mark paoletta bak

===

SEE MAIN

MERRI OK

cfpb mo fo Mark Paoletta, the CFPB’s chief legal officer

SEE GINNI CLARENCE

SEE LEO

ORIGIN SMOKEY JOE BARTON

killed cfbp

SEE VOUGHT OMB DOGE

FAIL NOT FIRED 4 25

DAVIS ARTL III POW

bad code 8 22

see vast RW conspir

reps ginni ~ Jan 6

he says he is on clerk listserv

cassidy H liar?! nope ntbcw passantino

when did he work for pence, why stopped? 2018

===

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

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RWW

12/15/2025

Kyle Mantyla

Colby Hall @ Mediaite: Trump Blames Tragic Death of Rob Reiner and Wife on ‘TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME’

President Donald Trump seized on a shocking and still-developing report about the deaths of filmmaker Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele Reiner, using the moment to settle political scores rather than acknowledge the gravity of the allegations.

Liz Lykins @ The Roys Report: Pastors accuse Greg Locke of spiritual abuse, financial mismanagement

Two married pastors at Greg Locke’s central Tennessee church have resigned, claiming the founding pastor created a spiritually abusive and manipulative culture.

Josh Kovensky @ Talking Points Memo: New York’s Young Republicans Beg for More, But Fret About a ‘MAGA Civil War’

One year in, and the club of young Republicans that touts itself as the most MAGA of them all isn’t happy. They’ve gotten what they’ve wanted, and it still isn’t enough. If last year’s iteration of their annual gala was a preview for what life under a second Trump administration would be — ubiquitous authoritarian gestures, Christian nationalism ascendant, and a growing global far-right front with Washington at the center — then this year’s event showed how even some of the president’s most die-hard supporters are pushing for even more.

Sophia Cai @ Politico: The lawyer behind Vought’s bureaucracy crackdown

The Trump administration’s boldest moves against the bureaucracy share a common thread: Mark Paoletta’s signature.

Warren Throckmorton @ Baptist Press: Is it time to retire the term ‘Christian nationalism’?

As if exasperated by a quarrel during Thanksgiving dinner, columnist Michael Sean Winters pleads with whoever will listen: “Can everyone please stop talking about ‘Christian nationalism?’”

Anna Merlan @ Mother Jones: In Her New Media Ascent, Erika Kirk Whitewashes Her Husband’s Legacy

In recent appearances, Charlie Kirk’s widow has hardly been asked about Turning Point USA’s right-wing mission.

Ali Breland @ The Atlantic: I Watched 12 Hours of Nick Fuentes

The white-supremacist influencer is laying the groundwork to go even bigger.

Greg Sargent @ The New Republic: Inside Stephen Miller’s Dark Plot to Build a MAGA Terror State

He is descended from Russian Jews—you know, the kind of people who were once denounced as alien and unassimilable. Today, his project is to unleash government persecution of those he deems alien and unassimilable. How far will Miller’s sadistic designs go?

Jason Wilson @ The Guardian: ‘Just disgraceful’: outcry as Heritage thinktank appoints far-right figure to key post

Scott Yenor, who has offered views on women, marriage and LGBTQ rights, helped to found secretive fraternal order.

Anna Maria Barry-Jester and Brett Murphy @ ProPublica: Trump Officials Celebrated With Cake After Slashing Aid. Then People Died of Cholera

Trump officials were told that cutting aid to South Sudan would exacerbate a deadly cholera epidemic. They did so anyway.

---

REF

Sophia Cai12/12/2025

If Russ Vought sees his quest to dismantle the federal bureaucracy as a race against time, his lawyer sidekick Mark Paoletta is holding the stopwatch.

“Political capital is not the scarcest resource. You can always build it. Time is our scarcest resource,” Vought, the Office of Management and Budget director, said last week at the Reagan National Defense Forum. “That’s why we’re going at it with everything we’ve got and trying to bulldoze the bureaucracy where it exists.”

Vought, the point man for the administration’s efforts to slash the federal bureaucracy, has spent months assembling a team of legal, budget and political operatives who share his view that the administrative state is less a governing structure than an obstacle course.

Paoletta is at the center of that team, paving the legal road for just about every major action Vought has taken, from withholding congressionally appropriated funds to yanking back pay from furloughed workers – not to mention Trump passion projects like the construction of the Trumphiant Arch, according to public letters and four current and former officials who have worked with Paoletta. Like others in this story, they were granted anonymity to speak candidly.

