Ukrainian energy company. The money for Ukraine had already been approved by Congress, but Vought agreed to hold back the funds. Paoletta signed off on a memo authorizing the freeze. Under the law, the move was known as an impoundment. (The Government Accountability Office, an independent nonpartisan agency, later deemed it illegal.)

Any fan of “Schoolhouse Rock!” knows that the first job assigned to Congress in the Constitution is the power of the purse. The President, meanwhile, must “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed,” according to Article II of the Constitution. Most legal scholars interpret this to mean that the President’s duty is to spend the money Congress appropriates, and that the President does not have the power to withhold funds. In 1969, William Rehnquist, the conservative future Supreme Court Chief Justice, wrote that the impoundment power was “supported by neither reason nor precedent.”

The question of impoundment’s legality came to a head in the nineteen-seventies, when President Richard Nixon withheld billions in congressionally approved funds for environmental-cleanup efforts. Courts undid Nixon’s actions, and Congress eventually passed the Impoundment Control Act of 1974, which outlawed the maneuver, leaving only narrow exceptions—rescissions—that required congressional sign-off. (Democrats are calling for restrictions on the rescission process as part of the current shutdown negotiations.) Over the years, the Impoundment Control Act would come to be viewed as sacrosanct at the O.M.B. That didn’t stop Vought. “I had been personally told, ‘Look, I want the money cut off until we can figure out where it’s going,’ ” Vought later said of the Ukraine funding in an interview with the conservative commentator Tucker Carlson. “It was like all hell broke loose within the bureaucracy.”

The impoundment triggered congressional investigations and, ultimately, Trump’s first impeachment. (Ukraine eventually received the money.) Vought refused to coöperate with investigators, calling the probe a “sham process that is designed to relitigate the last election.” One of the impeachment articles named Vought, saying that the President had pressured him and others not to respond to subpoenas. Trump, for his part, continued to express support for impoundment, calling it the “secret weapon” that could tame the “bloated federal bureaucracy.”

In early 2021, on one of the final days of Trump’s first term, Vought visited him in the Oval Office. Both men felt a sense of unfinished business, Vought would later recall. Only a few months earlier, when Vought was sworn in as the O.M.B. director, Trump had told him that, after three and a half years as President, he had finally got the hang of the job. “Russ, we’ve got to get another term,” Trump said. “We finally figured out how to do this.”

Vought, frustrated by what he saw as years of obstruction by civil servants, had recently pushed through a new policy to vastly expand the number of at-will employees in the government, making them easier to fire. But the COVID-19 pandemic had dashed any chance of leaving the government smaller than he’d found it. Trump had signed trillion-dollar stimulus bills to prop up the American economy; by the time he left office, the national debt had swelled by $7.8 trillion. After the violence on January 6th, a second Trump term looked less likely than ever. Vought, however, had not given up hope.

In the Oval Office, he told Trump that he would soon launch a new political operation that would keep the MAGA movement alive while attacking the policies of the incoming Biden Administration. Trump blessed the venture, with one request. That summer, in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, national protests had forced a racial reckoning in the country. Trump wanted Vought, who as O.M.B. director had scrubbed training materials for federal employees of any references to “white privilege” and “systemic racism,” to find a way for conservatives to push back against the Black Lives Matter movement. “This was an assignment I was given from President Trump,” Vought later recalled. “I’m the budget guy. If I can talk about race, you can talk about race.”

A few days after Trump left office, Vought announced the launch of the Center for Renewing America, a MAGA think tank that aspired to act as an incubator for future Republican Administrations. Its activist arm, Citizens for Renewing America, would mobilize grassroots supporters to pressure elected officials to embrace the think tank’s agenda. The overarching goal, Vought wrote in an op-ed for the Federalist, was to “restore an old consensus in America that has been forgotten, that we are a people For God, For Country, and For Community.”

At the Center for Renewing America, Vought surrounded himself with other radical constitutionalists from the first Trump Administration. He brought on Jeffrey Clark, the Justice Department official who had tried to use his agency to help Trump overturn the 2020 election. (A D.C. disciplinary board recently recommended that Clark, who now works at the O.M.B., lose his law license as punishment for those efforts, an outcome that Clark is appealing and that his lawyer called a “travesty of justice.”) Kash Patel, Trump’s current F.B.I. director, and Ken Cuccinelli, a top immigration official in the first Trump Administration, joined as senior fellows. Working at the center, Cuccinelli explained at the conservative policy summit, allowed him to “stake out the outer boundary of reasonable constitutional law.”

The Center for Renewing America’s ideas included how the President could invoke the Insurrection Act to deploy military troops to American cities to put down protests; how the White House could freeze billions in federal funding without waiting for a vote in Congress; and how agency leaders could defy government unions and fire workers en masse. The think tank also set out to create shadow versions of the O.M.B. and of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel to anticipate legal challenges and counter internal pushback. In his 2024 address, Vought explained, “I don’t want President Trump having to lose a moment of time having fights in the Oval Office about whether something is legal or doable or moral.”

Vought and his colleagues at the center also worked closely with the House Freedom Caucus to urge other congressional Republicans to use government shutdowns as a way of forcing through major policy changes. One of their first targets was critical race theory, a once obscure academic concept that had become a flashpoint during the 2020 racial-justice protests. According to previously unreported recordings of briefings held by Citizens for Renewing America, Vought said that he had pressured members of the Freedom Caucus to yoke a ban on critical race theory to must-pass bills on raising the debt limit and funding the government. “We have to have a Speaker that goes into these funding fights with a love for the shutdowns,” Vought said during a November, 2022, briefing call, “because they create an opportunity to save the country.”

But Republicans never shut down the government during the Biden Presidency, and Vought grew increasingly frustrated with them for not using more aggressive tactics. On one briefing call, he praised Cori Bush, a progressive Democrat from Missouri, after she camped out for several days on the Capitol steps to protest the end of a pandemic-era moratorium on evictions. Vought called her politics “very, very bad,” but he admired her methods: “We need this from Republicans.”

The centerpiece of Vought’s work during the Biden years was his campaign to popularize the concept of “woke and weaponized” government. The tagline brought together two of Vought’s rallying cries: “woke” policies, like diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts and transgender rights, and a “weaponized” F.B.I. and Justice Department that had allegedly been wielded against the Democrats’ political enemies, including, most notably, Trump. When the Center for Renewing America released a federal budget blueprint in late 2022, calling for nearly nine trillion dollars in cuts in the course of ten years, the word “woke” appeared seventy-seven times across a hundred and three pages.

Jessica Riedl, a budget expert who works for the conservative Manhattan Institute, told me that it was “just silly” to claim, as the Center for Renewing America’s budget did, that Veterans Affairs, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and farm subsidies required enormous cuts for being too woke. “It’s a way to dress up spending cuts that aren’t popular on their own merits,” Riedl said. Vought described his framing as an attempt to “change paradigms.” “We have to be able to defund agencies,” he said in the private speech in 2023. “That is why these things have to be indelibly linked, and that is why we are focussing so much on ‘woke and weaponized.’ ”

Any hope that Vought had of implementing his ideas in a second Trump Administration nearly ran aground last summer. He had written a chapter of Project 2025’s eight-hundred-and-eighty-seven-page report, arguing for an expansion of executive power that would put the Justice Department and other traditionally independent agencies fully under Presidential control. Center for Renewing America fellows had written two more chapters in the report. But, as Election Day neared, Project 2025 became a liability for the Trump campaign. Polls showed that a majority of Americans opposed its most aggressive proposals, including removing the abortion drug mifepristone from the market, eliminating the Department of Education, and implementing Vought’s plan to more easily fire nonpolitical federal workers. As criticism of Project 2025 grew, Trump insisted that he knew “nothing” about it, while also claiming that “some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal.”

The month before the election, Politico reported that Donald Trump, Jr., had compiled a list of people who would not be allowed to serve in a second Trump Administration, including a number of leading contributors to Project 2025. But, according to a former Trump campaign official with close ties to the White House, Vought deftly navigated the controversy. “Russ is a consummate team player,” the official told me. “He was the one person at Project 2025 that we could have a conversation with during the course of the campaign.”

A week after Trump’s victory, the President-elect announced his plans for the Department of Government Efficiency. “It will become, potentially, ‘The Manhattan Project’ of our time,” Trump said in a statement. He tapped two of his biggest backers to run it: Elon Musk, who had donated nearly three hundred million dollars to help elect Trump and other Republicans, and the biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, who briefly ran for President on an anti-woke platform. Two days after the announcement, Vought met with Musk and Ramaswamy at Mar-a-Lago. Vought and Musk “hit it off,” according to the Times; both were “on the same wavelength in terms of taking the most extreme action possible.” Soon after the meeting, Trump nominated Vought to run the O.M.B.

One of DOGE’s first targets was the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The C.F.P.B. had first been proposed by Senator Elizabeth Warren, who, as a law professor, argued for the creation of a regulator that could protect Americans from predatory mortgages and hidden fees. Created by law in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, the bureau developed a reputation as an aggressive enforcer of fair-lending and consumer-protection laws. The bureau’s work has led to nearly twenty billion dollars in direct relief to consumers and five billion dollars in civil penalties for alleged wrongdoing. For Vought, the bureau embodied the gross regulatory overreach that he loathed; outside of government, the agency’s biggest foes, Wall Street and Silicon Valley, were major funders of Trump’s second campaign.

On February 7th, Trump named Vought the bureau’s acting director, a role he would perform on top of his duties at the O.M.B. That morning, a small team of DOGE staffers arrived at the C.F.P.B.’s headquarters. According to previously unreported e-mails and depositions, the members of DOGE took orders from Vought as they disabled the C.F.P.B.’s website and decided which of the agency’s employees to fire. Musk weighed in on X: “CFPB RIP.”

Trump had targeted the C.F.P.B. during his first term. “There were days in Trump One where it felt like we were getting punched in the face,” one longtime employee told me. Over time, however, the President seemed to lose interest, and the C.F.P.B.’s last director under Trump, a political appointee named Kathy Kraninger, supported the bureau’s mission. In 2020, under Kraninger, the C.F.P.B. filed the second-highest number of enforcement actions in its nearly ten-year existence.

Current and former C.F.P.B. staff told me that they assumed a second Trump Administration would look like the first one. “Generally, we thought there would be a conservative agenda we’d be handed, and we’d figure out how to enact it,” the veteran employee said. Soon after taking over, Vought informed Jerome Powell, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, which funds the C.F.P.B., that the agency would not need any more money. He barred C.F.P.B. employees from doing most types of work and told them not to go to the office. When confusion arose over what duties, if any, remained for the staff to do, Vought clarified the matter in a February 10th e-mail, telling employees to “stand down from performing any work task.”

In the following weeks, Vought and Paoletta stopped oversight activities, quashed ongoing investigations, and froze active enforcement cases, which included matters involving some of the largest banks in the nation, such as JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and Capital One. Rohit Chopra, the bureau’s director under Biden, said that Vought’s actions had put the C.F.P.B. “in a coma.” The bureau’s top enforcement officer resigned in June, writing in a letter to colleagues that the C.F.P.B.’s leadership “has no intention to enforce the law in any meaningful way.”

The final blow came when Vought announced a plan to lay off more than eighty per cent of the C.F.P.B.’s employees. A federal appeals court ruled in August that the mass-firing plan could proceed. It took Vought four months to accomplish what the previous Trump Administration had been unable to do in four years.

The unwinding of the C.F.P.B., however, was quickly overshadowed by another Vought victory. That same month, he completed his assault on foreign aid. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who had been running what was left of U.S.A.I.D., announced that, with Trump’s approval, he had empowered Vought to officially eliminate the agency. “Russ is now at the helm to oversee the closeout of an agency that long ago went off the rails,” Rubio announced. “Congrats, Russ.”

Four months before the 2024 election, the Center for Renewing America had welcomed a small group of congressional staffers to its headquarters, a few blocks from the Capitol. Some of them worked for the House and Senate Budget Committees, which every year help set spending levels for the federal government. The purpose of the meeting was to brief the staffers on the center’s latest policy fight—an attempt to build the case for the use of impoundment.

At the briefing, Paoletta argued that the Impoundment Control Act was unconstitutional. Spending laws passed by Congress were a ceiling, not a floor, Paoletta argued, according to a person in the room. In that view—which most legal experts dismiss as a fringe position—the White House is not permitted to spend more than a law calls for, but it has the power to spend far less. “Congress passes statutes episodically, and often with conflicting purposes and demands,” Paoletta later wrote in an essay for the Center for Renewing America. “It is left to the President and his subordinates to harmonize their execution in a coherent manner.”

According to Democrats on the House Appropriations Committee, the Trump Administration has since frozen or cancelled more than four hundred and ten billion dollars in funding on everything from energy subsidies for low-income households and Head Start after-school programs to President George W. Bush’s H.I.V.-reduction initiative, PEPFAR, and artists’ grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Vought directed the National Institutes of Health to withhold—illegally, according to the Government Accountability Office—an estimated fifteen billion dollars in grants for outside research projects. The N.I.H. also moved to cap funding for so-called indirect costs, which research universities rely on to pay for their buildings, utilities, and administrative staff. Scientists I interviewed said that these cuts would inevitably lead to less medical research, including into a drug that Vought’s ex-wife credited with improving the life of their eleven-year-old daughter, who was born with cystic fibrosis. A scientist who receives government funding to study cystic-fibrosis treatment told me that, without sufficient money for indirect costs, “we probably won’t be able to do the research and will have to relinquish the grants.”

The O.M.B. claims that it is vetting federal spending to insure that the money does not fund “woke” programs. “We can confirm that President Trump and Director Vought are carefully scrutinizing spending that has previously run on autopilot or worse—toward transing our kids, the Green New Scam, and funding our own country’s invasion—just as the president promised,” an O.M.B. spokesperson told the Times in August. But blocking funds is also a way to pressure officials and agencies to comply with the Administration’s demands. “O.M.B. is like a giant funnel that everything has to go through in order to happen,” Lester Cash, a former O.M.B. employee, told me. “You can get agencies to agree to things just to get the funnel to open back up.”

In March, the O.M.B. took down a legally mandated public website that made it possible to track the funding freezes. The move elicited a rare show of bipartisanship. In a letter to Vought, the Democratic and Republican leaders of the House and Senate Appropriations Committees urged him to “restore public access to apportionment data in accordance with statute.” Vought said the information listed on the site was “predecisional” and a risk to national security. The O.M.B. restored the site only when a judge ruled that taking it down was illegal, saying that the government’s position relied “on an extravagant and unsupported theory of presidential power.”

The O.M.B.’s funding freezes have wreaked havoc. On June 30th, the Department of Education told state agencies that congressional appropriations for after-school activities and English-as-a-second-language instruction would not arrive the next day, as planned. The unexpected shortfall affected thousands of school districts, which served millions of students, in all fifty states. The Administration only backed down after both Democrats and Republicans criticized the move. “When something’s been appropriated, signed into law, and people are writing contracts based on the commitment of the federal government, and then they don’t know if they’re going to get it or not, it creates such chaos,” Don Bacon, a Republican House member from Nebraska, told me. “I’m not sure what the O.M.B. director thought he was doing.” (A spokesperson for Vought at the O.M.B. would not comment on the record in response to a detailed list of questions.)

In June, Trump sent a rescission request to Congress, seeking to cancel roughly nine billion dollars in funding for foreign aid and for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which supports NPR, PBS, and other public radio and TV stations nationwide. The programs were viewed, the senior agency official told me, as “soft targets,” a test to see if Vought could persuade Republicans to put aside their concerns about undermining Congress’s power of the purse. Unlike in Trump’s first term, Vought’s rescission plan succeeded. The measure, which faced opposition from Democrats and a few Republicans, passed after Vice-President J. D. Vance cast two tie-breaking procedural votes. Jeff Merkley, the top Democrat on the Senate Budget Committee, told me, “You’ve basically said to Congress, ‘Hey, compromise all you want, but we’re going to undo that in the way we want as soon as you’ve signed the bill.’ ”

On the Friday before Labor Day, Vought made his most audacious move yet. The White House sent Congress a new rescissions package, targeting nearly five billion dollars in foreign aid. But this time Vought informed lawmakers that he didn’t need their approval. He asserted that the President could make the request, putting a temporary freeze on the funds, then simply wait for the fiscal year to expire, on September 30th, at which point the money would be cancelled out. Vought called it a “pocket rescission,” but it was impoundment by another name. Susan Collins, a Republican from Maine, who chairs the Senate Appropriations Committee, said it was a “clear violation of the law.”

The Government Accountability Office can sue the O.M.B. over an impoundment or pocket rescission to get the money released. In April, Gene Dodaro, who leads the Government Accountability Office, testified that his office had opened thirty-nine investigations into potential violations of the Impoundment Control Act by the Trump Administration. The O.M.B. has responded by attacking Dodaro’s agency. In one letter, Paoletta said that the O.M.B. would coöperate with the Government Accountability Office only if its demands didn’t get in the way of Trump’s agenda. In another letter, Paoletta told the Department of Transportation to ignore a Government Accountability Office ruling that found that the O.M.B. had illegally impounded money for electric-car development. Vought, for his part, has flatly declared that the Government Accountability Office “shouldn’t exist.”

Vought’s actions could provoke a challenge to the Impoundment Control Act in the Supreme Court. In the meantime, a number of current and former government employees told me that they worried about the long-term consequences of what he has already done: the terminating of vital research projects that could have led to life-saving breakthroughs; the nation’s lost standing as an international leader; the uncertainty cast over the fundamental workings of government. “They’ve given up on the idea that they need to persuade anybody,” Bagenstos, the former general counsel at the O.M.B., said of Vought and Paoletta. They’re “just going to use brute force and dominance.” As the former O.M.B. analyst told me, “They’ve dropped a grenade into the system.”