In addition to being OMB’s general counsel, Paoletta also performs the duties of the administrator of OMB’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs – a powerful perch from which each federal regulation is shaped before it is finalized. In an unusual dual arrangement, Paoletta is also the chief legal officer at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

OMB declined to comment. The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

Those who have worked with him describe Paoletta as deeply loyal, meticulous with statutory text and unafraid of confrontation, qualities that make him indispensable to Vought, who is keen to dismantle as much of the regulatory state from the inside as he can.

The two men, who bond over their love of the Yankees, according to a colleague, have grown close owing to their years in the trenches fighting to shrink the federal government.

“Russ and Mark developed a very close friendship and working relationship over the first term, through a lot of very difficult fights,” said Joe Grogan, who worked with both men in the Trump White House. “They stayed in touch, shared learnings and books and research between terms, so their friendship - born out of a working relationship - is based on deep loyalty, respect and a set of shared ideological values.”

Paoletta, who declined to comment, has advanced sweeping views of the president’s power over Congress, including authoring a memo one week after the inauguration that ordered a pause on all federal spending. Though the memo was quickly yanked back, it landed like a bombshell at virtually every agency and was a harbinger of spending fights to come.

Inside the administration, Paoletta has become known as the lawyer willing to test limits rather than avoid them – sometimes going further than some in the White House or Justice Department prefer, according to three current and former officials.

Vought has relied on Paoletta’s willingness to push the boundaries of what is legal to assert control over federal spending, from the freeze memo that sent agencies scrambling to later confrontations with the Government Accountability Office, the Federal Reserve and other regulators.

Paoletta is no stranger to conflict. During the first Trump term, when he served as OMB’s general counsel, he often advocated for a broad interpretation of executive authority and previewed some of the little-known tools that would become a hallmark of the second term.

A longtime conservative lawyer and former chief counsel to Vice President Mike Pence, Paoletta has spent his career navigating and challenging the conventional boundaries of federal authority.

And conservative legal activist Mike Davis described having “gone into battle alongside” Paoletta “in the most crucial fights.”

“Paoletta’s biggest impact is advising President Trump and OMB Director Russ Vought how to successfully win spending fights with Congress and the courts, Davis said in a statement to POLITICO.

Trump’s transition team briefly considered him for attorney general, two people, one of whom was involved in the transition, told POLITICO.

“Mark isn’t going to go angle for a better job behind Russ’s back. And Russ isn’t gonna take advantage of Mark and hide information from him,” Grogan said.

A memo Paoletta authored in September of last year previewed many of the thorniest issues that would come between Congress and the Trump administration, which has sought numerous times to delay, claw back, redirect or otherwise just not spend money on policies it doesn’t agree with. That memo asserted that presidents possess inherent constitutional authority to impound federal funds and argued that “the power of impoundment is one such executive power vested in the President alone by Article II.”

Indeed, his imprint was felt even before Vought’s Senate confirmation. On January 27, 2025, OMB issued a memo - written by Paoletta - ordering agencies to “temporarily pause all activities related to obligation or disbursement of all federal financial assistance.”

The directive sent agencies scrambling and triggered alarm inside the West Wing, according to two of the officials. It was rescinded within 48 hours. “Mark almost lost his job for that. They went and released this memo without consulting the West Wing. He got ahead of his skis and didn’t follow procedure,” said a person familiar with the matter granted anonymity to describe the events. A second person familiar with the incident, also granted anonymity to discuss the episode, called it an example of growing pains in the early days of the White House noting that Elon Musk’s cost-cutting squad, DOGE, was a complicating factor.

But the signal was unmistakable: Vought’s OMB intended to probe the boundaries of its authority. A senior administration official granted anonymity to discuss internal processes disputed the notion that the West Wing did not know about the memo, adding that White House senior policy advisor May Mailman was looped in as the memo was developed.

Paoletta is also heavily invested in the fight against the Government Accountability Office — a group that he frequently derides as the “JV Congress” — penning three letters batting down the GAO, including one instructing the Department of Transportation to disregard a GAO ruling that the Trump administration violated the law by freezing electric vehicle funding.

When Trump turned up the pressure on the Federal Reserve over the summer, Paoletta wrote a letter from Vought to Jerome Powell, saying the federal reserve chair was not in compliance with the approved construction plan for renovations of the Federal Reserve’s Washington, DC headquarters. He joined an onsite inspection the following month alongside Vought and President Donald Trump.