The government shutdown has illustrated, in the starkest terms, Vought’s expansive theory of executive power and his willingness to ignore Congress. On October 2nd, Trump posted on Truth Social that he would meet with Vought to decide which “Democrat Agencies” to cut on a temporary or permanent basis. A few days later, the O.M.B. released a memo claiming that, seemingly in defiance of a 2019 law, furloughed federal employees were not guaranteed back pay following a shutdown. Then, on October 10th, Vought announced that his campaign of mass firings across the bureaucracy had begun. So far, more than four thousand employees have been laid off, disrupting government services devoted to, among other things, cybersecurity efforts, special-education programs, substance-abuse treatment, and loans for small businesses. A federal judge put a temporary stop to the cuts, but that same day Vought predicted that the total number of firings would be “north of ten thousand.” As one official texted me, “Trauma achieved.” ♦

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.*}:

Published in the print edition of the October 27, 2025, issue, with the headline “The Shutdown Artist.”

*The New Yorker

Andy Kroll, an investigative reporter at ProPublica, is the author of the book “A Death on W Street.”

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not a win yet?

an 8 25

President Donald Trump's administration is having a difficult time defending the legality of its policies — even to judges Trump himself put on the bench.

Politico reported Monday that U.S. District Judge Dabney Friedrich, who Trump appointed to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia during the first year of his first term, wasn't buying the administration's argument in favor of withholding congressionally appropriated funds for the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). Politico correspondents Katherine Tully-McManus and Kyle Cheney called Friedrich's Monday ruling "one of the most significant benchmarks in the legal response to the Trump administration’s effort to test the president’s power to withhold congressionally approved funds."

White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Russell Vought claimed that the administration's refusal to disburse the $315 million appropriation for NED was legally justified by not only saying the administration had the right to hold onto money that wasn't lined up with the president's priorities, but that it was also in the best interest of NED.

READ MORE:'Tangled mess': Nicolle Wallace exposes Trump's mounting 'contradictions' on Epstein

"The defendants’ official justification for that withholding — preserving the Endowment’s funding stability for the coming year — is not plausible," Friedrich wrote in her ruling, while also slamming "repeated maneuvers to impede the Endowment’s flow of funds."

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NED — which focuses on promoting democratic ideals overseas – has typically had access to its full amount of funding since it was established in 1982 under then-President Ronald Reagan's administration. However, after Trump took office in January, NED became a casualty of Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which rampaged through multiple federal agencies, fired thousands of workers and axed billions of dollars in federal grants and contracts.

Previously, NED had pursued litigation to gain access to its full congressional appropriation, though its efforts were somewhat curtailed after the Trump administration relented and released most of its money. However, NED's legal efforts continued after the administration continued to justify freezing the disbursement of millions of dollars designated as "no-year" funds, meaning there was no deadline attached to when they had to be spent.

Congress banned presidents from singlehandedly refusing to disburse money passed in appropriations bills with the Impoundment Control Act of 1974, and Politico reported that the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that the administration had violated the act on five different occasions since his second term began. Vought complained in a May social media post that Trump critics were "going to call everything an impoundment because they want to grind our work to manage taxpayer dollars effectively to a halt."

READ MORE:'Why aren't you here to apologize?' GOP rep in deep-red district loudly booed at town hall

Click here to read Politico's full report in its entirety.

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1 25 trump j6 pardons, chris hayes said some scotus decision was actually written by P?

impoundment

The President’s Constitutional Power of Impoundment | The Center for Renewing America

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Employees at one federal agency were reportedly kept up for more than a day and a half straight due to the demands of a staffer from South African centibillionaire's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

That's according to a Friday article from CNN, which reported on DOGE staffer Gavin Kliger's alleged treatment of workers at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). The allegations stem from a sworn declaration a CFPB employee made in U.S. District judge Amy Berman Jackson's court anonymously out of fear of retaliation.

In the declaration, the worker stated that Kliger "kept CFPB staffers working for 36 hours straight to send out mass layoff notices" and was apparently "screaming at those he thought weren’t working fast enough." Kliger — who Reuters reported had amplified content from white supremacist Nick Fuentes — has since been ordered to appear at a hearing scheduled for April 28 pertaining to the mass firing of CFPB employees.

READ MORE:**Defense Secretary mistakenly shares screenshot of article contradicting his self-praise**

On Friday, Judge Jackson ruled that the roughly 1,500 fired CFPB workers (out of approximately 1,700) would have to be reinstated, as she weighed whether their firings were a violation of a prior court ordered preventing DOGE from effectively shutting down the agency aimed at protecting American consumers from financial scams.

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That prior decision ruled that the mass firings of workers at the agency were illegal, as it would prevent the CFPB from meeting its statutory requirements that Congress legislated at the time of its creation. Because the CFPB is a Congressionally authorized agency, it would take an act of Congress to dismantle it.

The Trump administration argued that the mass firings were legitimate, asserting that the CFPB had "pushed well beyond the limits of the law" in its work while "engag[ing] in intrusive and wasteful fishing expedition. Mark Paoletta, who the administration named as the CFPB's chief legal officer, insisted that leaving the CFPB with just 200 employees was sufficient for the agency to fulfull its statutory obligations.

"An approximately 200 person agency allows the Bureau to fulfill its statutory duties and better aligns with the new leadership’s priorities and management philosophy," he said.

READ MORE:**'Rapid erosion': Trump's FEMA cuts put hurricane-prone states in a 'really bad situation'**

an 4 25

Project 2025

2025

Risk: Politicized Government OperationsBranch: Executive

Likely Agency or Office: Office of Management and Budget

Characteristic: Trump Admin Appointee, Project 2025 Advisory Board Member Affiliation

Harlan Crow’s tuition payments made directly to these schools on behalf of Justice Thomas’s great nephew did not constitute a reportable gift… Mark Paoletta’s assertion responding to news that Harlan Crow secretly paid what could have been over $150,000 in private school tuition for Justice Clarence Thomas’ family that Thomas did not disclose

Mark Paoletta was General Counsel under Russ Vought in Trump’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB). A major proponent of impoundment, Paoletta has called the Impoundment Control Act “unconstitutional.” While at OMB, Paoletta provided the legal framework Trump used to redirect congressionally allocated funds from the Pentagon to the border wall. Paoletta is a Senior Fellow at Vought’s Center for Renewing America, a Project 2025 Advisory Board member.

Paolleta is a close friend of Leonard Leo and a key defender of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife Ginni. He has assailed those who raise concerns about ethical issues about their luxury lifestyle that has been secretly funded by billionaires. He also represented Ginni Thomas when the bipartisan House January 6th Committee called on her to testify after news reports that she repeatedly texted Trump’s Chief of Staff, Mark Meadow, to stop the Electoral College votes from being counted and she urgednumerous state legislators to overturn Biden’s election victory. He also objected to Congress inquiring into her email correspondence with John Eastman, who is facing disbarment in California over his role in trying to subvert the election.

Paoletta has also penned several pieces defending Justice Thomas or assailing his critics. In a recent WSJ op-ed, he attacked Fix the Court, a nonpartisan organization that “advocates for non-ideological ‘fixes’ that would make the federal courts, and primarily the U.S. Supreme Court, more open and more accountable to the American People.” This attack was prompted by Fix the Court’s finding that Thomas accepted more than $4 million in luxurious gifts, often secretly, since 2004. Many of these gifts, including luxury travel on private jets and super yachts owned by billionaire Harlan Crow, a Nazi-memorabilia collector and major GOP funder.

Paoletta helped get Thomas confirmed to the Court and was referred to as Thomas’ “sherpa.” When HBO’s film “Confirmation” about his nomination was in the works, Paoletta wrote a letter to HBO threatening legal action if the script were left unrevised. Leonard Leo–who also worked on Thomas’ confirmation, where Anita Hill testifiedabout Thomas’ grotesque sexual overtures toward her, which he denied–steered almost $2 million on a PR campaign to support Thomas that lasted years. Paoletta confirmed this by saying “my good friend Leonard Leo’s group provided funding for this work,” which included a film supportive of Thomas. Paoletta was also directly involved in the Supreme Court selection process for Neil Gorsuch.

Paoletta’s ties with both Leo and Thomas was immortalized in the now infamous portrait commissioned by and including Crow, a portrait first uncovered by True North Research. Paoletta is also the co-editor of the book “Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words,” a project promotedby the Judicial Crisis Network.

Paoletta is a fellow at the Center for Renewing America (CRA), a Project 2025 Advisory Board member that aims to provide “ideological ammunition to sustain” the MAGA movement. It was spearheaded by Russell Vought, who was Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget and whom Paoletta worked closely with as General Counsel. Vought, a key advisor to Project 2025, has claimed that Christians are under assault in America even though the Supreme Court has allowed religion to be used as a sword against anti-discrimination protections. A document drafted by CRA staff and fellows, lists “Christian nationalism” as a top priority for CRA in any second Trump term.

Paoletta is currently a partner at the D.C. law firm Schaerr Jaffe. The firm has become a go-to for Elon Musk, who has hired Schaerr Jaffe to represent numerous cases. In other notable cases handled by the firm, but not Paoletta, Schaerr Jaffe secured a dismissal in a case that abortion providers brought against the Louisiana Department of Health for its oppressive regulations that severely limited abortion access in the state; Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita paid the firm over $190,000 to aid his investigation of an Indiana doctor who provided abortion care to a 10-year-old rape victim; and the firm also defended Rokita in an ethics case filed against him by the Indiana Supreme Court’s Disciplinary Commission for disparaging comments he made about the doctor.

The firm has also represented parties in high-profile Supreme Court cases like Dobbs v. Jackson, West Virginia v. EPA, Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, Carson v. Makin, and *Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard

===

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FAIL UP

OMFG KASH CONFIRMED SAME DAY

TMP 2 25

Remember Jeffrey Clark, the former acting assistant attorney general in the Trump DOJ’s environmental division? He became infamous in the first days of 2021, when Donald Trump tried, unsuccessfully, to install him as attorney general mid-coup attempt. Now, Clark is reportedly back in government, in a top post at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. It’s an agency that Trump, Elon Musk and other allies have taken steps to paralyze in recent weeks.

You’ll recall Clark was behind efforts to use the power of the Justice Department to pressure Georgia lawmakers to throw out President Joe Biden’s win in the state not long after the 2020 election. While his name was ultimately dropped as a co-conspirator, Clark was initially indicted in Georgia as part of Fulton County’s racketeering case against Trump and his allies for attempts to overturn the results of the election there. Clark’s law license was also suspended for two years, and he faces threats of disbarment in D.C. for his efforts to help Trump subvert the will of the voters in 2020.

Now, according to new reporting from American Banker, Clark has been installed as a senior adviser to attorney Mark Paoletta, the CFPB’s new chief legal officer. Per American Banker:

Clark and at least five other new hires showed up in the CFPB’s email directory this weekend, according to people familiar with the situation. They are now listed as part of the CFPB’s front office working under acting CFPB Director Russel Vought, who is head of the Office of Management and Budget.

Clark’s placement at the CFPB comes as other Trump loyalists within the bureau push forward with plans to effectively shutter the agency. The ubiquitous Russ Vought took over as acting director earlier this month, and halted all of the agency’s investigations and even closed the building. In the past week, the Trump administration began purging employees.

On Friday, CFPB employees were alerted that they’d been placed on indefinite administrative leave. Those reports emerged just before the Trump administration agreed in court to a temporary pause on terminating staff. U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson on Friday issued an order stating the Trump administration had agreed to not fire more staff, delete agency data or transfer money out of its reserves — at least not until March 3. That’s when Berman Jackson will hold a hearing on a lawsuit that the National Treasury Employees Union filed on behalf of ousted CFPB staff. It is one of a handful of lawsuits that have been filed by former employees and other agency advocates in response to purges.

Musk and his cronies at DOGE have had their sights set on dismantling CFPB for weeks. Musk made those intentions public when he tweeted “CFPB RIP” earlier this month.

It is unclear what role Clark will play in his position at the bureau, which was created in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, the brainchild of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), to monitor banking systems and protect Americans from financial scams. But Clark, Paoletta and Vought all worked together both in the first Trump administration, and also at a right-wing think tank they set up that advocates for expanding executive authority, the Center for Renewing America. The group recently published a piece — written by “CRA staff” — advocating for the bureau to be “shut down” and explaining how best to do it.

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FAIL

DESMOG

The recent federal funding freeze spurred immediate finger-pointing inside the Trump administration, with anonymous sources telling major news outlets that attorney Mark Paoletta was responsible for drafting the infamous memo that briefly paused trillions in federal funds. Paoletta, newly returned as the White House Office of Management and Budget’s (OMB) general counsel, is connected to a wide range of powerful figures on the right, including multiple conservative Supreme Court justices, the organizers of Project 2025, and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

Multiple anonymous sources said Paoletta’s job was at risk, “though no final decision has been made,” ABC News reported on Friday.

With the OMB memo, the Trump administration threw a wild punch it claimed was aimed at the “green new deal” and other abstract concepts — but landed as a very real blow to American doctors, teachers, and a dizzying array of public services and programs whose federal funding access was abruptly thrown into question.

The OMB memo was rapidly rescinded — but not before it unleashed chaos, upending the work of thousands of government agencies that issue grants and loans to organizations providing services across the world. From Medicaid reimbursements to early childhood program payments, some of the most significant and immediate disruptions hit at the very agencies the White House later claimed it had specifically intended to leave unaffected. The memo sparked multiple legal challenges and court orders blocking OMB’s freeze from taking effect, at least for now.

Paoletta did not respond to a request for comment from DeSmog.

The blame placed on Paoletta is a sign that infighting is already emerging within the Trump administration, just two weeks after the new president assumed office.

Stephen Miller and other senior Trump officials never reviewed the OMB memo before it went out, anonymous sources also told the major media organizations that reported on Paoletta’s involvement.

Tensions inside the Trump administration may be heightened by internal contradictions between its stated priorities on energy and power struggles between Musk’s DOGE project, which aims to impose widespread austerity measures (amid massive fossil fuel subsidies), and supporters of Project 2025, which seeks, for example, to shift federal energy spending towards “increasing energy security and supply through fossil fuels.”

The government’s fossil fuel subsidies pose a thorny problem for the Trump administration’s efforts to slash spending. “These handouts to the oil and gas industry, which allows these multinational corporations to earn billions of dollars a year, fly in the face of everything else they talk about,” Matthew Tejada, a senior vice president at the Natural Resources Defense Council, told Grist in early January.

Paoletta has worked with both DOGE and Project 2025’s backers.

“Mark will work closely with our DOGE team to cut the size of our bloated Government bureaucracy, and root out wasteful and anti-American spending,” President Donald Trumpsaid in December as he announced Paoletta’s return to the OMB.

“I am thrilled to be rejoining my friend @russvoughtat OMB where we will once again be the tip of the spear to implement President Trump’s agenda, including working w/ @DOGEto cut wasteful government spending!,” Paoletta posted on X that day, drawing a “Congratulations” reply from Musk.

Until recently, Paoletta was also listed as a senior fellow at the Center for Renewing America, a far-right think tank led by Russell Vought, one of Project 2025’s key architects and Trump’s nominee to lead the OMB. The Center for Renewing America, DeSmogpreviously reported, counts oil billionaire Tim Dunn among its funders.

Though the Trump administration has sought topublicly distance itself from Project 2025, the organization’sMandate for Leadership, marketed as a roadmap for Trump on his return to the presidency, foreshadowed this week’s funding freeze. “The President should use every possible tool to propose and impose fiscal discipline on the federal government,” Vought wrote in a chapter devoted to the OMB. “Anything short of that would constitute abject failure.”

Many of the organizations that contributed to Project 2025 have extensive histories of climate denial, DeSmogreported shortly after the election in November.

High Court Connections

Paoletta brings close connections with Supreme Court justices to Trump’s OMB. Especially notable: Paoletta is a “long-time friend” to Justice Clarence Thomas, according to Politico. Paoletta not only helped to usher Thomas through his fraught confirmation process in 1991, he also defended Ginni Thomas, Justice Thomas’ wife, before the January 6 select committee.

He’s cozy enough with both Justice Thomas and billionaire and conservative activist Harlan Crow to be depicted in aportrait hanging in Crow’s Adirondack’s lodge, a 2023 investigation by ProPublica found. The painting shows Paoletta seated next to Thomas, accompanied by Crow, the Federalist Society’s Leonard Leo, and attorney Peter Rutledge.

Justice Thomas wasdubbed “fossil fuels’ best friend on the Supreme Court” by Law Students for Climate Accountability, which called for his resignation citing his ties to Crow, the Koch network, and other “oil tycoons.”

Paoletta also worked to confirm two other current Supreme Court justices — Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh.

Expansive Sweep of Presidential Power

The two-page memo Paoletta allegedly drafted for the OMB sought to exert presidential control over trillions of dollars in Congressionally approved spending, requiring agencies to review “all Federal financial assistance programs and supporting activities” for their consistency with the President’s priorities. Federal agencies were told to identify activities “implicated” by Trump’s flurry of executive orders “including, but not limited to, financial assistance for foreign aid, nongovernmental organizations, DEI, woke gender ideology, and the green new deal.”

Instructions circulated with the memo list 2,600 federal programs required to undertake a review — including over 500 that didn’t report actually spending a dime in 2024, according to The New York Times.

Federal employees involved in everything from regulating consumer product safety standards for pools and spas to Pentagon research into detecting chemical, biological, and radiological weapons were asked to scrutinize their work for “gender ideology” or “an undue burden on… domestic energy resources” — with no hints as to what either term might mean.

Environmental regulators were among those impacted. “At [the Environmental Protection Agency] EPA, this means that funds for safe drinking water projects, Superfund cleanup, and sewage construction will halt, costing jobs and harming public health,” Environmental Protection Network Executive Director Michelle Roos said in a statement on the funding freeze. “These measures are illegal and come on the heels of President Trump firing the Inspectors General at 17 government agencies, including EPA.”

“These unparalleled actions are being advertised as temporary, but that doesn’t mean that things will get better,” Roos said. “These will likely be the foundation of even more extreme actions to follow.”

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opensecrets

Employment History

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caller

HHRG-117-JU00-20221208-SD012

dailycaller.com

PAOLETTA: Leftist Tantrum Targets Spouses In Latest Attack To Undermine SCOTUS’ Legitimacy

Mark Paoletta

Politico’s gaslighting of Supreme Court justices continues with its recent story on a letter from four left wing groups requesting Congress to “close a disclosure loophole in the judiciary.” According to Politico, “Currently, the justices merely disclose their spouses’ jobs, not the identity of their clients or the level of compensation.” }:

But there is no “loophole” for justices, who comply with the same laws as Members of Congress & Executive Branch officials, who also don’t disclose spouse’s clients and income. Politico implied in a previous story that there are possible serious unknown conflicts of interest for justices because they don’t disclose their spouse’s clients. The report focused on the spouses of Chief Justice Roberts, Justice Barrett and Justice Thomas. This is nonsense. The Ethics in Government Act, which governs all federal officials’ disclosure requirements for spouses’ outside work, applies to Congress, the Executive Branch, and the Judiciary, including justices.

The relevant section on disclosure of spouse’s income requires the filer to list the source of income exceeding $1,000 earned by a spouse from any person. Thus, the law is expressly written so that a filer Member of Congress and staff, Executive Branch official, or justice) only needs to disclose a spouse’s employer. That’s it. For example, Congressman Hank Johnson’s wife is a lawyer in private practice. On his 2022 financial disclosure form, he merely disclosed his spouse’s law firm, not her clients or income.

Fix The Court, CREW, POGO and Free Law Project’s letter to Congress misleadingly describes this provision as a “loophole in the judiciary,” and asks Congress to require justices to disclose the source of any payments totaling more than $5,000 to a spouse from any client for work rendered. Gabe Roth from Fix The Court claims that these disclosures would allow justices to recuse themselves from cases in which a spouse has a financial interest. But recusal laws already require judges and justices to recuse from cases in appropriate circumstances.

This amendment is really just a marriage penalty to bully justices into unnecessarily recusing themselves from cases, and will hamper justices’ spouses from being able to work. It’s worth remembering that no group or any media outlet had concerns when liberal justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg never disclosed her husband’s clients when he practiced law at a firm that appeared many times before the Supreme Court. But the authors of this letter nor the Politico story ever mention that this current provision or the proposed amendment covers Congress and the Executive Branch too. Politico only attacks justices’ spouses’ work, claiming “the details of their clients remain largely unknown” surrounded by Roth’s “black box.”

These so-called “concerns” surely also exist regarding Members of Congress’s spouses and their staff alongside executive branch officials. Congress writes laws and executive branch officials promulgate regulations and administer federal programs. Following the logic of Fix the Court and Politico, lots of companies might hire the spouses of lawmakers or their staff or executive branch officials to influence these public servants’ decisions. But POGO, CREW, FTR, and Free Law Project don’t seem to be interested in these possible conflicts of interest.

Politico quotes Rep. Johnson on the proposed law: “I welcome this proposal to shine a light on just who or what may be influencing the justices’ decision in major cases.” Why didn’t Politico ask Rep. Johnson if he supports disclosing his wife’s clients too? Per Rep. Johnson’s statement, the same argument could be made for shining a light “on just who or what may be influencing” Rep. Johnson’s decisions or other Members of Congress’ work. But no problems there. So, why is Politico creating a bogus story that justices have some sort of “loophole” and should have to disclose more than other officials regarding their spouse’s work? Politico’s story can only be an attack on the court’s legitimacy because SCOTUS is moving in an originalist direction.

Given that FTR’s proposed amendment would also require Members of Congress and staff to disclose their spouses’ clients and income, this proposal will almost certainly never pass, regardless of who is in control of Congress. I don’t believe it is good policy to require justices or other federal officials to disclose more on a spouse’s clients or income. It’s unnecessary and would harm working spouses and make serving in government more unappealing for two-career families. As noted earlier, recusal laws for judges and justices are already on the books, as well as conflict of interests laws that govern the other branches regarding spousal financial interests.

But in case that isn’t enough, let’s extend Politico’s theory of transparency to its logical conclusion: Should the outlet’s reporters, editors, and media owners disclose their spouses’ clients and income to see who may be influencing their reporting? Fair is fair, right? Mark Paoletta served in the George H.W. Bush and Trump Administrations and worked on the confirmations of Justices Thomas, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh.

He is a partner at Schaerr Jaffe LLP and a Senior Fellow at the Center for Renewing America. He represents Ginni Thomas in connection with the January 6th Select Committee proceedings. The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller.}:

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Mark R. Paoletta

Schaerr | Jaffe

https://www.schaerr-jaffe.com › attorneys › mark-r-paole...](https://www.schaerr-jaffe.com/attorneys/mark-r-paoletta/)

Mark Paoletta represents clients in connection with government investigations, with an emphasis on congressional investigations and hearings. He also.

[### Mark Paoletta

Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Mark_Paoletta](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Paoletta)

Mark Paoletta is an American attorney who served in roles in the first Donald Trump administration. From January 8, 2018, to January 20, 2021, Paoletta ...

[### Mark Paoletta: Home markpaoletta.com

https://www.markpaoletta.com](https://www.markpaoletta.com/)

Mark Paoletta. Partner at Schaerr Jaffe LLP, Senior Fellow at Center For Renewing America. Former Trump & Bush 41 Administration Lawyer; Former Chief ...

About · ‎Op-eds · ‎Media Coverage · ‎Congressional Testimony

[### Trump transition figure warns DOJ lawyers: Get on board or ...

Politico

https://www.politico.com › 2024/11/11 › congress › ma...](https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2024/11/11/congress/mark-paoletta-justice-department-lawyers-00188772)

2 days ago — Mark Paoletta says the new administration won't tolerate Justice Department “resistance” to the president-elect's policy goals.

[### Mark Paoletta

The Center for Renewing America

https://americarenewing.com › team › mark-paoletta](https://americarenewing.com/team/mark-paoletta/)

Mark Paoletta served as General Counsel of the Office of Management & Budget (OMB) for three years during the Trump Administration.

[### Mark Paoletta (@MarkPaoletta) / X

X · MarkPaoletta

24.8K+ followers](https://twitter.com/markpaoletta?lang=en)

Sr Fellow @AmRenewCtr I Trump OMB GC I Fr. Chief Oversight Counsel, Congress I WH Lawyer Bush 41 I Co-Editor, Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own ...

[### Trump transition lawyer: DOJ employees who won't ...

The Hill

https://thehill.com › homenews › state-watch › 498432...](https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/4984329-trump-transition-justice-department/)

2 days ago — President-elect Trump's transition team urges employees at the Justice Department to support the Republican's vision or resign, ...

[### Mark Paoletta - Schaerr Jaffe LLP (March 2021-), Partner LegiStorm

https://www.legistorm.com › person › bio › Mark_R_Pa...](https://www.legistorm.com/person/bio/19143/Mark_R_Paoletta.html)

See more about Mark Paoletta including contact information, congressional salary, employment history, education, lobbying records, family relationships, ...

[### Mark Paoletta

OpenSecrets

https://www.opensecrets.org › paoletta-mark › summary](https://www.opensecrets.org/revolving-door/paoletta-mark/summary?id=71618)

Period, Employer, Title, Additional Info. 2018, Office of Management & Budget Revolving Door Personnel: 201, General Counsel, Agency lobbying profile

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https://www.alternet.org/clarence-thomas-2659749180/

an 4 23

no lnx in orig?

'A flagrant violation': More legal, ethics experts slam Clarence Thomas over bombshell corruption allegations

David Badash and The New Civil Rights Movement April 06, 2023

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is under fire after a bombshell ProPublica report detailed the expensive vacations he’s been given, gifts of a Republican megadonor, for more than two decades, without disclosing certain portions of them – which legal experts say he is required by federal law to do.

At issue are important questions of ethics and law.

The vacations, revealed in ProPublica’s extensive and detailed report Thursday, from a legal standpoint appear to be worth hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars in total. From an ethical standpoint, some say, they have cost the institution of the Supreme Court further repetitional damage.

Justice Thomas at times was accompanied on these lavish trips by his wife Ginni Thomas, the far-right activist and lobbyist who worked behind the scenes to try to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

Together or apart, one person who joined them on these all-expenses-paid trips to private resorts via private jets and private yachts was the gift-giver: billionaire Dallas real estate magnate and GOP mega donor Harlan Crow.

READ MORE: For Decades Clarence Thomas Has Accepted Luxury Vacations from a GOP Megadonor Without Disclosing Them

ProPublicarevealed the details of one of Thomas’ almost yearly trips.

“In late June 2019, right after the U.S. Supreme Court released its final opinion of the term, Justice Clarence Thomas boarded a large private jet headed to Indonesia. He and his wife were going on vacation: nine days of island-hopping in a volcanic archipelago on a superyacht staffed by a coterie of attendants and a private chef,” ProPublica reports.

“If Thomas had chartered the plane and the 162-foot yacht himself, the total cost of the trip could have exceeded $500,000. Fortunately for him, that wasn’t necessary: He was on vacation with real estate magnate and Republican megadonor Harlan Crow, who owned the jet — and the yacht, too.”

Justice Thomas “has gone with Crow to the Bohemian Grove, the exclusive California all-male retreat, and to Crow’s sprawling ranch in East Texas. And Thomas typically spends about a week every summer at Crow’s private resort in the Adirondacks.”

Crow, who financially supports right wing causes, in 2011, according to Politico, contributed $500,000 to help Ginni Thomas start her consulting group, “Liberty Consulting, which boasts on its website using her ‘experience and connections’ to help clients with ‘governmental affairs efforts’ and political donation strategies.”

The ProPublica report includes an image of a painting that hangs at Crow’s private lakeside resort, Camp Topridge, in the Adirondacks that features shows Crow and Justice Thomas “smoking cigars at the resort. They are joined by lawyers Peter Rutledge, Leonard Leo and Mark Paoletta.”

READ MORE: Students Across the Country Walk Out of School to Protest Gun Violence After Nashville as TN House GOP Moves to Expel Dems

Leonard Leo is a vice president of The Federalist Society and sits on its board. The Federalist Society was the right-wing clearing house for most of Donald Trump’s federal court appointees, including his three Supreme Court nominees, and Leo is seen as the man behind those picks.

Meanwhile, legal experts are responding to the bombshell report, confirming ProPublica’s assertion that Thomas’ “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.”

Slate senior writer Mark Joseph Stern, an attorney who writes about the courts and the law and wrote a book on the Roberts Supreme Court, calls Justice Thomas’ actions “corruption.”

Stern observes that “federal law DOES require justices to disclose most gifts of value.”

“It’s clear that Thomas brazenly violated this law many times. We should call this what it is: corruption,” he says.

“Just to be clear here,” Stern adds, “it was a flagrant violation of federal law for Thomas to accept this wildly expensive luxury vacation without reporting it as a gift—his conduct isn’t just unseemly, it’s illegal.”

READ MORE: ‘They Had an Insider on SCOTUS’: Legal Experts Stunned by Bombshell Clarence Thomas Was Seen as ‘Key’ by Trump Lawyers

The award-winning investigative reporter for The New Yorker, Jane Mayer, pointing to ProPublica’s report, says: “This is why public trust in the Supreme Court is cratering.”

Leah Litman, Assistant Professor of Law and The University of Michigan School of Law, says, “no one is doing a better job at making the case that the Supreme Court is broken than … the Court and its Justices.”

Top national security attorney Brad Moss offers this exercise: “Change the name of the Justice to Kagan or Sotomayor, and the name of the donor to Soros. Then think about how Fox would react.”

Imani Gandy, Editor-at-Large covering courts and the law for Rewire News Group, does not mince words.

“Clarence Thomas should be impeached,” she says. “He broke the law.”

Attorney and former Biden deputy cabinet secretary, Cristóbal Alex asks, “How do you impeach a Supreme Court Justice?

“Besides being married to someone who conspired to overthrow our government, Justice Thomas has accepted what appears to be millions of dollars in undisclosed gifts,” Alex notes.

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

Justice Thomas: SCOTUS 'should reconsider' contraception, same ... ›

Clarence Thomas has waited over 30 years for this moment | CNN ... ›

A Timeline Of Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill Controversy As ... ›

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https://www.alternet.org/clarence-thomas-2659747910/

an 4 23

no lnx

in the wake of the latest bombshell report revealing incriminating details about U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas' luxurious lifestyle, legal experts are weighing in with critical remarks and concerns as calls for accountability increase.

According to the new report:

"For more than two decades, Thomas has accepted luxury trips virtually every year from the Dallas businessman without disclosing them, documents and interviews show. A public servant who has asalary of $285,000, he has vacationed on [Harlan] Crow’s superyacht around the globe. He flies on Crow’s Bombardier Global 5000 jet. He has gone with Crow to the Bohemian Grove, the exclusive California all-male retreat, and to Crow’s sprawling ranch in East Texas. And Thomas typically spends about a week every summer at Crow’s private resort in the Adirondacks."

READ MORE: Clarence Thomas opposes a 'landmark precedent' guaranteeing defendants the right to counsel: legal columnist

The report also emphasized: “The extent and frequency of Crow’s apparent gifts to Thomas have no known precedent in the modern history of the U.S. Supreme Court.”

Now, legal experts have taken to Twitter with ethical concerns as they've pointed out the many issues with Thomas' conflicts of interest.

"There’s been a lot of talk by MAGA Republicans this week about the judge in NYC," former Trump administration official Olivia Troye tweeted. "If you want to talk about a judge & their family let’s talk about Justice Clarence Thomas & his wife Ginni…"

"Our country is poisoned from within," tweeted former Rep. Denver Riggleman (R-Va.). "Ethics be damned. And with his wife, Ginni, being a major GOP influencer with multiple organizations that funnel and accept money in GOP circles—and certified Q quack—Clarence Thomas should not be allowed anywhere near a judicial decision.…"

READ MORE: How Clarence Thomas went from a 'fringe figure with extremist views' to the Court’s 'center of gravity': report

Calls have also increased for Thomas to be impeached from the Supreme Court or held accountable amid reports on the latest findings.

"Google 'Clarence Thomas RV' and you'll find endless puff pieces about him and Ginni being ascetics who spend their free time with the common folk," Max Kennerly tweeted. "Turns out their vacations were really on private planes and superyachts — trips they concealed in violation of federal law."

"What is the penalty for violating the disclosure law? Would the DOJ need to first file a criminal complaint?" Chief financial correspondent Felix Salmon also asked.

According to a new report from The Washington Post, Supreme Court disclosures will likely hold justices accountable going forward.

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"Supreme Court justices and all federal judges must provide a fuller public accounting of free trips, meals and other gifts they accept from corporations or other organizations, according to revised regulations quietly adopted this month," the report notes.

The latest controversy followsThomas' own remarks insisting that the Supreme Court was being "bullied" following the overturn of Roe v. Wade. At the time, Thomas also raised concerns about Americans disrespecting the government, a remark Truthout's Sharon Zhang described as a form of "glaring hypocrisy" given the Supreme Court justice's reputation.

The judicial system “can’t be an institution that can be bullied into giving you just the outcomes you want,” Thomas said, implying that the opposing views toward institutions “bode ill for a free society.” Per the report, Thomas also said, "Young people are especially guilty of disrespecting government institutions like courts."

Pushing back against the remarks, Zhang wrote:

Thomas’s comments sparked ire among abortion rights supporters, who pointed out the glaring hypocrisy of telling people to simply live with decisions made by 9 unelected judges with lifetime appointments who are not subject to any oversight. As political commentators pointed out, Republican attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election are a prime example of people not being able to live with an outcome they don’t like — but Thomas has yet to condemn the anti-democratic campaign and coup attempt, perhaps because of his wife Ginni Thomas’s involvement in those events.

READ MORE: Here Are 5 of Clarence Thomas’ Worst Decisions - And Proof Judge Brett Kavanaugh Is Cut from the Same Cloth

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

How Clarence Thomas went from a 'fringe figure with extremist views' to the Court’s 'center of gravity': report ›

What a Supreme Court impeachment from 1805 could mean for Clarence Thomas: historian ›

Ginni Thomas’ testimony to Jan. 6 committee sparks calls to investigate Clarence Thomas ›

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

Justice Thomas: SCOTUS 'should reconsider' contraception, same ... ›

A Timeline Of Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill Controversy As ... ›

Clarence Thomas has waited over 30 years for this moment | CNN ... ›

---

ref badash 11/22

https://www.thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/2022/11/they-had-an-insider-on-scotus-legal-experts-stunned-by-bombshell-clarence-thomas-was-seen-as-key-by-trump-lawyers/

Washington Post bombshell revealing Trump attorneys saw **Justice Clarence Thomas** as the key to getting the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn the 2020 election is leaving several legal experts stunned.

The Post reports eight emails “ordered released by U.S. District Judge David O. Carter of California, include correspondence between Trump lawyers Kenneth Chesebro, John Eastman and others discussing various legal strategies to convince Republican members of Congress to object to the official certification of electoral votes in a joint session of Congress on Jan. 6, 2021.”

In one email “from Chesebro to Eastman and several others sent on Dec. 31, 2020, Chesebro argued that [U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence] Thomas would ‘end up being key’ to asking the high court to overturn then-President-elect Joe Biden’s win in contested states.”

READ MORE: ‘Heist’: Ginni Thomas Tells J6 Committee Election Was Stolen, Says She Never Discussed Efforts to Overturn With Spouse

The Post states the email also says, “they should ‘frame things so that Thomas could be the one to issue some sort of stay or other circuit justice opinion saying Georgia is in legitimate doubt.'”

Politico’s Kyle Cheney sums up the scheme.