On Oct. 3, 2025, an OMB memo bearing Paoletta’s signature opened the door to withholding back pay for federal workers furloughed during the government shutdown, an effort to squeeze Democrats.

During the shutdown, Paoletta also helped Vought navigate what the director once called “budgetary Twister,” identifying creative ways to move federal money around to pay troops and other programs the administration desired to keep afloat.

Paoletta’s influence extends beyond OMB. Because Vought served for nine months as acting head of the CFPB, Paoletta simultaneously served as the bureau’s chief legal officer. In April 2025, Paoletta penned a memo saying the agency “will focus its enforcement and supervision resources on pressing threats to consumers” – including shifting resources away from enforcement and monitoring that states can perform.

Paoletta’s fingerprints are also on earlier iterations of this philosophy. During Trump’s first term, after joining OMB from Pence’s office, he helped defend Trump’s expansive executive-branch interpretations.

And a day before Trump left office in 2021, Paoletta authored a letter to the House Budget Committee that previewed many of the little known executive-branch actions like pocket rescissions that would inform OMB’s actions in Trump’s second term.

Between Trump terms, Paoletta joined the Center for Renewing America, where he criticized President Joe Biden’s decision to freeze more than $1 billion in border wall funding and testified against legislation strengthening the Impoundment Control Act, arguing its provisions would lead to “micromanaging of the daily operations of the executive branch.”

“They have wet dreams of these moments,” one of the officials said of Vought and Paoletta’s focus on seizing the opportunity to enact change.

“In many ways, they’ve been more constrained than they’ve wanted to be. They feel like they have a mandate to conduct the most conservative and consequential politics of the administration, and they take that seriously. But quite frankly extreme change is not something Washington is used to, or that the West Wing wants to stomach every single day.”

*Kyle Cheney contributed to this report.

===

see othr node for all nyer

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.

an 4 25

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.

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.

IFrame Content

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.

an 4 25

===

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.”

---

===

oil ptng cigars leo

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 andThe 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.

Project 2025 partners celebrate Supreme Court ruling on presidential immunity

Written by Jack Wheatley, Jacina Hollins-Borges & Sophie Lawton

Published 07/02/24

Project 2025 partners are taking a victory lap after the Supreme Court’s July 1 decision in Trump v. United States, which ruled that “former President Donald Trump is entitled to immunity from federal prosecution for official actions he took while in office, a landmark decision at the height of an election season that further delays the start of his criminal trial in Washington, D.C.”

Project 2025 is a comprehensive transition plan to guide a potential second Trump administration with policy proposals and staffing recommendations led by right-wing think tank The Heritage Foundation, which joined other members of the project’s advisory board in celebrating the ruling on presidential immunity as a win for Trump and a defeat for Democrats.

Last week, Project 2025 partners also praised the Supreme Court decision overturning Chevron deference in a ruling that will restrict federal agencies' regulatory abilities and make it easier for corporations to challenge environmental protections, climate action, and rules that protect workers or regulate drugs and financial practices, among other issues..

* On former Trump adviser Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts marked the decision as “vital,” and claimed, “We are in the process of the second American Revolution.” Real America’s Voice, *War Room*, [7/2/24]

- Heritage senior legal fellow Sarah Parshall Perry posted that the Trump ruling is “the one the nation waited for. Never in American history has the high court weighed in on the scope of criminal immunity for presidents over their conduct in office. Today's decision was historic.” She added that “the presumption of immunity for certain official acts applies to all occupants of the Oval Office. Politicizing the Justice system against a president sets a dangerous precedent, and SCOTUS put some much-needed guardrails in place today.” Twitter/X, [4/1/24]

* The American Center for Law and Justice posted, “BREAKING: In a major ruling, the Supreme Court has agreed with our amicus brief that Presidents are entitled to immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts in office.” Twitter/X, [7/1/24]

- Former Trump adviser Stephen Miller, president of America First Legal, wrote that the decision is “another setback for the Democrat Party’s illegal and unconstitutional crusade to outlaw dissent, jail the opposition leader, impose authoritarian rule, replace democracy with the deep state and liberty with leftwing oligarchy.” Twitter/X, [7/1/24]

- The Center for Renewing America posted a video of senior fellow Mark Paoletta reacting to the decision on Newsmax, saying, “It’s a great day for President Trump… it’s an even better day for the U.S. Constitution." Twitter/X, [7/2/24]

- The Center for Renewing America’s official statement said the ruling also “confirms that immunity” for senior fellow Jeff Clark, who was indicted alongside Trump for efforts to overturn the 2020 election in Georgia.CRA wrote: “We have vigorously insisted from the very beginning that Mr. Clark is entitled to immunity from prosecution and from bar discipline. The Supreme Court’s decision today confirms that immunity in resounding and unmistakable terms. Now the Fulton County District Attorney and the D.C. Bar Disciplinary Process must immediately dismiss all charges against Clark and bring their wrongful prosecutions of him to an end.” PBS NewsHour, [8/8/23; Twitter/X, 7/1/24]

- Jenny Beth Martin of Tea Party Patriots wrote, “Today’s SCOTUS ruling is another win for former President Trump, and a big defeat for the Democrats who have been weaponizing the government against Trump to interfere in this year’s election.” She thanked the Supreme Court “for recognizing the importance of presidential immunity” and added, “This is why your vote is so important.” Twitter/X, [7/1/24]

- Family Research Council’s Washington Watch podcast hosted Rep. Eric Burlison (R-MO) and Liberty University’s Phill Kline to celebrate the immunity decision. Burlison said, “The court, I felt like, made a very common-sense ruling that the president has immunity when performing the duties of his office. It just so happens that some of those duties include making sure that there’s no voter fraud that occurred in the previous election.” Kline said the Supreme Court concluded “that the president, in the exercise of his constitutional and statutory responsibilities, needs to be immune from zealous or overreaching oversight by the other branches of government, including that of Congress and even the courts, as well as a prosecutor who might take a law and try to weaponize it against the president to try to deter certain behavior.” Family Research Council, *Washington Watch*, [7/1/24, 7/1/24]

### Project 2025 partners join right-wing media and climate deniers to celebrate SCOTUS decision overturning Chevron deference

06/28/24

### Fox's chief political anchor interviewed the architect of Project 2025. Here are some of the details he failed to mention.

09/19/24

### Fox praises “pro-worker” Trump despite his anti-overtime record

09/13/24

new

wapo

If Trump Wins, His Allies Want Lawyers Who Will Bless a More Radical Agenda

Politically appointed lawyers sometimes frustrated Donald J. Trump’s ambitions. His allies are planning to install more aggressive legal gatekeepers if he regains the White House.

Top Trump allies, including Russell Vought, seated in the middle, have come to view the Republican Party’s legal elites — even leaders with impeccable conservative credentials — as out of step.Credit...Andrew Harnik/Associated Press

Jonathan SwanCharlie SavageMaggie Haberman

By Jonathan SwanCharlie Savage and Maggie Haberman

Nov. 1, 2023

Close allies of Donald J. Trump are preparing to populate a new administration with a more aggressive breed of right-wing lawyer, dispensing with traditional conservatives who they believe stymied his agenda in his first term.

The allies have been drawing up lists of lawyers they view as ideologically and temperamentally suited to serve in a second Trump administration. Their aim is to reduce the chances that politically appointed lawyers would frustrate a more radical White House agenda — as they sometimes did when Mr. Trump was in office, by raising objections to his desires for certain harsher immigration policies or for greater personal control over the Justice Department, among others.

Now, as Trump allies grow more confident in an election victory next fall, several outside groups, staffed by former Trump officials who are expected to serve in senior roles if he wins, have begun parallel personnel efforts. At the start of Mr. Trump’s term, his administration relied on the influential Federalist Society, the conservative legal network whose members filled key executive branch legal roles and whose leader helped select his judicial nominations. But in a striking shift, Trump allies are building new recruiting pipelines separate from the Federalist Society.

These back-room discussions were described by seven people with knowledge of the planning, most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations. In addition, The New York Times interviewed former senior lawyers in the Trump administration and other allies who have remained close to the former president and are likely to serve in a second term.

The interviews reveal a significant break within the conservative movement. Top Trump allies have come to view their party’s legal elites — even leaders with seemingly impeccable conservative credentials — as out of step with their movement.

“The Federalist Society doesn’t know what time it is,” said Russell T. Vought, a former senior Trump administration official who runs a think tank with close ties to the former president. He argued that many elite conservative lawyers had proved to be too timid when, in his view, the survival of the nation is at stake.