“Chesebro made the plan explicit: Get any remotely favorable ruling from a federal judge — not to win outright but to embolden GOP state legislatures, Congress or Pence to reverse the results.”

Politico‘s reporting includes copies of the redacted emails, and adds: “Chesebro contended that Thomas would be ‘our only chance to get a favorable judicial opinion by Jan. 6, which might hold up the Georgia count in Congress.'”

“I think I agree with this,” Eastman replied.

“Eastman,” Politico notes, “an architect of Trump’s last-ditch bid to subvert the 2020 election, once clerked for Thomas and had corresponded with his wife, Virginia, in the weeks before Jan. 6.”

READ MORE: Ginni Thomas Attempts to Influence Overturn of Election Even Wider Than Previously Known

“[I]f we can just get this case pending before the Supreme Court by Jan. 5,” Chesebro wrote in one email, “ideally with something positive written by a judge or justice, hopefully Thomas, I think it’s our best shot at holding up the count of a state in Congress.”

Richard Signorelli, a former Asst. U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York (SDNY) blasted both the Supreme Court Justice and his far right wing activist wife, **Ginni Thomas**.

“They had a damn insider on SCOTUS who they thought would help them overthrow our democracy,” Signorelli tweeted. “He’s married to a deranged MAGA cult member. He won’t even recuse himself.”

Former Harvard Constitutional Law professor Laurence Tribe blasted Chesebro.

“We now learn that Ken Chesebro saw Justice Thomas as Trump’s ‘only chance’ to stop the 2020 election from being duly certified. Such abhorrent abuse of an attorney’s license to practice law should be strictly disciplined and perhaps criminally prosecuted,” he tweeted.

Attorney and writer Rachel Solar, pointing to the Politico article asks: “When is it enough???? His wife is an insurrectionist He refuses to recuse He’s the Trump election-denial go-to? Come on.”

READ MORE: ‘Suicide Mission’: Pelosi Attacker Named ‘Prominent State and Federal Politicians’ He Wanted to Target

Journalist Helen Kennedy goes one step further.

“Hey look! It wasn’t just critics of the Supreme Court who thought Clarence Thomas was corrupted – Trump’s lawyers said so too in secret emails just revealed.”

===

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/**2020/01**/28/hard-charging-white-house-budget-lawyer-middle-ukraine-decision-has-pushed-legal-limits-trump/

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WAPO no lnx

ECONOMIC POLICY

Hard-charging White House budget lawyer in middle of Ukraine decision has pushed legal limits for Trump

Mark Paoletta’s actions to hold up aid to the country were among several disputed moves he’s made as OMB’s top lawyer

By Erica Werner, Jeff Stein and Josh Dawsey

January 28, 2020 

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[From left, Robert D. Hogue, counsel for the commandant of the Marine Corps; Mark Paoletta, then-counsel for Vice President Pence; Supreme Court Justice Neil M. Gorsuch; and then-White House Counsel Donald McGahn in 2017 at the Marine Corps War Memorial in Arlington, Va. (Cpl. Christian Varney/Marine Corps/Alamy)[

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A hard-charging conservative lawyer little known to the public is responsible for executing some of the White House’s most divisive and legally aggressive moves, including the hold on Ukrainian aid now central to President Trump’s impeachment trial.

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Mark Paoletta, general counsel at the White House Office of Management and Budget, signed off on the delay of security assistance to Ukraine, overruling the objections of some career staffers at the OMB and the Pentagon. The Government Accountability Office recently determined that the delay was unlawful.

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Paoletta’s below-the-radar role in a decision key to Trump’s impeachment is just one example of how he has enabled the White House to stretch the legal limits of the executive branch — forcefully pushing forward the administration’s agenda but sometimes incurring a severe backlash in the process.

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Live updates: Trump impeachment trial

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Paoletta helped craft the administration’s justification for adding new restrictions to billions in disaster aid to Puerto Rico, blowing past a congressional deadline and ignoring fierce criticisms from the island’s government.

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He also provided the legal foundation for Trump’s move to redirect Pentagon money and use it to erect a wall on the border with Mexico. That legal maneuver was opposed by another top White House attorney, according to officials familiar with internal deliberations, and has been criticized by congressional lawmakers in both parties.

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White House hold on Ukraine aid violated federal law, congressional watchdog says

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Pentagon takes money from Puerto Rico, European projects to fund Trump’s wall

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Paoletta similarly helped engineer the Trump administration’s maneuvering during last year’s government shutdown to minimize the impact, a move the GAO also said broke federal law.

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Internally, Paoletta has battled with other White House attorneys who helped block a push to make him a part of Trump’s defense team for impeachment charges in the Senate, according to officials familiar with that process, although he himself did not push for the position. His approach has also rankled some career staffers at the OMB, with some officials saying it has caused career employees to feel dismissed or even demeaned.

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The Washington Post interviewed more than a dozen current and former OMB employees, as well as numerous other White House officials and legal experts, who painted a portrait of Paoletta’s work as the top lawyer at the OMB. Many were granted anonymity to share details of internal deliberations.

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Paoletta’s allies say he should be commended for pushing boundaries to help Trump secure wins.

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“Will he try to maximize the extent to which the law can be used to advocate for his client’s position? Of course he will — that’s his job,” said Leonard Leo, head of the Federalist Society, a conservative legal organization allied with the administration.

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Critics see an attorney who has provided dangerously expansive legal cover for Trump’s willingness to force the law to match his presidential whims.

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His unapologetic approach may promise more conflicts ahead, with the administration preparing to release a budget that is likely to provoke another round of skirmishes with Congress and more fights over spending on foreign aid and the border wall.

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“From the beginning of the Trump administration, there’s been a real pattern at OMB — from the authority of transfers to building the wall, to the moneys delayed for Puerto Rico — of stretching the budget law,” said Bill Hoagland, a Republican and former staff director on the Senate Budget Committee. “The OMB general counsel is supposed to give his best interpretation of the law to the political operatives there. And it appears to me that — at least on a lot of this — the politics are driving his interpretation, as opposed to the law driving the interpretation.”

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Several administration officials defended Paoletta’s work. Two administration officials acknowledged that Paoletta had been forceful in seeking ways to implement the president’s agenda but that he has always relied on the backing of career staffers and stayed within the law. Paoletta is an ally of acting OMB director Russell Vought, and the two have worked closely together in implementing Trump’s agenda.

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“Paoletta works well and closely with OMB staff, and his deputy, a career staffer appointed under the Obama administration, has never objected to his legal opinions,” said Rachel Semmel, an OMB spokeswoman.

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Paoletta, 57, has spent decades as a conservative operative.

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A native of Fairfield, Conn., he quickly gained prominence in conservative legal circles after graduating from Georgetown Law. In 2006, the Wall Street Journal described him as a “mysterious, rather strapping man … looking pretty powerful” while conferring privately with scores of lawmakers. It said of Paoletta: “Picture a square-jawed hockey coach pacing back and forth along the bench, barking at his players from time to time — except this guy’s wearing a suit and, well, whispering.”

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Trump officials broke law by using entrance fees to keep parks open, watchdog says

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Paoletta gained prominence when he helped guide Clarence Thomas through his 1991 Senate confirmation hearings, an effort that eventually secured Thomas’s lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court. Paoletta battled cancer shortly after Thomas’s confirmation and told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazettethe new Supreme Court justice called or visited him “every single day.” Paoletta later set up a website devoted to celebrating Thomas.

:{:{}:

}:

Paoletta later went to Capitol Hill, where he served as chief counsel for oversight and investigations with the House Energy and Commerce Committee. He led probes of Enron and Martha Stewart. Paoletta left the Hill to join various lobbying firms and did legal work related to Major League Baseball’s steroids scandal. He joined a “truth squad” for Sarah Palin, Sen. John McCain’s vice-presidential nominee, to defend her from criticisms in the media.

:{:{}:

}:

His professional approach crystallized as it hardened with experience.

:{:{}:

}:

“Grab the offense,” Paoletta wrote in one internal strategy memo on Thomas’s circuit court hearings kept by the George H.W. Bush Presidential Library. “Mold the candidate in our image; not the opposition’s.”

:{:{}:

}:

His style has led to some internal conflict.

:{:{}:

}:

Early in the Trump administration, Paoletta’s relationship with other White House officials fractured over another Supreme Court nominee, Neil M. Gorsuch, Trump’s first appointment to the high court. At the time, Paoletta was working as a counsel to Vice President Pence and wanted to be involved in preparing Gorsuch for his confirmation hearings, although some White House officials were against it. He had clashed at times with then-White House Counsel Donald McGahn, who was leading the process.

:{:{}:

}:

But his involvement proved critical, said Mike Davis, a former top counsel for Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) who worked with Paoletta during the Gorsuch confirmation. Paoletta asked “really tough questions that prepared the nominee for game day,” Davis said.

:{:{}:

}:

Gorsuch personally thanked Paoletta by name when he was sworn in. Paoletta left Pence’s office not long thereafter and joined the OMB at the beginning of 2018 at the invitation of Mick Mulvaney, who was heading the budget office at the time and is now acting White House chief of staff.

:{:{}:

}:

Paoletta’s legal moves at the OMB ignited multiple controversies, but public attention rarely fell on him. In the spring and summer of 2018, he helped push forward a package of “rescissions” that would claw back billions in funding already approved by Congress but not yet spent. Paoletta helped develop the plan, according to government officials, relying on a little-known legal tool that had fallen into disuse. It met bipartisan opposition and failed in the Senate.

:{:{}:

}:

Within months Paoletta was involved in another showdown with Congress, this time over funding for Trump’s border wall.

:{:{}:

}:

During the record-long government shutdown a year ago, Paoletta worked with federal agencies to figure out how to limit the impact of the shutdown on government services, including by keeping many of the nation’s parks open. That led the Government Accountability Office, an investigative agency that reports to Congress, to accuse the Interior Department of violating the law by using recreation fees to keep national parks running in absence of congressional appropriations. Paoletta brushed the GAO criticism aside, arguing the office, as a legislative-branch agency, has no jurisdiction and can be ignored.

:{:{}:

}:

“That’s pretty atypical,” said Ilona Cohen, who served as OMB general counsel during the final years of the Obama administration. “It’s not that reasonable people can’t disagree, but it’s pretty atypical for them just to say we’re not going to listen to GAO.”

:{:{}:

}:

As the shutdown ended, Paoletta pushed for a controversial interpretation of the law that would allow the White House to redirect military funds so that Trump could build his border wall, over the objections of Republicans and Democrats.

:{:{}:

}:

Internally, White House Counsel Pat Cipollone argued against what Paoletta proposed and warned that it could be illegal, according to an administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal debates. Paoletta moved forward anyway, with Trump’s support. The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel also signed off on the decision, but multiple Republicans voted against the White House’s move in a congressional resolution later vetoed by Trump.

:{:{}:

}:

The Ukraine aid delay may be where Paoletta’s influence has most clearly emerged. He worked closely throughout the saga with Vought, administration officials said, signing off on the language holding up the funds and working with attorneys at the Pentagon.

:{:{}:

}:

Some Defense Department officials warned against delaying the assistance, however, according to testimony in the House impeachment inquiry. During the inquiry, Paoletta reviewed OMB emails and helped draft talking points defending the administration’s position, according to an administration official and internal documents. Paoletta’s name appears dozens of times in batches of emails about the Ukraine decision released under Freedom of Information Act requests, though usually the content is redacted. Paoletta also reviewed the redactions, the administration official said.

:{:{}:

}:

Paoletta and other political appointees overruled concerns expressed by career staffers who feared that delaying the Ukraine money might result in a violation of the Impoundment Control Act, a Nixon-era law that limits the ability of the executive branch to change Congress’s spending decisions, according to congressional testimony and people briefed on the actions.

:{:{}:

}:

Earlier this month, the GAO ruled that the delay did violate that law.And the GAO criticized Paoletta’s justifications for the delay, which he laid out in a nine-page memo in December asserting that OMB’s actions were a routine “exercise of its statutory authority.”

:{:{}:

}:

That claim, the GAO said, had “no basis in law.”

:{:{}:

}:

Semmel, the OMB spokeswoman, disputed the agency’s findings.

:{:{}:

}:

“We disagree with GAO’s opinion,” she said. “OMB uses its apportionment authority to ensure taxpayer dollars are properly spent consistent with the president’s priorities and with the law.”

:{:{}:

}:

Among the career staffers flagging concerns about the Ukraine delay was Mark Sandy, a senior OMB official who was the only agency employee to testify for impeachment investigators about the Ukraine matter. Multiple top political appointees had defied congressional subpoenas.

:{:{}:

}:

Paoletta has repeatedly expressed skepticism about Sandy, according to people who have heard his comments and said they were part of a pattern of coming into conflict with career staffers. Sandy’s attorney declined to comment.

:{:{}:

}:

Paoletta has suggested that career employees who are not moving quickly enough are seeking to undermine the president’s agenda, according to administration officials and others familiar with his actions.

:{:{}:

}:

In November, some of Paoletta’s allies were pushing for him to take a lead role in Trump’s impeachment defense.Clarence Thomas’s wife, Ginni Thomas, released a statement to the Washington Examiner in support of the idea,even though Paoletta had never sought the role. Administration officials said Mulvaney wanted Paoletta on the impeachment team as well, but Cipollone was opposed.

:{:{}:

}:

Paoletta was ultimately blocked. He has remained at the budget agency while Cipollone and others have taken the public stage defending some of the legal moves that Paoletta helped orchestrate.

===

===

https://www.msnbc.com/congress/jan-6-hearings/live-blog/live-updates-analysis-day-5-rcna34785

99d ago /

Day 5 offers new evidence — and new mysteries

:{:{}:

Lisa Rubin

}:

As at prior hearings, the House select committee offered new evidence today, including evidence of GOP congressmembers’ consciousness of guilt. (You don’t ask for a pardonunless you think there’s a decent chance you broke the law — and could be prosecuted.)

But some of the new evidence was just as puzzling as it was tantalizing. Consider two examples.

First, the committee asserted today that lawyer Ken Klukowski, who served in the Justice Department for a hot minute, collaborated with John Eastman and Jeffrey Bossert Clark on aspects of Trump’s scheme. But how did Klukowski come to DOJ, where, as Liz Cheney noted, he was specifically assigned to Clark, in the first place?

one clue comes from the Dec. 28, 2021 email the committee showed today, in which GOP activist and Family Research Council fellow Ken Blackwell advocated that Eastman and Klukowski brief Pence and his team. That email was sent to two people: Rep. Louis Gohmert’s chief of staff, Connie Hair, and Ed Corrigan, the president and CEO of the Conservative Partnership Institute, or CPI. If CPI sounds familiar to you, it should. It’s where Mark Meadowsis now a “Senior Partner,” and it was the beneficiary of a $1 million donation from Trump in the weeks after the select committee was created.

What sway, if any, Corrigan and Hair had over Pence and his staff is unknown. But it bears noting that Corrigan had prior experience filling administration jobs for Trump; as his CPI bio reads, he led “the personnel selection process for all domestic policy departments” for Trump’s 2016 transition.

Second, the committee noted, in describing the run up to the Jan. 3, 2021 Oval Office meeting, that Jeff Clark was already being referred to asthe acting attorney general on White House call logs late that afternoon. The absence of call logs for Jan. 6 itself has already been thoroughly explored, but is it possible that such logs for other, significant days reveal more than we would have expected? Looks like we’ll have to wait at least until hearings resume next month to find out.

:{:{}:

}:

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99d ago /  9 22 access

The key role played by Ken Klukowski

:{:{}:

Lisa Rubin

}:

In November of last year, the House select committee issued a subpoena to Kenneth Klukowski, a lawyer and former aide to Assistant Attorney General Jeffrey Clark. And in its press release, the committee was fairly transparent as to why: Klukowski “was:{**involved in drafting a letter**:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:that urged legislatures in certain states to delay certification of the election.” He also helped Clark prepare for the now-infamous Jan. 3, 2021 meeting. That, of course, was the meeting at which all assembled but Clark said they would resign if Trump fired Rosen and made Clark acting attorney general.

But who is Klukowski?

For starters, he’s a guy with a long history in the conservative legal and political worlds, including with Team Trump. In November 2016, Politico reported thatKlukowski, who was then senior counsel at director of strategy at the First Liberty Institute, joined the Trump transition team as an advisor on “protecting constitutional rights.” By 2018, while still at First Liberty, he argued, in an op-ed for the Washington Examiner in support of an Oregon couple that refused to bake a same-sex wedding cake. Unsurprisingly, Klukowski, a former Family Research Council director, was named as a member ofthe “Christian legal army” in The Nation’s reporting on those lawyers’ growing influence in state attorneys generals’ offices and federal courts.

Klukowski’s relationships with key Trump world figures are also substantial. A former senior legal editor at Breitbart, he hasknown former Trump advisor Steve Bannon for years. (Here’sthem talking together on Breitbart.) And connections between Klukowski and Trump attorney John Eastman date back to at least 2012.” He even appeared with another Trump campaign lawyer, Sidney Powell, on talk radio in 2018.

Yet Klukowski did not join the Trump administration until late August 2019, when he joined OMB as a special counsel underthen-general counsel Mark Paoletta, who later became embroiled in the withholding of aid to Ukraine underlying Trump’s first impeachment. (Today, Paoletta and Klukowski havereunited in private practice at Schaerr Jaffe, a boutique law firm well stocked with conservative legal stars.) And he didn’t leave the White House for the Justice Department until mid-December 2020, which begs the question: Why would anyone, much less someone with a plum White House gig, take a job expected to last little more than a month?

As expected, the committee has some answers.

First, Klukowski “parachuted into the Department... with only 36 days left until [the] inauguration” and then “drafted th[e] Georgia letter with Mr. Clark” just days before the Oval Office showdown between Clark and his DOJ bosses.