Such comments may surprise those who view the Federalist Society as hard-line conservatives. But the move away from the group reflects the continuing evolution of the Republican Party in the Trump era and an effort among those now in his inner circle to prepare to take control of the government in a way unseen in modern presidential history.

Two of the allies leading the push are Stephen Miller, Mr. Trump’s former senior adviser, and John McEntee, another trusted aide whom the then-president had empowered in 2020 to rid his administration of political appointees perceived as disloyal or obstructive.

The nonprofit groups they are involved in are barred by law from supporting a candidate, and none of the work they are doing is explicitly tied to Mr. Trump. But Mr. Miller and Mr. McEntee remain close to the former president and are expected to have his ear in any second term.

Mr. Trump himself, focused for now on multiple criminal and civil cases against him, appears disengaged from these efforts. But he made clear throughout his term in office that he was infuriated by many of the lawyers who worked for him, ranting about how they were “weak” and “stupid.”

By the end of his term, lawyers he appointed early in his administration had angered the White House by raising legal concerns about various policy proposals. But Mr. Trump reserved his deepest rage for the White House and Justice Department legal officials who largely rejected his attempts to overturn the 2020 election, according to people who spoke with him. Casting about for alternative lawyers who would tell him what he wanted to hear, Mr. Trump turned for that effort to a group of outside lawyers, many of whom have since been indicted in Georgia.

People close to the former president say they are seeking out a different type of lawyer committed to his “America First” ideology and willing to endure the personal and professional risks of association with Mr. Trump. They want lawyers in federal agencies and in the White House who are willing to use theories that more establishment lawyers would reject to advance his cause. This new mind-set matches Mr. Trump’s declaration that he is waging a “final battle” against demonic “enemies” populating a “deep state” within the government that is bent on destroying America.

ImageStephen Miller stands at a lectern, gesturing with his hands as he speaks into a thin microphone.

Several of Mr. Trump’s key allies — including Stephen Miller, his former senior adviser — are drawing up lists of lawyers they plan to hire if the former president returns to the White House in 2025.Credit...Cooper Neill for The New York Times

There were a few lawyers like that in Mr. Trump’s administration, but they were largely outnumbered, outranked and often blocked by more traditional legal conservatives. For those who went to work for Mr. Trump but grew disillusioned, the push to systematically install Trump loyalists who may see the law as malleable across a second Trump administration has been a cause for alarm.

John Mitnick was appointed by Mr. Trump as general counsel of the Homeland Security Department in 2018. But he was fired in 2019 as part of a broad purge of the agency’s leaders — whom Mr. Trump had installed — and was replaced by one of Mr. Miller’s allies.

Mr. Mitnick predicted that “no qualified attorneys with integrity will have any desire to serve as political appointees” in a second Trump term, and that instead it would be “predominantly staffed by opportunists who will rubber-stamp whatever Trump and his senior White House staff want to do.”

In many ways, the Federalist Society has become synonymous with the Republican establishment, and its members’ most common interests — including pushing an originalist interpretation of the Constitution and federal statutes — can be distinct from the whims and grievances of Mr. Trump himself. Its membership dues are low, and politically ambitious Republican lawyers of various stripes routinely join it or attend its events. Many of the more aggressive lawyers the Trump allies are eyeing have their own links to it.

But after both the legal policy fights inside the Trump administration and the refusal by the group’s most respected luminaries to join Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, the phrase “Federalist Society” became a slur for some on the Trump-aligned right, a shorthand for a kind of lawyerly weakness.

Hard-right allies of Mr. Trump increasingly speak of typical Federalist Society members as “squishes” too worried about maintaining their standing in polite society and their employment prospects at big law firms to advance their movement’s most contentious tactics and goals.

“Trump and his administration learned the hard way in their first term that the Democrats are playing for keeps,” said Mike Davis, a former congressional aide who helped shepherd judicial nominees during the Trump administration and has become a close ally of the 45th president. “And in the Trump 47 administration, they need much stronger attorneys who do not care about elite opinion who will fight these key cultural battles.”

Image

The chilling of the relationship between Mr. Trump and Leonard Leo, a leader of the Federalist Society, embodies a broader rift between Mr. Trump and conservative legal elites.Credit...T.J. Kirkpatrick for The New York Times

A Fraught Union

When Mr. Trump wrested the 2016 Republican presidential nomination from the party’s old guard, it was unclear whether social conservatives would turn out in the general election to vote for a thrice-married New Yorker who had cultivated a playboy reputation and once described himself as “very pro-choice.” But Mr. Trump won their support by essentially striking a deal with legal conservatives: He agreed to fill Supreme Court vacancies from a list of prospects compiled by a small number of movement stalwarts.