Second, Klukowski worked with his old friend Eastman, includingafterhe joined DOJ, to quietly aid Trump’s efforts to overturn the election. Ken Blackwell, a GOP activist and former Ohio Secretary of State, suggested Pence and his staff would benefit from a briefing from Eastman and Klukowski. Still, Blackwell cautioned they not “overexpose Ken given his new position.” Klukowski’s value, apparently, was as both a willing soldier for Trump, and an under-the-radar insider.

As Cheney summed up, the evidence shows “Klukowski was simultaneously working with Jeffrey Clark to draft the proposed letter to Georgia officials to overturn their certified election and working with Dr. Eastman to help pressure the Vice President to overturn the election.” And that determination, coupled with reporting that federal law enforcement seized electronic devices from Clark’s home yesterday, is not a good development for Klukowski.

===

===

8 pp ltr refuse ; egs of dem object to votes in various elections; bennie NEW nation of islam

charles burnham eastman atty; claims she did not know much about what JE was doing post election; unrelenting efforts to overturn election' is false "; TP truce denied by both, stockton's src denies?

===

forbes

...cRUCIAL QUOTE

Thompson told reporters last week Thomas’ testimony would “[add] to the body of knowledge about whether or not she had additional information as to what went on, on January 6.”

CHIEF CRITIC

Thomas has denied discussing her work with her husband or having any influence on his work as a justice. Paoletta denied allegations that Thomas was personally involved with efforts to overturn the election in his letter to the committee and criticized its members as being biased against Thomas and her husband. “Given the animus already directed at Mrs. Thomas and Justice Thomas, I have serious concerns about the fairness of any interview,” Paoletta wrote.

WHAT TO WATCH FOR

The House committee is expected to soon hold its first public hearing in months—and potentially its final hearing. The hearing was supposed to take place on Wednesday but was rescheduled due to Hurricane Ian. Thompson told reporters Thursday Thomas’ testimony could make it into the hearing ““if there’s something of merit,” CNN reports. The committee will then issue a final report detailing all its findings after the hearings have concluded, though it’s still unclear when exactly that will be.

SURPRISING FACT

Lawmakers initially declined to ask Thomas to testify before the emails between her and Eastman were reported, which the *New York Times* reported in March was due in part to objections from Republican committee member Rep. Liz Cheney (Wyo.). The Times reports there was resistance within the committee to going after Thomas because it could hurt Clarence Thomas’ reputation—three of his former clerks also have “major roles” in the investigation,the Times reports—and because committee members believed she was “a distraction from more important targets.”

KEY BACKGROUND

Thomas has drawn widespread scrutiny for her links to the wide-ranging effort to overturn the 2020 election, which were taking place as her husband considered lawsuits challenging the election results at the Supreme Court. In addition to her correspondence with Eastman, Thomas also exchanged text messages with then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows in which she urged him to challenge the election results, and sent emails to lawmakers in multiple states pushing efforts to contest the vote count. A group she’s linked to was also involved with the “fake electors” scheme in which GOP officials submitted false slates of electors to Congress claiming Trump won their states, and she has said she was briefly present at the rally on January 6 that preceded the attack on the Capitol building. In his letter to lawmakers, Paoletta denied that any of her efforts constitute wrongdoing: her correspondence with Eastman was merely asking him to speak to one of her groups, her texts with Meadows were her “simply texting with a friend” and the emails she sent to lawmakers were form letters that Thomas did not draft or edit herself, and she “simply pushed a few buttons,” Paoletta alleged.

FURTHER READING

Ginni Thomas Won’t Testify to Jan. 6 Committee, Lawyer Says — Here’s What We Know About Her Efforts To Overturn The Election (Forbes)

Ginni Thomas—Wife Of Supreme Court Justice—Reportedly Pressured Wisconsin Lawmakers To Overturn 2020 Election (Forbes)

Ginni Thomas agrees to January 6 committee interview (CNN)

Ginni Thomas to speak to House Jan. 6 committee this week, chair Thompson says (CBS News)

Alison Durkee

I am a New York-based senior reporter covering breaking news at Forbes. I previously covered politics and news for Vanity Fair and Mic...

===

ref

...Ginni, serves on the board of C.N.P. Action, the political advocacy arm of the right-wing Council for National Policy, which the Times reports circulated an “action steps” document after the 2020 presidential election that advocated for challenging the election results in Arizona, Georgia and Pennsylvania.

C.N.P. Action told its members to “pressure” GOP state lawmakers to appoint alternate slates of electors in states that President Joe Biden won, in an effort to get Congress to recognize those electors over the Democratic ones, claiming there was “historical, legal precedent” for doing so.

the Times notes the effort “would have almost certainly” gone before the Supreme Court if the GOP lawmakers had succeeded.

C.N.P. Action broadly pushed for members to challenge battleground state results, the Times reports, noting one such effort—a Pennsylvania GOP lawmaker’s effort to overturn that state’s results—ultimately went before the Supreme Court, where it was rejected.

When the Supreme Court then separately rejected a full hearing on that Pennsylvania lawsuit after the election, Thomas issued a dissent that the Times notes “echo[ed]” C.N.P. Action’s arguments, saying the court not taking up the case “invite[s] further confusion and erosion of voter confidence.”

The Times piece also added to previous reporting on Ginni Thomas’ involvement with the January 6 rally that preceded the attack on the Capitol building, reporting she played a “peacemaking role” between different groups involved with the rally.

KEY BACKGROUND

The Times report comes as Thomas and his wife have come under increasing scrutiny in recent weeks, following a recent New Yorker piece on Ginni’s political activities and her signing a December letter that slammed the House’s January 6 committee as an “overtly partisan political persecution.” Watchdog group American Oversight also published emails in early February showing Ginni had emailed Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ office and told them her husband “has been in contact with [DeSantis] too on various things of late.” Ginni’s political involvement has long been known and a 2019 meeting between her and then-President Donald Trump drew scrutiny. Critics have become more focused on her potential influence on her husband more recently, however, as the 6-3 conservative Supreme Court has taken up an increasing number of major cases on partisan topics like abortion, guns and immigration. Even aside from the Thomases, public trust in the Supreme Court has hit record lows because of the public’s perception the court is politicized, and Trump-appointed Justice Neil Gorsuch was recently criticized for speaking at the partisan Federalist Society alongside major GOP figures like DeSantis and former Vice President Mike Pence. His speech was closed to the press.

CHIEF CRITIC

Justice Thomas has hit back against suggestions the court is politicized, saying in a September speech he believes it’s a misconception. “If [the media thinks] you’re anti-abortion or something personally, they think that that’s the way you always will come out,” Thomas said. “They think you become like a politician. And I think that’s a problem.”

WHAT TO WATCH FOR

Whether Justice Thomas will recuse himself from any upcoming cases that could be a conflict of interest. The court will soon hear a challenge to affirmative action policies backed by a group on whose board Ginni also sits, which has sparked calls for him to recuse, and the New Yorker reports she has ties to the leader of a group that’s brought two other upcoming cases to the court. The Washington Post notes that while justices are supposed to recuse themselves in cases that could pose a conflict, there’s no actual enforcement mechanism requiring them to do so. Legal scholars have advocated for the high court to take up a code of conduct that would impose a process for preventing conflicts of interest, but the court has not yet said whether they intend to do so.

TANGENT

Though the “fake electors” plot was known at the time it happened, the strategy—which resulted in seven false slates of GOP electors in states Biden won—has resurfaced in recent months, after the House January 6 committee released documents in December showing former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows was involved in discussions about the plot. The committee has issued subpoenas to many of the false electors in an attempt to learn more about the origins of the plot and the Trump campaign’s involvement. Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco told CNN the Justice Department is also investigating the scheme, after multiple states’ attorneys general referred the certificates to the DOJ and asked them to look into it.

FURTHER READING

The Long Crusade of Clarence and Ginni Thomas (New York Times)

Is Ginni Thomas a Threat to the Supreme Court? (New Yorker)

Legal Scholars Push For Supreme Court Ethics Code As Gorsuch And Thomas Come Under Fire (Forbes)

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ref

no lnx

Affirmative Action Could Soon Be Overturned As Supreme Court Takes Up Harvard And UNC Cases

Alison Durkee Forbes Staff

Updated Jan 25, 2022,

TOPLINE The U.S. Supreme Court will hear cases challenging Harvard University and the University of North Carolina (UNC)’s affirmative action policies that take race into account for admissions, the court announced Monday, which could potentially overturn the decades-old practice of affirmative action and threaten gains in diversity at colleges and universities nationwide.

KEY FACTS

The court announced it would take up the cases without comment, and it’s not clear yet whether the cases will be heard this term or after the Supreme Court’s next term begins in October.

The group Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) sued Harvard University for allegedly discriminating against Asian-American applicants in its admissions process and unfairly favoring other applicants of color, accusing it of using a “racial hierarchy” in its admissions process.

The same group also sued UNC in order to cover both public and private universities—noting UNC is the oldest public college in the U.S.—and alleged the university’s policy violates the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause by not guaranteeing racial neutrality.

Harvard and UNC have denied the accusations their affirmative action policies are discriminatory and argue they’re in line with previous court rulings upholding the practice, and UNC said it “considers race flexibly as merely one factor among numerous factors” in its admissions process.

Harvard said getting rid of race considerations in its admissions would result in “steep declines in diversity,” noting taking race out of the equation entirely would reduce enrollment of Black students at the school from 14% to 6% of its student body, and Hispanic enrollment from 14% to 9%.

Both the district and appeals court ruled in Harvard’s favor and upheld their admissions policy, and a district court ruled in UNC’s favor, but SFFA appealed the case to the Supreme Court before an appeals court could rule so that it could be heard with the Harvard case.

WHAT TO WATCH FOR

The Supreme Court has repeatedly held up affirmative action in the past, but there are fears it will now be overturned given the court’s 6-3 conservative majority. Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito have already ruled against affirmative action in the past, as has Chief Justice John Roberts, who once wrote, “It is a sordid business, this divvying us up by race.”

CRUCIAL QUOTE

“Harvard’s mistreatment of Asian-American applicants is appalling,” SFFA alleged in its Supreme Court complaint, calling the case “the kind of important individual rights dispute that this Court has not hesitated to hear.” “Review thus would be warranted if the defendant were any university subject to Title VI. But it isn’t just any university. It’s Harvard.” 

CHIEF CRITIC

The Supreme Court’s past rulings on affirmative action “sent a powerful signal that diversity is vital to preparing individuals to work and participate as citizens in our pluralistic democracy,” Harvard wrote in its opposition to SFFA’s complaint. “Americans have come to view diversity as integral to learning and to trust that the path to leadership is open to all. Overruling those cases at this time would undermine the public’s faith in those foundational principles.”

KEY BACKGROUND

The concept of “affirmative action” to ensure racial diversity dates back to a 1965 executive order that told employers to “take affirmative action to ensure that equal opportunity is provided in all aspects of their employment.” The Supreme Court then officially sanctioned affirmative action in college admissions in a 1978 ruling that found universities could constitutionally consider race as part of its admissions process, though it struck down schools using quota systems dedicating a certain number of enrollment places to students of a particular race. Since then, the Supreme Court has repeatedly held up affirmative action policies in 2003 and 2016, though it struck down a “point system” at the University of Michigan that automatically gave applications from underrepresented racial minorities enough points to virtually guarantee admission. While critics of affirmative action policies contend they discriminate against white and Asian American students, proponents say the practice is necessary for ensuring diversity both at universities and the workforce at large. Harvard also alleged that not considering race in admissions would have “adverse effects on Harvard’s ability to create an environment that promotes cross-racial interactions and that lessens feelings of alienation and isolation.”

TANGENT

The Trump Administration had strongly backed the case against Harvard, filing a brief in support of SFFA in 2018 when the case was at a lower court and filing separate affirmative action complaints against Yale University that the Biden Administration later dropped.William Cosovoy, the lead attorney for SFFA, has represented former President Donald Trump in private lawsuits concerning the release of his tax returns.The Biden administration, however, told the Supreme Court in December it should not take up the Harvard case, arguing the lower court rulings that upheld the school’s policy were decided correctly and the case is an “unsuitable vehicle” for the court to overturn its previous affirmative action rulings.

FURTHER READING

The Supreme Court case that could end affirmative action, explained (Vox)

A Timeline of Key Supreme Court Cases on Affirmative Action (New York Times)

Justices Consider Harvard Case On Race In College Admissions (Associated Press)

University of North Carolina and civil rights advocates ask Supreme Court to sidestep affirmative action challenge (CNN)

Alison Durkee

===

ed co wrote barr memo trump no obstruction

Sarah Palin "truth squad"[

Main article: Alaska Public Safety Commissioner dismissal

In 2008, O'Callaghan co-led what the Anchorage Daily News called "a cadre of high-powered operatives" described by John McCain's campaign as a "truth squad" to field questions about and defend attacks against vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin.^[5] His two co-leaders were Karl Rove protégée Brian Jones, and Washington lawyer Mark Paoletta.

Paoletta, Jones, and O'Callaghan were "tasked specifically with responding to the sort of viral attacks that have been popping up about Palin’s background and record in Alaska... The public face for this pushback, though, will be woman Republican politicians, a 'truth squad' team designed to highlight attacks on Palin and draw sympathy to her side."^[6] Paoletta and Jones were volunteers while O'Callaghan was on staff.^[7]

O'Callaghan was sent to Alaska to handle "legal issues that are affecting the political dynamic of the campaign," according to Taylor Griffin, a former Treasury Department official in the Bush administration.^[8] Newsweek described O'Callaghan's role as "helping to direct an aggressive legal strategy aimed at shutting down a pre-election ethics investigation into Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin." Working with Palin's attorney Thomas Van Flein, O'Callaghan worked to block the investigation."There was no Ethics Act violation and there is no need to go forward with this," O'Callaghan told reporters.^[9]

The Alaska Personnel Board concluded that Palin did not violate the Alaska Executive Ethics Act by trying to get her brother-in-law fired. Alaska Personnel Board investigations are normally secret, but the three-member board chose to release its report one day before the Presidential election.^[10]

===

https://www.alternet.org/**2022/03/**clarence-thomas/

U.S, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has a business relationship with Leonard Leo, a co-chairman of the board of the right-wing Federalist Society, which was responsible for “vetting” and effectively installing then-President Donald Trump’s judicial nominees.

“Right-wing judicial activist Leonard Leo has been exerting influence over the Supreme Court for three decades,” reports The Daily Beast‘s Roger Sollenberger. “So why is Clarence Thomas hiring Leo’s firm to do public relations?”

Justice Thomas is promoting a new release of his 2007 memoir and has hired Leonard Leo’s PR firm, CRC Advisors, to promote the book. The Daily Beast adds Leo “was also tasked with promoting a Thomas documentary, and the firm was the registered agent for four Thomas-centric web domains.”

Sollenberger reports that the “revelations of Leo and Thomas’ business relationship offers new evidence of ties between a sitting justice and a man widely considered the most powerful conservative judicial activist in the country. And while it might not be an instantly damning smoking gun, experts say the connection—where Thomas stands to gain financially—raises further questions about thearch-conservative justice’s deep and shady ties to a sprawling network of dark money organizations and right-wing activist groups, many of which have business before him.”

Leonard Leo has also “raised hundreds of millions of dollars over the three decades on behalf of right-wing dark money groups to influence the federal judiciary and Supreme Court. He advised and persuaded Republican presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump in their appointments of Justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett, and Chief Justice John Roberts—and prepped Justice Thomas for his nomination hearings.”

The Federalist Society, which Leo ran for years, was founded in 1982. Antonin Scalia, Robert Bork, and Ted Olson were there at the beginning. It has reshaped America’s courts and laws, especially under Donald Trump.

U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) in a 2019 speech on the floor of the Senate noted that “nearly 90% of Trump’s appellate judges, and both his Supreme Court justices, are members of the so-called Federalist Society. On the Supreme Court, Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, Alito, Thomas—all are members. Now that’s a little weird. What’s really weird is that through this Federalist Society vehicle, big special interests are picking federal judges.”

Read the full Daily Beast article here, read Sen. Whitehouse’s full speech here, and watch him again go after the Federalist Society in a 2020 Senate hearing here.

---

ref1

https://www.thedailybeast.com/supreme-court-justice-clarence-thomas-strange-pick-to-promote-his-book-says-it-all?ref=home

best no lnx Trumpland

Clarence Thomas’ Strange Pick to Promote His Book Says It All

Amicus Curiae

Right-wing judicial activist Leonard Leo has been exerting influence over the Supreme Court for three decades. So why is Clarence Thomas hiring Leo’s firm to do public relations?

Roger Sollenberger

Political Reporter

Published Mar. 08, 2022

When Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was promoting a new release of his 2007 memoir last October, he made an interesting choice for his public relations firm, a company run by one of the most influential figures in conservative legal circles: Leonard Leo.

Leo, the former head of the Federalist Society and a top fundraiser for right-wing judiciary activist groups, wasn’t just in charge of Thomas’ memoir; Leo’s PR firm, CRC Advisors, was also tasked with promoting a Thomas documentary, and the firm was the registered agent for four Thomas-centric web domains.

The interesting part of this choice is not that Leo’s firm was incapable of handling the work—far from it. What makes Thomas’ decision notable is that Leo happens to have a vested interest in the Supreme Court, and his dark money network actively tries to influence rulings.

The revelations of Leo and Thomas’ business relationship offers new evidence of ties between a sitting justice and a man widely considered the most powerful conservative judicial activist in the country. And while it might not be an instantly damning smoking gun, experts say the connection—where Thomas stands to gain financially—raises further questions about the arch-conservative justice’s deep and shady ties to a sprawling network of dark money organizations and right-wing activist groups, many of which have business before him.

The news also comes at a time of dwindling public faith in the Supreme Court’s impartiality. That faith hit an all-time low last September, the month before the audiobook’s press release.

Paul Collins, professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and author of several books about the high court, called Thomas’ specific choice of Leo’s firm, of all available options, “strange” and “unnecessary.”

“It signals that this world of the Federalist Society is even smaller than we thought,” Collins told The Daily Beast.

That world was already thought to be miniscule, with Leo’s hand seemingly never far from the court’s affairs.

The foremost of a tight cadre of hyperconservative legal activists, Leo has raised hundreds of millions of dollars over the three decades on behalf of right-wing dark money groups to influence the federal judiciary and Supreme Court. He advised and persuaded Republican presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump in their appointments of Justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett, and Chief Justice John Roberts—and prepped Justice Thomas for his nomination hearings.

Leo is also the hub of a network of dark money groups which routinely, and anonymously, fund and join arguments before the Supreme Court—bankrolling what researchers have called an “amicus flotilla.”

His network has most recently taken the shape of a sprawling legal effort focused on influencing election administration, including misleading allegations of impropriety. The Federalist Society, the legal activist group synonymous with Leo, has been called “the single most influential advocacy organization in Washington.”

But Leo’s affiliations with the court are especially heightened when it comes to Justice Thomas.

Leo made Thomas the godfather of one of his children, and, according to The New York Times, has hosted the justice on vacation at his New England getaway. Thomas’ wife, Ginni Thomas, was also the subject of a recent profile by the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, titled, “Is Ginni Thomas a Threat to The Supreme Court?” It detailed the staggering extent and depth of connections between the justice’s wife and conservative groups.

Some of those organizations are tied with Leo, and, as Mayer reported, many have matters before the court. At least one of them has tapped CRC to handle its public relations.

Leo, whom Ginni Thomas considers a mentor, joined CRC Advisors in 2020, after stepping down from his position as vice president of the Federalist Society. (He still co-chairs the board.) Leo told Axios at the time that CRC planned to pump a “minimum of $10 million” into judicial advocacy issues ahead of the 2020 election.

“Leo and his CRC Advisors form the head of a many-legged dark-money operation designed to deliver on the priorities of right-wing donor interests.”

— Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI)

Neither CRC Advisors nor the Supreme Court replied to a request for comment.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), a progressive who has long called for clarity about dark money influence on the judiciary, said Leo’s group, in running public relations for Thomas, appears to be trying to clean up after its own damage.

“Leo and his CRC Advisors form the head of a many-legged dark-money operation designed to deliver on the priorities of right-wing donor interests,” Whitehousetold The Daily Beast. “That operation spent hundreds of millions of dollars—if not more—to capture the Supreme Court. Now, it’s trying to prop up its right-wing justices’ credibility in the face of growing public frustration with whatJustice Sotomayor calls the ‘stench’ of partisanship emanating from the Court.”

CRC’s press announcement for the Thomas memoir—My Grandfather’s Son—promotes a new release in audiobook and Kindle formats. It also quotes two conservative activists, and informs media that they can contact a CRC Advisors official if they want to land an interview with either of them.

One of the officials, Mark Paoletta, worked on Justice Thomas’ nomination; the other, Carrie Severino, clerked for him and currently runs the Judicial Crisis Network, a conservative group linked to Leo which has poured millions into influencing judicial nominations.

CRC Advisors was also chosen to promote the critically panned Thomas documentary, Created Equal, which Variety called “a two-hour infomercial for the decency, the competence, and the conservative role-model aspirationalism of Clarence Thomas.”

(CNBC reported that the documentary’s producer—a Trump appointee—had tapped donations to his nonprofit to help fund his private production company.)

CRC has also registered several web domains related to Justice Thomas, including “clarencethomas.org,” “clarencethomas.us,” “justicethomas.us,” and “theanitahillcase.com,” a reference to the credible sexual harassment allegations that marked Thomas’ bitter nomination hearings in 1991.

The relationship carries the further context of Leo’s activism, fundraising, and connection to cases before the court. This extends not just to the Federalist Society, but to CRC itself, which within months of promoting the memoir published multiple press releases about attempts to influence Supreme Court cases, including a petition to knock down the vaccine mandate.

Collins, the UMASS professor, noted that, after the fraught nominations of Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, the public has been particularly sensitive to ethical concerns.

“Many people, including the Chief Justice, are worried about the legitimacy of the Supreme Court in the eyes of the American public,” Collins said, referencing Chief Justice John Roberts’s annual report last year, where Roberts took the unusual step of admonishing federal judges for ethical breaches, writing that, “We expect judges to adhere to the highest standards.”

“The continued exposure of real or potential conflicts of interest could be problematic for the court, especially when we see ties like this between a justice and the Federalist Society, which plays such a large role in the legal world,” Collins said.

Stephen Gillers, an expert on legal ethics at New York University School of Law, said that while the connection between Leo, CRC, and Thomas bears reporting, it doesn’t hit an official ethical bar—partly, he said, because the bar is so much higher for Supreme Court justices than for any other federal judge.

“The ethics rules governing justices are much narrower than the rules governing other federal judges. So on the question of disqualification, in this case it’s too attenuated, as this case doesn’t suggest that those rules have been violated,” Gillers explained, noting that “Ginni Thomas is a class by itself; nothing comes close to the harm that does to our courts.”

On the issue of CRC, Gillers said, “There’s a difference between whether something is newsworthy, and whether it crosses a legal line. This instance is newsworthy, but it doesn’t cross a line.”

“Thomas of course has a right to hire a PR firm to sell his book and get attention to it. Now, it may appear to many people as unseemly, but that’s not a legal question,” Gillers said. “In my view, justices should not act in a way that casts suspicion on the court just because they can.”

Artemus Ward, a professor of political science at Northern Illinois University who has written extensively on the politics of the Supreme Court, said that the matter could raise political problems for Thomas.

Ward pointed to a 1960s conservative campaign to force the resignation of Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas, a liberal justice “got hounded out by conservatives because of some alleged ethical breaches regarding his finances, such as receiving speakers fees.”

“It was never fully clear just what the money was or whether he had crossed ethical lines, but conservatives held hearings to drum him out of office because they saw him as a liberal crony,” he said. “The question with Thomas is whether the endgame for Democrats is to hound him out of office before he’s ready to go.”

2022 The Daily Beast Company LLC

===

===

omg

https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/i-knew-brett-kavanaugh-during-his-years-republican-operative-don-ncna907391

no lnx

I knew Brett Kavanaugh during his years as a Republican operative. Don't let him sit on the Supreme Court.

We were part of a close circle of cynical hard-right operatives being groomed for much bigger things.

Sept. 7, 2018, 

ByDavid Brock

I used to know Brett Kavanaugh pretty well. And, when I think of Brett now, in the midst of his hearings for a lifetime appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court, all I can think of is the old "Aesop's Fables" adage: "A man is known by the company he keeps."

And that's why I want to tell any senator who cares about our democracy: Vote no.

Twenty years ago, when I was a conservative movement stalwart, I got to know Brett Kavanaugh both professionally and personally.

Brett Kavanaugh proves the Supreme Court swing vote is dead

SEPT. 4, 2018]

Brett actually makes a cameo appearance in my memoir of my time in the GOP, "Blinded By The Right." I describe him at a party full of zealous young conservatives gathered to watch President Bill Clinton's 1998 State of the Union address — just weeks after the story of his affair with a White House intern had broken. When the TV camera panned to Hillary Clinton, I saw Brett — at the time a key lieutenant of Ken Starr, the independent counsel investigating various Clinton scandals — mouth the word "bitch."

But there's a lot more to know about Kavanaugh than just his Pavlovian response to Hillary's image. Brett and I were part of a close circle of cold, cynical and ambitious hard-right operatives being groomed by GOP elders for much bigger roles in politics, government and media. And it’s those controversial associations that should give members of the Senate and the American public serious pause.

[Related OPINION

GOP's maneuvering during the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings will seriously damage the Supreme Court's legitimacy]

Call it Kavanaugh's cabal: There was his colleague on the Starr investigation, Alex Azar, now the Secretary of Health and Human Services. Mark Paoletta is now chief counsel to Vice President Mike Pence; House anti-Clinton gumshoeBarbara Comstockis now a Republican member of Congress. Future Fox News personalities Laura Ingraham and Tucker Carlson were there with Ann Coulter, now a best-selling author, and internet provocateur Matt Drudge.

At one time or another, each of them partied at my Georgetown townhouse amid much booze and a thick air of cigar smoke.

In a rough division of labor, Kavanaugh played the role of lawyer — one of the sharp young minds recruited by the Federalist Society to infiltrate the federal judiciary with true believers. Through that network, Kavanaugh was mentored by D.C. Appeals Court Judge Laurence Silberman, known among his colleagues for planting leaks in the press for partisan advantage.

[Related OPINION

Tom Steyer and Ron Fein: Stop Kavanaugh's confirmation until Mueller's investigation is done]

When, as I came to know, Kavanaugh took on the role of designated leaker to the press of sensitive information from Starr's operation, we all laughed that Larry had taught him well. (Of course, that sort of political opportunism by a prosecutor is at best unethical, if not illegal.)

:{:{}:

}:

Another compatriot was George Conway (now Kellyanne's husband), who led a secretive group of right-wing lawyers — we called them "the elves" — who worked behind the scenes directing the litigation team of Paula Jones, who had sued Clinton for sexual harassment. I knew then that information was flowing quietly from the Jones team via Conway to Starr's office — and also that Conway's go-to man was none other than Brett Kavanaugh.

[Recommended OPINION

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OPINION

Trump's election plot was eye-opening. And the Senate is finally paying attention.]

That critical flow of inside information allowed Starr, in effect, to set a perjury trap for Clinton, laying the foundation for a crazed national political crisis and an unjust impeachment over a consensual affair.

But the cabal's godfather was Ted Olson, the then-future solicitor general for George W. Bush and now a sainted figure of the GOP establishment(and of some liberals for his role in legalizing same-sex marriage). Olson had a largely hidden role as a consigliere to the "Arkansas Project" — a multi-million dollar dirt-digging operation on the Clintons, funded by the eccentric right-wing billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife and run through The American Spectator magazine, where I worked at the time.

Both Ted and Brett had what one could only be called an unhealthy obsession with the Clintons — especially Hillary. While Ted was pushing through the Arkansas Project conspiracy theories claiming that Clinton White House lawyer and Hillary friend Vincent Foster was murdered (he committed suicide), Brett was costing taxpayers millions by pedaling the same garbage at Starr's office.

A detailed analysis of Kavanaugh's own notes from the Starr Investigation reveals he was cherry-picking random bits of information from the Starr investigation — as well as the multiple previous investigations — attempting vainly to legitimize wild right-wing conspiracies. For years he chased down each one of them without regard to the emotional cost to Foster’s family and friends, or even common decency.

[Related OPINION

Brett Kavanaugh's Supreme Court nomination is the result of years of unopposed conservative organizing]

Kavanaugh was not a dispassionate finder of fact but rather an engineer of a political smear campaign. And after decades of that, he expects people to believe he's changed his stripes.

Like millions of Americans this week, I tuned into Kavanaugh's hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee with great interest. In his opening statement and subsequent testimony, Kavanaugh presented himself as a "neutral and impartial arbiter" of the law. Judges, he said, were not players but akin to umpires — objectively calling balls and strikes. Again and again, he stressed his "independence" from partisan political influences.

But I don't need to see any documents to tell you who Kavanaugh is — because I've known him for years. And I'll leave it to all the lawyers to parse Kavanaugh's views on everything from privacy rights to gun rights. But I can promise you that any pretense of simply being a fair arbiter of the constitutionality of any policy regardless of politics is simply a pretense. He made up his mind nearly a generation ago — and, if he's confirmed, he'll have nearly two generations to impose it upon the rest of us.

===

2z?

...ow do we know? Because she just had her lawyer send a letter to the committee saying she didn’t want to meet with them after previously stating that she “looked forward” to answering their questions.

In the eight-page letter sent yesterday, Ginni’s lawyer, Mark Paoletta, demanded “a better justification for why Mrs. Thomas’s testimony is relevant,” before he could recommend she testify.

“Based on my understanding of the communications that spurred the Committee’s request, I do not understand the need to speak with Mrs. Thomas,” Paoletta wrote.

Related: Ginni Thomas may need a “great f***ing criminal lawyer” after latest revelation

The committee initially asked to speak to Thomas months ago, after it was revealed she had been in close communication with Trump’s camp in the days leading up to the insurrection and sent over 20 totally-not-crazy-sounding text messages to Meadows, such as:

Biden crime family & ballot fraud co-conspirators (elected officials, bureaucrats, social media censorship mongers, fake stream media reporters, etc) are being arrested & detained for ballot fraud right now & over coming days, & will be living in barges off GITMO to face military tribunals for sedition.

She also exchanged multiple emails with John Eastman, the Trump lawyer who drafted a memo outlining a plan to subvert the electoral process.

Oh, and she attended the “Stop the Steal” rally on January 6, praised the insurrectionists on Facebook, writing “LOVE MAGA people!!!!” and “GOD BLESS EACH OF YOU STANDING UP or PRAYING”, and emailed 29 Republican state lawmakers in Arizona urging them to ignore Joe Biden’s popular vote victory and “choose” presidential electors instead.

Related: Ginni Thomas is so screwed and she has her own psychotic text messages to blame

In his letter, Paoletta said he had “serious concerns” about the committee’s desire to speak with Thomas, and claimed both she and her husband “have been subjected to an avalanche of death threats and other abuse.”

He also said that he personally reviewed her texts with Meadows and said Thomas “simply expressed concerns about the 2020 election” and “never claimed to have first-hand knowledge about election fraud.”

Regarding her communications with Eastman, Paoletta said he looked at those too and found “not a single document” that seemed suspicious.

Related: We need to talk about that fat-shaming cult Clarence Thomas’ wife belonged to in the ’80s

Earlier this month, Thomas said she “can’t wait to clear up misconceptions” and suggested she would happily comply with the panel’s request to testify without a subpoena. Something clearly changed since yesterday. We wonder what it could be?[twt]

===

Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack

In March 2022, texts between Thomas and White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows from 2020 were handed to the Select Committee on the January 6 Attack.^[51] The texts show her repeatedly urging Meadows to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and repeating conspiracy theories about ballot fraud.^[4] She urged that conspiracy theorist attorney Sidney Powell be retained by the Trump campaign efforts to overturn the 2020 election.^[52] In the quoted texts, Thomas described an unknown number of American citizens that she hoped would be "living in barges off GITMO"^[53] in accord with theQAnon-affiliated conspiracy theory that President Biden, his family, and thousands of state and county election officials, administrators, and volunteers successfully orchestrated and performed a vast conspiracy to rig the 2020 elections across thousands of administrative districts or wards.

Public perception of the likelihood of such QAnon-style conspiracy theories influencing a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court was widespread enough^[54] that President Biden was asked what he thought about whether Clarence Thomas should recuse himself from any January 6-related cases.^[55] He replied that the answer is for others to determine,^[55] mentioning the congressional investigating committee and the Department of Justice.^[55] Under U.S. law, each justice of the court is the main and possibly only person who has power over his or her own recusal.

CNN reported in June 2022 that the Select Committee possessed email correspondence between Thomas and John Eastman.^[56] The emails were part of Eastman's correspondence related to efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election.^[56] In the wake of revelations regarding her correspondence with Eastman, Thomas was asked to testify before the committee.^[57] In an interview with the Daily Caller, Thomas stated that she "can't wait to clear up misconceptions. I look forward to talking to them."^[58] Thomas previously signed on to a letter to House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, calling for the removal of Rep. Liz Cheney and Rep. Adam Kinzinger from the Republican conference for their participation on the Select Committee and describing the January 6 investigations as "bringing disrespect to our country's rule of law."^[35]Mark Paoletta, Thomas's attorney, wrote the committee days later that she would not agree to be interviewed unless additional information came to light that might warrant testimony.^[59]

Days after it became known Eastman and Thomas had communicated by email, Eastman posted on his new Substack blog one email that he captioned, "OMG, Mrs. Thomas asked me to give an update about election litigation to her group. Stop the Presses!" In the December 4, 2020 email, Thomas invited Eastman to speak four days later at a gathering of "Frontliners," which she described as a group of "grassroots state leaders." A private Facebook group named "FrontLiners for Liberty," which included over 50 people and was created in August 2020, showed Thomas as an administrator. The group's front page carried a banner stating, "the enemy of America...is the radical fascist left."

After CNBC asked Thomas about the group, its public pages were either made private or deleted.CNBC also contacted Stephanie Coleman, who was also listed as a group administrator. She is the widow of former Texas solicitor general Greg Coleman, who had clerked for Clarence Thomas. Numerous photos of her and Thomas are on her personal Facebook page, including one of both of them with former Trump chief strategist Steve Bannon in December 2016. The Thomas email was among those federal judge**David Carter**ordered Eastman to releaseto the January 6 committee in June 2022, as Eastman sought to withhold them. Carter found ten documents he ordered released to the committee relating to three December 2020 meetings by a secretive group strategizing about how to overturn the election, which included who he characterized as a "high-profile" leader. Carter noted one email in particular among those he ordered released that contained what he found was likely evidence of a crime. Thomas attended a meeting of FrontLiners for Liberty on March 6, 2021, at which a speaker declared Trump was still the "legitimate president," to enthusiastic applause.^[60][61][62] ^[63]

ref

Jan. 6 Panel Hearings

A lawyer for Virginia Thomas said she would not testify to the House panel for now.

Maggie Haberman

June 28, 2022

Maggie Haberman

A lawyer for Virginia Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and a supporter of President Donald J. Trump’s efforts to stay in power after the 2020 election, told the House select committee investigating the Capitol riot that he saw no reason for her to testify before the panel.

The letter from her lawyer, Mark Paoletta, obtained by The New York Times, came after the committee made a fresh request to secure an appearance from Ms. Thomas, who had exchanged text messages with the White House chief of staff at the time, Mark Meadows, in which she urged on efforts to challenge Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory.

...

===

https://thefederalist.com/2022/03/03/media-smeared-clarence-thomass-wife-for-agitating-on-a-listserv-heres-the-sweet-thing-she-actually-said/

the unifying characteristic of the legacy corporate media’s repeated attacks on Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife Ginni is that they all contain false statements — some much worse than others.

One fake storyline pushed by The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer and The New York Times is that, after President Trump lost re-election in November, Ginni Thomas continually emailed a private listserv of former Thomas law clerks complaining about his loss, causing a rift in the group for which she had to apologize. This fake news fits a familiar pattern seen throughout the hit pieces: The press takes an instance in which Ginni Thomas did something that was in reality exemplary and distorts it beyond all recognition into something nefarious and unethical.

there is in fact a private email listserv of the current and former Justice Thomas clerks and their spouses, developed by Ginni Thomas many years ago to help everyone stay in touch on family and career developments. That the Thomas family has over 30 years helped foster a tight-knit “extended Thomas family” with the clerks and their families, who routinely correspond online and convene in-person, is the kind of thing the media would write nice profiles about were the Thomases a court couple that held the “right” views.

Instead, we get this: Mayer fabricates that Ginni had “been agitating about Trump’s loss on a private Listserv,” and that Ginni “eventually apologized to the group for causing internal rancor.” As The New York Times frames it, Ginni’s “use of the [Thomas clerk email] forum prompted a bitter debate among the former clerks,” and after this contentious exchange of emails, “Ginni…felt compelled to issue a semi-apology on the forum.”

I can say for certain that these stories are false, because I am a member of this listservand read this email exchange, which occurred on Jan. 17-18, 2021.

First, it is completely false that Ginni Thomas was “agitating about Trump’s loss.” In fact, Ginni sent an email on Dec. 19 to the listserv with a general update on life, and added, “Since early November, I have been on sabbatical from my politics and meetings, postings and all – which is new and super challenging for me, but makes sense until our national election is more resolved.”... zzz After one clerk sent an email on Jan. 17 providing an article critical of the Jan. 6 events, Ginni Thomas sent a separate email on Jan. 18 that began with a heartfelt apology to the clerk family: “I owe you all an apology. I have likely imposed on you my lifetime passions. 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… what we have together supersedes any one of your politics, including mine.” Aside from this email, Ginni Thomas did not send any other emails on this listserv about Trump’s loss. After Ginni’s email, two former clerks responded separately to the former clerk’s original Jan. 17 email, and there was a total of six emails exchanged between these three clerks regarding the events of Jan. 6, until a fourth clerk told them to take the discussion off the listserv. Ginni did not respond at all to the email exchange between the three clerks responding to the original Jan. 17 email. Then the listserv went back to what it mainly does, providing a forum to keep in touch, from recommending books and toys for kids, to passing along birth announcements, graduations, weddings, and other celebrations in the lives of the clerk families. zzzYet Mayer can’t help but turn Ginni’s participation in this listserv into some kind of ethical transgression by quoting an “expert” on Supreme Court clerks who cries that Ginni “is advocating for things directly” to the Thomas clerks — Thomas clerks whom this totally independent and impartial party describe as “an elite right-wing commando movement.” This is bizarre. Fully 99.8 percent of those on the listserv are former clerks and their spouses, who don’t work at the court, and 99.99 percent of the exchanges are about family and professional updates. You know Ginni Thomas really triggers the left when her sending of heartfelt notes in a listserv of clerks and spouses makes the left see conspiracies and corruption. Omitted from the media’s hysterical talk of theThomas Clerk World Listserv is why it was created in the first place: One of Justice Thomas’ former clerks, Greg Coleman, a wonderful person and legal superstar, tragically passed away in 2010 in a crash of an airplane he was piloting, along with his mother-in-law and her brother. Out of that terrible moment came the Thomas listserv, developed by Ginni Thomas and Coleman’s widow, Stephanie, to build the “connective tissue,” as Ginni says, among the Thomas clerk family to support one another in times of difficulty and to celebrate family and professional news. zzz Ginni Thomas should be applauded for helping bring this clerk family together, but the legacy corporate press prefers to lie about everything she does in a campaign to destroy her. Shame on them, and particularly Mayer, for these false and baseless smears. And know this: Ginni will never cower in the face of your callousness. >zzzMark Paoletta served as a lawyer in the George H.W. Bush White House Counsel’s office [NO REF TO TRUMP ADMIN OMB] and worked on the confirmation of Justice Thomas. He is a senior fellow at Center for Renewing America, and partner at Schaerr Jaffe<[stpp stel rlly dc] assault on the Capitol resulting in the deaths of at least five people, she cheered on the supporters of President   https://www.newyorker.com/tag/donald-trump ...Biden’s election. In a Facebook post that went viral, she linked to a news item about the protest, writing, “:{love maga:(style="box-sizing:border-box;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-caps:small-caps;text-transform:lowercase"):}: people!!!!” Shortly afterward, she posted about Ronald Reagan’s famous “A Time for Choosing” speech. Her next status update said, “:{god bless each of you standing up:(style="box-sizing:border-box;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-caps:small-caps;text-transform:lowercase"):}: or :{praying:(style="box-sizing:border-box;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-caps:small-caps;text-transform:lowercase"):}:.” Two days after the insurrection, she added a *Post*[revealed 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 rebukes.< zzz According to the..., 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 her 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. === https://www.mediamatters.org/january-6-insurrection/center-renewing-america-preparing-next-republican-administration-govern https://www.mediamatters.org/january-6-insurrection/center-renewing-america-preparing-next-republican-administration-govern over the last several years, the United States has seen a dramatic rise in Christian nationalism, a loosely defined ideology that fuses patriarchy, xenophobia, and pretextual economic populism with an overtly biblical foundation and a deep distrust of democracy. This phenomenon has manifested in many ways, but one of the organizations driving the trend is a far-right think tank called the Center for Renewing America. 

Several former Trump administration officials are associated with the group, including its president, Russ Vought, who served as director of the Office of Management and Budget under Trump. Vought led the administration’s efforts to demonize critical race theory, including removing anti-racism training from federal agencies. He is a regular guest on Steve Bannon’s podcast War Room: Pandemic and on Fox News. His organization is one of several far-right groups under the umbrella of the Conservative Partnership Institute, whose top officials include former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows and right-wing legal activist Cleta Mitchell.Both Meadows and Mitchell were intimately involved in Trump’s attempted insurrection, as were at least 18 other people associated with CPI, including CRA senior fellow Kash Patel,  former Trump Pentagon official.  

Perhaps the most significant of Trump’s top coup allies is CRA senior fellow Jeffrey Clark,a former environmental lawyer at the Department of Justice who was hired by the think tank in June. About three weeks later, Clark was targeted in a raid by federal law enforcement. Little is publicly known about the investigation into Clark, but it may revolve around his proposal “to send a letter to state officials in Georgia falsely stating that the department had evidence that could lead Georgia to rescind its certification of Mr. Biden’s victory in that key swing state,” according to The New York Times.

CRA works on an array of disparate, seemingly unrelated issues. In addition to CRA-linked individuals’ considerable efforts to justify the January 6 insurrection, the organization has sown doubt about future “election integrity.” Vought has remained at the heart of the anti-critical race theory push even after he left OMB. He is virulently anti-trans, calling trans identity a “contagion” in a 2021 podcast, and CRA has supported anti-trans legislation and opposed laws that would ban discrimination based on sexual and gender identity. Senior fellow and immigration restrictionistKen Cuccinelli and Vought successfully lobbied counties in Texas to declare that they were under “invasion” by migrants. CRA is also an active participant in the conservative legal community, as exemplified by its **senior fellow** Mark Paoletta, who prepared Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Clarence Thomas for their confirmation hearings. Following the overturning of Roe v. Wade, Vought celebrated Paoletta’s central role in the court’s rightward shift. 

What unites these issues is what Vought refers to as a “biblical worldview,” a concept that has long been prevalent on the religious right and refers to an all-encompassing ideology derived from a conservative interpretation of the Bible. Although Vought eschews the aesthetics of some of the street-fighting Christian fascists who terrorized Pride events in June, he overtly believes the United States should be a Christian nation. CRA’s mission is to “renew a consensus of America as a nation under God.” Vought is signatory to a national conservative statement affirming that “the Bible should be read as the first among the sources of a shared Western civilization in schools and universities.” Most revealingly, in 2021 Vought wrote an opinion piece for Newsweek with the headline: “Is There Anything Actually Wrong With 'Christian Nationalism?'

Vought argues that, no, there’s nothing wrong with Christian nationalism, so long as it’s defined in a circumscribed, non-threatening way.

“Once stripped of its superimposed liberal scar tissue, ‘Christian nationalism’ is actually a rather benign and useful description for those who believe in both preserving our country's Judeo-Christian heritage and making public policy decisions that are best for this country,” Vought writes.

This is a fig leaf. Christian nationalism as it actually operates — sometimes taking the modifier “white” at the beginning — endorses the racist “great replacement theory,” which posits that global elites are fueling non-white immigration to the United States to “replace” white people. The conspiracy theory holds that this upending of power relations will be done through demographic changes, and at the ballot box — which helps to explain CRA’s obsession with “secure borders” and “election integrity.”

For Vought, CRA’s issues of focus are not discrete policy battles. As he made clear recently on a right-wing podcast, he believes the country is in a Manichean war between the forces of good and evil. The battleground is so-called cultural issues, which, properly understood, are liberation movements to end racist and patriarchal oppression, but for Vought they must be opposed at every step of the way.

“These are the issues that if we don’t fight on we lose our civilization,” Vought said. “Critical race theory has to be front and center. Transgender contagion in our schools, impacting our daughters across the country, needs to be a front and center issue."

moment of truth pod]

vought wants to create an “army” of activists ready and waiting to serve in government who can be trusted to carry out a Christian nationalist agenda. And as former director of OMB, Vought has a unique insight into how to implement a whole-of-government approach to enacting a presidential directive, which is what he did with Trump’s initiative against so-called “critical race theory.”

“When the president says, ‘I want to not fund critical race theory through the federal government,’ that’s involving all of the agencies, and we have to then make sure that the president’s agenda is executed,” Vought said in the same interview [aud]

more broadly, Vought lamented that not enough religious right activists “operate on the basis of worldview.” As a result, less dogmatic “elite Christians” have adopted ideologies that “lack clarity at best” and are “damaging at worst.” Vought wants hardliners in the church and in the public sphere. In the context of running the government, that means replacing career staff with “ideologically committed individuals up and down the agencies.”

That idea aligns with the upcoming plans from the Manhattan Institute’s Christopher Rufo, who, along with Vought and CRA, spearheaded the broader backlash against critical race theory. As Rufo said in a recent interview:

As we approach 2024, I will be publishing a policy paper on “eliminating left-wing ideologies in the federal government,” using the power of the presidency to fundamentally reshape the bureaucracy with a six-part program targeting budget, content, personnel, grantmaking, and oversight. The idea is to centralize ideological control over the federal agencies in the White House and create a team at the Office of Management and Budget to enforce it. We could easily wipe out a significant portion of the infrastructure for the left-wing ideologies within the federal bureaucracy and within the network of federal grantees and contractors, which would shift American politics in the right direction.

These plans are not theoretical. CRA is one of many hard-right organizations involved in the Heritage Foundation’s 2025 Presidential Transition Project, a coalition of zealots determined to avoid some of the shortcomings and incompetencies of the Trump administration. (Vought is a former vice president of the organization’s grassroot and advocacy arm, Heritage Action for America.)

Vought has made no secret of what he would do if given the opportunity to serve as a Cabinet-level appointee in a Republican administration. He would attempt to eliminate or drastically curtail the Environmental Protection Agency, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, and others.

“We got to get after these agencies we talked about before, the administrative state, bigmoney, EPA, CDC, [and] NIH that's weaponized against the American people and we need to put them on the chopping block before we get to some other things down the road,” Vought said on Steve Bannon’s War Room.

A subsequent Supreme Court decision that drastically limited the EPA’s ability to regulate carbon emissions would likely serve as a template for Vought to dismantle broad swaths of the executive branch’s regulatory authority.

Vought’s antagonism toward the regulatory state extends to aspects of federal law enforcement, but only when those agencies are investigating conservatives for attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Right-wing podcaster Charlie Kirk asked Vought about the Department of Justice’s supposed persecution of conservatives, including his colleague Jeffrey Clark, and how he thought it should be addressed.  The long-term plan is to structurally change it,” Vought said. “We've got to deconstruct the state that is weaponized against the American people.”

Like other organizations that have sprung up to harness Trumpism in the last several years, CRA’s broad influence remains limited. But its success in promoting the backlash against critical race theory shows it shouldn’t be underestimated, even though that topic may not have had the electoral influence Vought and others have claimed. What’s undeniable is that Vought and his fellow travelers have sweeping ambitions and the zeal of a true believer. They are telling us exactly what they are going to do if they return to power at the federal level, and it is a chilling vision of theocracy and repression.

vid Citation From the June 27, 2022, edition of Real America's Voice's The Charlie Kirk Show

===

===

mofo

https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2020/01/28/hard-charging-white-house-budget-lawyer-middle-ukraine-decision-has-pushed-legal-limits-trump/

no lnx

ECONOMIC POLICY

Hard-charging White House budget lawyer in middle of Ukraine decision has pushed legal limits for Trump

Mark Paoletta’s actions to hold up aid to the country were among several disputed moves he’s made as OMB’s top lawyer

By Erica Werner, Jeff Stein and Josh Dawsey

January 28, 2020 a

From left, Robert D. Hogue, counsel for the commandant of the Marine Corps; Mark Paoletta, then-counsel for Vice President Pence; Supreme Court Justice Neil M. Gorsuch; and then-White House Counsel Donald McGahn in 2017 at the Marine Corps War Memorial in Arlington, Va. (Cpl. Christian Varney/Marine Corps/Alamy)

A hard-charging conservative lawyer little known to the public is responsible for executing some of the White House’s most divisive and legally aggressive moves, including the hold on Ukrainian aid now central to President Trump’s impeachment trial.

Mark Paoletta, general counsel at the White House Office of Management and Budget, signed off on the delay of security assistance to Ukraine, overruling the objections of some career staffers at the OMB and the Pentagon. The Government Accountability Office recently determined that the delay was unlawful.

Paoletta’s below-the-radar role in a decision key to Trump’s impeachment is just one example of how he has enabled the White House to stretch the legal limits of the executive branch — forcefully pushing forward the administration’s agenda but sometimes incurring a severe backlash in the process.

Paoletta helped craft the administration’s justification for adding new restrictions to billions in disaster aid to Puerto Rico, blowing past a congressional deadline and ignoring fierce criticisms from the island’s government.

He also provided the legal foundation for Trump’s move to redirect Pentagon money and use it to erect a wall on the border with Mexico. That legal maneuver was opposed by another top White House attorney, according to officials familiar with internal deliberations, and has been criticized by congressional lawmakers in both parties.

White House hold on Ukraine aid violated federal law, congressional watchdog says

Pentagon takes money from Puerto Rico, European projects to fund Trump’s wall

Paoletta similarly helped engineer the Trump administration’s maneuvering during last year’s government shutdown to minimize the impact, a move the GAO also said broke federal law.

Internally, Paoletta has battled with other White House attorneys who helped block a push to make him a part of Trump’s defense team for impeachment charges in the Senate, according to officials familiar with that process, although he himself did not push for the position. His approach has also rankled some career staffers at the OMB, with some officials saying it has caused career employees to feel dismissed or even demeaned.

The Washington Post interviewed more than a dozen current and former OMB employees, as well as numerous other White House officials and legal experts, who painted a portrait of Paoletta’s work as the top lawyer at the OMB. Many were granted anonymity to share details of internal deliberations.

Paoletta’s allies say he should be commended for pushing boundaries to help Trump secure wins.

“Will he try to maximize the extent to which the law can be used to advocate for his client’s position? Of course he will — that’s his job,” said Leonard Leo, head of the Federalist Society, a conservative legal organization allied with the administration.

Critics see an attorney who has provided dangerously expansive legal cover for Trump’s willingness to force the law to match his presidential whims.

His unapologetic approach may promise more conflicts ahead, with the administration preparing to release a budget that is likely to provoke another round of skirmishes with Congress and more fights over spending on foreign aid and the border wall.

“From the beginning of the Trump administration, there’s been a real pattern at OMB — from the authority of transfers to building the wall, to the moneys delayed for Puerto Rico — of stretching the budget law,” said Bill Hoagland, a Republican and former staff director on the Senate Budget Committee. “The OMB general counsel is supposed to give his best interpretation of the law to the political operatives there. And it appears to me that — at least on a lot of this — the politics are driving his interpretation, as opposed to the law driving the interpretation.”

Several administration officials defended Paoletta’s work. Two administration officials acknowledged that Paoletta had been forceful in seeking ways to implement the president’s agenda but that he has always relied on the backing of career staffers and stayed within the law.Paoletta is an ally of acting OMB director Russell Vought,and the two have worked closely together in implementing Trump’s agenda.

“Paoletta works well and closely with OMB staff, and his deputy, a career staffer appointed under the Obama administration, has never objected to his legal opinions,” said Rachel Semmel, an OMB spokeswoman.

Paoletta, 57, has spent decades as a conservative operative.

A native of Fairfield, Conn., he quickly gained prominence in conservative legal circles after graduating from Georgetown Law. In 2006, the Wall Street Journal described him as a “mysterious, rather strapping man … looking pretty powerful” while conferring privately with scores of lawmakers. It said of Paoletta: “Picture a square-jawed hockey coach pacing back and forth along the bench, barking at his players from time to time — except this guy’s wearing a suit and, well, whispering.”

Trump officials broke law by using entrance fees to keep parks open, watchdog says

Paoletta gained prominence when he helped guide Clarence Thomas through his 1991 Senate confirmation hearings, an effort that eventually secured Thomas’s lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court. Paoletta battled cancer shortly after Thomas’s confirmation and told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazettethe new Supreme Court justice called or visited him “every single day.” Paoletta later set up a website devoted to celebrating Thomas.

Paoletta later went to Capitol Hill, where he served as chief counsel for oversight and investigations with the House Energy and Commerce Committee. He led probes of Enron and Martha Stewart. Paoletta left the Hill to join various lobbying firms and did legal work related to Major League Baseball’s steroids scandal. He joined a “truth squad” for Sarah Palin, Sen. John McCain’s vice-presidential nominee, to defend her from criticisms in the media.

His professional approach crystallized as it hardened with experience.

“Grab the offense,” Paoletta wrote in one internal strategy memo on Thomas’s circuit court hearings kept by the George H.W. Bush Presidential Library. “Mold the candidate in our image; not the opposition’s.”

His style has led to some internal conflict.

Early in the Trump administration, Paoletta’s relationship with other White House officials fractured over another Supreme Court nominee, Neil M. Gorsuch, Trump’s first appointment to the high court. At the time, Paoletta was working as a counsel to Vice President Pence and wanted to be involved in preparing Gorsuch for his confirmation hearings, although some White House officials were against it. He had clashed at times with then-White House Counsel Donald McGahn, who was leading the process.

But his involvement proved critical, said Mike Davis, a former top counsel for Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) who worked with Paoletta during the Gorsuch confirmation. Paoletta asked “really tough questions that prepared the nominee for game day,” Davis said.

Gorsuch personally thanked Paoletta by name when he was sworn in. Paoletta left Pence’s office not long thereafter and joined the OMB at the beginning of 2018 at the invitation of Mick Mulvaney, who was heading the budget office at the time and is now acting White House chief of staff.

Paoletta’s legal moves at the OMB ignited multiple controversies, but public attention rarely fell on him. In the spring andsummer of 2018, he helped push forward a package of “rescissions” that would claw back billions in funding already approved by Congress but not yet spent. Paoletta helped develop the plan, according to government officials, relying on a little-known legal tool that had fallen into disuse. It met bipartisan opposition and failed in the Senate.

Within months Paoletta was involved in another showdown with Congress, this time over funding for Trump’s border wall.

During the record-long government shutdown a year ago, Paoletta worked with federal agencies to figure out how to limit the impact of the shutdown on government services, including by keeping many of the nation’s parks open. That led the Government Accountability Office, an investigative agency that reports to Congress, to accuse the Interior Department of violating the law by using recreation fees to keep national parks running in absence of congressional appropriations. Paoletta brushed the GAO criticism aside, arguing the office, as a legislative-branch agency, has no jurisdiction and can be ignored.

“That’s pretty atypical,” said Ilona Cohen, who served as OMB general counsel during the final years of the Obama administration. “It’s not that reasonable people can’t disagree, but it’s pretty atypical for them just to say we’re not going to listen to GAO.”

As the shutdown ended, Paoletta pushed for a controversial interpretation of the law that would allow the White House to redirect military funds so that Trump could build his border wall, over the objections of Republicans and Democrats.

Internally, White House Counsel Pat Cipollone argued against what Paoletta proposed and warned that it could be illegal, according to an administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal debates. Paoletta moved forward anyway, with Trump’s support. The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel also signed off on the decision, but multiple Republicans voted against the White House’s move in a congressional resolution later vetoed by Trump.

The Ukraine aid delay may be where Paoletta’s influence has most clearly emerged. He worked closely throughout the saga with Vought, administration officials said, signing off on the language holding up the funds and working with attorneys at the Pentagon.

Some Defense Department officials warned against delaying the assistance, however, according to testimony in the House impeachment inquiry. During the inquiry, Paoletta reviewed OMB emails and helped draft talking points defending the administration’s position, according to an administration official and internal documents. Paoletta’s name appears dozens of times in batches of emails about the Ukraine decision released under Freedom of Information Act requests, though usually the content is redacted. Paoletta also reviewed the redactions, the administration official said.

Paoletta and other political appointees overruled concerns expressed by career staffers who feared that delaying the Ukraine money might result in a violation of the Impoundment Control Act, a Nixon-era law that limits the ability of the executive branch to change Congress’s spending decisions, according to congressional testimony and people briefed on the actions.

Earlier this month, the GAO ruled that the delay did violate that law. And the GAO criticized Paoletta’s justifications for the delay, which he laid out in a nine-page memo in December asserting that OMB’s actions were a routine “exercise of its statutory authority.”

That claim, the GAO said, had “no basis in law.”

Semmel, the OMB spokeswoman, disputed the agency’s findings.

“We disagree with GAO’s opinion,” she said. “OMB uses its apportionment authority to ensure taxpayer dollars are properly spent consistent with the president’s priorities and with the law.”

Among the career staffers flagging concerns about the Ukraine delay was Mark Sandy, a senior OMB official who was the only agency employee to testify for impeachment investigators about the Ukraine matter. Multiple top political appointees had defied congressional subpoenas.

Paoletta has repeatedly expressed skepticism about Sandy, according to people who have heard his comments and said they were part of a pattern of coming into conflict with career staffers. Sandy’s attorney declined to comment.

Paoletta has suggested that career employees who are not moving quickly enough are seeking to undermine the president’s agenda, according to administration officials and others familiar with his actions.

In November, some of Paoletta’s allies were pushing for him to take a lead role in Trump’s impeachment defense. Clarence Thomas’s wife,Ginni Thomas, released a statement to the Washington Examiner in support of the idea, even though Paoletta had never sought the role. Administration officials said Mulvaney wanted Paoletta on the impeachment team as well, but Cipollone was opposed.

Paoletta was ultimately blocked. He has remained at the budget agency while Cipollone and others have taken the public stage defending some of the legal moves that Paoletta helped orchestrate.

===

Mark Paoletta and Michael Pack are co-editors of the forthcoming book "Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words," taken from more than 25 hours of interviews with Justice Thomas conducted for the documentary of the same name. Pack produced and directed that film as well as over 15 other nationally broadcast documentaries. Paoletta is an attorney and worked on Justice Thomas’ confirmation.

LAW

Clarence Thomas: Expanding The Administrative State Comes At The Expense Of The Constitution

MICHAEL PACK AND MARK PAOLETTA

JUNE 23, 2022

===

Mark Paoletta

@MarkPaoletta

Partner

@SchaerrJaffeLLP

I Sr Fellow

@AmRenewCtr

I Trump OMB General CounseI I Chief Oversight Counsel, Congress I Asst WH Counsel Bush 41 I Counsel to VP Pence

Senate Judiciary Republicans

@SenJudiciaryGOP

News and updates from the Senate Judiciary Committee Republicans | Ranking Member

@ChuckGrassley

House Judiciary GOP

@JudiciaryGOP

Official Twitter for the House Committee on the Judiciary, Republicans | Est. 1813 | Ranking Member,

@Jim_Jordan

https://twitter.com/MarkPaoletta/status/1521240163896242176

left hates ct b/c blk conserv never bowed

// case wife head of aclu chapter?! judge reinhardt sp

out of order ok's

triggers left expose racism, hate ginni b/c woman, no reason to recuse

House Judiciary GOP

@JudiciaryGOP

· Apr 27

===

splc sept 2019

no lnx

Right-wing attorney, writer and legal analyst Ken Klukowski has landed a position in the Trump administration in the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB).

Klukowski has a long history with right-wing organizations, including anti-LGBT hate groups. The OMB is one of the most influential offices in government. It reports directly to the president and determines how money is spent on everything from national security to the environment. The OMB ensures White House policies are carried out across federal agencies.

He is a special counsel reporting to Mark Paoletta, OMB general counsel,The New York Post’s Jon Levine tweeted recently.

Ken Klukowski (right) talks with Steve Bannon on "Breitbart News Daily" during the Republican National Convention in 2016 in Cleveland. (Photo by Ben Jackson/Getty Images for SiriusXM)

Klukowski joins OMB staff with their own right-wing connections. OMB’s director is Mick Mulvaney, who is also acting White House chief of staff. Mulvaney has tea party ties and was a co-founder of the hard-right House Freedom Caucus. [scott perry] Acting OMB Director Russell Vought is an ally of Vice President Mike Pence and is a former vice president of Heritage Action, the lobbying arm of the anti-LGBT Heritage Foundation. As chief counsel and assistant to Pence, Paoletta was “very involved” in the nomination of Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch,according to CNN.

When reached by Hatewatch via email, OMB press secretary Chase Jennings passed along this comment from someone he described as being close to Klukowski: “It is well-known that Ken has a strong work history defending religious freedom and the unborn with several organizations – including Family Research Council.”

Klukowski has played an important role in writing amicus briefs for right-wing issues before the Supreme Court, including opposition to the Affordable Care Act and gun control measures. He was one of the attorneys who filed an amicus brief in support of Colorado baker Jack C. Phillips in theMasterpiece Cakeshop case. Phillips refused to make a wedding cake for a same-sex couple, citing his religious beliefs. His attorneys argued that the First Amendment gave him the right to refuse service on free speech grounds. (The high court narrowly ruled for the baker, citing “hostility” to religion by the Colorado Civil Rights Commission.)...

Mark Paoletta is an American attorney who served as general counsel to the Office of Management and Budget from January 8, 2018, to January 20, 2021. Prior to his post, Paoletta served as chief counsel and assistant to Vice President Mike Pence from January 20, 2017, to January 5, 2018.^[1] Paoletta was a lawyer specializing in representing clients in congressional investigations.^[2][3] THAT'LL ^BE ^HANDY

• :{:{Education:(style="display:table-cell"):}::(style="display:table-cell;padding-left:0px;padding-right:0.5em"):}:
• :{2:(style="display:table-cell;padding-left:0px;padding-right:0.5em"):}::{Career}:
• :{3:(style="display:table-cell;padding-left:0px;padding-right:0.5em"):}::{External links}:
• :{4:(style="display:table-cell;padding-left:0px;padding-right:0.5em"):}::{References}:

Education[

Paoletta received a bachelor's degree from Duquesne University and his J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center.^[4]

Career[

Paoletta began his career as Chief Counsel for Oversight and Investigations for the House Energy and Commerce Committee from September 1997 until January 2007.^[5]

During his tenure as Chief Counsel for Oversight and Investigations, Paoletta managed nearly 200 investigative hearings.^[5] In a report released in February 2007, Congressman Joe Barton (R-Texas), Ranking Member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, released a compilation of the Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee's work from 2001 through 2006 that served "as a road map through many of the great government and corporate scandals of this decade."^[6][7]

In 2007, Paoletta became partner at the Washington, D.C. law firm DLA Piper and partner in the firm's Federal Law and Policy practice. He has represented numerous companies and individuals, including a major hedge funds and foreign and domestic banks, according to Bisnow Media.^[8] Paoletta has represented Scott Jennings, a former Special Assistant to President George W. Bush, in connection with the various investigations into the firings of U.S. Attorneys. In 2007, Paoletta appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee as counsel for Scott Jennings, who had been directed by President Bush to not answer certain questions based on an assertion of executive privilege. In a letter to Chairman Leahy and Senator Specter, White House Counsel Fred F. Fielding indicated that President George W. Bush would assert executive privilege regarding Jennings' testimony. The letter indicates that Jennings was made aware of the President's decision and was directed not to provide any testimony covered by the assertion.^[9]

In November 2007, Paoletta was selected to serve as outside counsel to the U.S. House of Representatives Select Committee to Investigate Voting Irregularities of August 2, 2007.^[10][11][12]

Paoletta served as Assistant Counsel to the President during the George H. W. Bush administration, where he played a key role in the successful confirmation effort of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. ^[5] Paoletta subsequently created a website to promote Thomas's autobiography,**My Grandfather's Son**, as well as positive stories by others about Thomas.^[13]

Paoletta's work representing strength trainer Brian McNamee in the 2008 United States Congressional hearing on Roger Clemens was highlighted in the book, American Icon: The Fall of Roger Clemens and the Rise of Steroids in America's Pastime by Teri Thompson, Nathaniel Vinton, Michael O'Keeffe, and Christian Red.^[14]

Paoletta's work in the Enron investigation was highlighted in the book Conspiracy of Fools: A True Story, by Kurt Eichenwald.^[15] Paoletta wrote about his work on the Committee in a February 5, 2007 article in Roll Call.^[16] Paoletta also co-authored a piece entitled "Storm Clouds on the Horizon – Congressional Investigations 101."^[17]

On January 5, 2017, Paoletta along with then Vice President-elect Mike Pence, Reince Priebus, Steve Bannon, and Don McGahn helped Donald Trump vet Judge Neil Gorsuch to fill the vacant seat on the Supreme Court.^[1]

On January 25, 2017, Paoletta was named as chief counsel and assistant to the Vice President.^[18] In January 2018, Paoletta left the Vice President's office to become the General Counsel for the Office of Management and Budget.

External links[

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Mark Paoletta.

• George H. W. Bush Library files on Clarence Thomas nomination, with extensive material contributed by Paoletta

References[

1. ^ :{Jump up to::(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^a ^b Liptak, Adam (February 6, 2017). "How Trump Chose His Supreme Court Nominee". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved February 10, 2017.
2. ^ Sarasohn, Judy (November 30, 2006). "Everett to Take Helm at Black Think Tank" – via washingtonpost.com.
3. ^ CNN, Elizabeth Landers and Jamie Gangel (January 5, 2018). "Exclusive: Top Pence aides quietly depart in new year | CNN Politics". www.cnn.com.
4. ^ "National Journal (June 21, 2003) "The Hill People - House Energy and Commerce Committee":{"}:.[dead ^link]
5. ^ :{Jump up to::(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^a ^b ^c "DLA Piper, Global Law Firm - United States - Our People - Mark R. Pao…". archive.is. January 21, 2013. Archived from the original on January 21, 2013.
6. ^ "News Center". Energy and Commerce Committee.[dead ^link]
7. ^ House Energy and Commerce Committee Republicans (February 7, 2007) "Oversight & Investigations Subcommittee Accomplishments" Archived July 23, 2011, at the Wayback Machine
8. ^ Legal Bisnow (March 18, 2009) "Road Tripper"[dead ^link]
9. ^ White House Counsel to the President, Fred Fielding (August 1, 2007) Archived November 4, 2009, at the Wayback Machine
10. ^ Mike Pence (December 4, 2007) "Pence and Delahunt Announce Staff for Select Committee" Archived June 27, 2009, at the Wayback Machine
11. ^ Section-by-Section of Rule Changes – 111th Congress Archived January 5, 2010, at the Wayback Machine
12. ^ Lattman, Peter (September 28, 2006). "The Mysterious, Strapping Whisperer". Wall Street Journal.
13. ^ "MyGrandfathersSon.com". Archived from the original on September 5, 2008. Retrieved August 1, 2018.
14. ^ Thompson, Teri; Vinton, Nathaniel; O'Keeffe, Michael; Red, Christian (May 11, 2009). "American Icon". The New York Times.
15. ^ USA Today (July 26, 2002) "Rep. Tauzin Turns Business Scandals Into Must-See TV"
16. ^ Paoletta, Mark (February 2, 2007). "Oversight Never Ended at Energy and Commerce" – via Roll Call.
17. ^ The Advisor (Spring 2008) "Congressional Investigations: Storm Clouds on the Horizon" Archived February 14, 2011, at the Wayback Machine
18. ^ "Vice President Mike Pence Announces Andrea Thompson as National Security Advisor". whitehouse.gov. January 25, 2017. Archived from the original on January 25, 2017. Retrieved February 10, 2017.

Categories: 

• Living people
• Duquesne University alumni
• Georgetown University Law Center alumni
• American political consultants
• Trump administration personnel

===

mark R. Paoletta | Schaerr Jaffe LLPhttps://www.schaerr-jaffe.com › mark-r-paoletta

Mark Paoletta represents clients in connection with government investigations, with an emphasis on congressional investigations and hearings.

Mark Paoletta - Wikipediahttps://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Mark_Paoletta

Mark Paoletta is an American attorney who served as general counsel to the Office of Management and Budget from January 8, 2018, to January 20, 2021.

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Mark Paoletta - Partner - Schaerr Jaffe LLP | LinkedInhttps://www.linkedin.com › mark-paoletta-5b31403b

Washington, District of Columbia, United States · Partner · Schaerr Jaffe LLP

Chief Counsel for Oversight & Investigations. Energy & Commerce Committee, U.S. House of Representatives. Apr 1996 - Jan 2007 10 years 10 months.

Missing: OMB ‎| Must include: OMB

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I Trump OMB General CounseI I Chief Oversight Counsel, Congress I Asst WH Counsel Bush 41 I Counsel to VP Pence ... Mark Paoletta Retweeted.

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ggl 6 22

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Mark Paoletta served as a lawyer in the George H.W. Bush White House Counsel's office and worked on the confirmation of Justice Thomas.

Missing: society ‎| Must include: society

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Mark Paoletta (@MarkPaoletta) / Twitterhttps://twitter.com › markpaoletta

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PREVIEW

5:05

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Jan 28, 2020 — Mark Paoletta, general counsel at the White House Office of Management ... head of the Federalist Society, a conservative legal organization ...

Commentary | The Federalist Society  https://fedsoc.org › commentary › contributor=patricia-...

Spectrum Policy in the 5G Era · Adam Candeub, Harold Feld, Patricia J. Paoletta, Danielle Thumann. This webinar will focus on spectrum policy in the 5G era ...

Past Events | The Federalist Societyhttps://fedsoc.org › past-events › speaker=patricia-paoletta

Patricia J. Paoletta; Alden Abbott; Wayne Abernathy; J. Christian Adams; Jeffrey Addicott; Steven Aden; Jonathan Adler; Asheesh Agarwal; Karin Agness

Mark Paoletta - Schaerr Jaffe LLP (March 2021-), Partnerhttps://www.legistorm.com › person › bio › Paoletta_Mar...

See more about Mark Paoletta including contact information, congressional salary, ... Membership: Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies ...

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