This group helping to shape the judiciary included Leonard A. Leo — arguably the most powerful figure in the conservative legal movement and a leader of the Federalist Society — and Donald F. McGahn II, Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign general counsel and first White House counsel. With a seat already open after the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, the move worked: Exit polls showed that court-focused voters helped secure Mr. Trump’s narrow victory.

Along with the Republican leader in the Senate, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, Mr. Leo and Mr. McGahn — and later Pat A. Cipollone, Mr. Trump’s second White House counsel — created an assembly line for turning Federalist Society-style lawyers into appeals court judges and Supreme Court justices.

But the union between Mr. Trump and the conservative legal establishment could be more fraught than it sometimes appeared. As his presidency wore on, Mr. Trump attacked and sidelined many of the lawyers around him. That included Mr. Leo.

One episode, described by a person familiar with the incident, illustrates the larger chill.

In January 2020, Mr. Leo was having dinner at Mar-a-Lago when Mr. Trump strode up to his table. The president stunned Mr. Leo, publicly berating him and accusing him of recommending the deputy attorney general, Rod J. Rosenstein, who appointed a special counsel to investigate ties between the Russian government and the Trump campaign.

Taken aback, Mr. Leo protested that he had actually suggested someone else for the position — Mr. Cipollone. Mr. Trump walked away without apologizing.

Nearly a year later, when Mr. Trump was trying to enlist legal assistance for his efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss, he reached out three times to Mr. Leo. But Mr. Leo declined to take or return Mr. Trump’s calls, and has since only dealt with him through others.

A spokesman for Mr. Trump did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

In a statement, Mr. Leo said, “I have nothing to say regarding his current efforts, but I’m just grateful that President Trump transformed the Supreme Court and the federal judiciary in his first term.”

Mr. Mitnick’s experience underscores the style of lawyering that Trump allies saw as too cautious. His role as the top lawyer at the Department of Homeland Security put him in the path of increasingly aggressive policy proposals from a top White House adviser to Mr. Trump, Mr. Miller.

Mr. Miller, who is not a lawyer, is known for his vehement opposition to immigration. Mr. Mitnick and Mr. Miller are said to have clashed, directly and indirectly, over legal risks raised by regulatory and policy actions emanating from the White House, including separating migrant children from their parents and transporting migrants to so-called sanctuary cities.

In 2019, the White House purged the leadership ranks of the Homeland Security Department, firing Mr. Mitnick. Mr. Trump ultimately installed as his replacement Chad Mizelle, who had been out of law school just seven years but was a close Miller ally.

Like numerous other positions filled later in Mr. Trump’s term, Mr. Mizelle was appointed as “acting” general counsel, sidestepping a Senate vetting and confirmation process that would most likely have closely scrutinized whether he was qualified for the job.

With Mr. Mizelle acting as the department’s top lawyer when the Covid-19 pandemic arose, the Trump administration seamlessly invoked emergency powers to flatly refuse to consider the petition of any asylum seeker arriving at the southern border.

Seeking ‘America First’ Lawyers

Mr. Miller has stayed close to Mr. Trump and is expected to play an even more important role in shaping policy if Mr. Trump returns to power.

While out of office, Mr. Miller has been running a foundation focused on suing the Biden administration and recruiting a new generation of “America First” lawyers, with some from attorney general and solicitor general offices in Texas and other Republican-controlled states. “America First” Republicans are often opposed to both legal and illegal immigration, protectionist on trade and skeptical of international alliances and military intervention overseas.

One first-term Trump lawyer who would most likely serve in a second term is Mark Paoletta, who served as general counsel at the Office of Management and Budget and worked closely with Mr. Vought, the agency’s director. The O.M.B. team saw itself as an island of facilitators within an executive branch they believed was too quick to tell Mr. Trump that his ideas were unachievable or illegal.

Image

“The Federalist Society doesn’t know what time it is,” said Russell Vought, a former senior Trump administration official.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times

Together, Mr. Vought and Mr. Paoletta came up with the idea of having Mr. Trump declare a national emergency and invoke special powers to spend more taxpayer money on a border wall than Congress was willing to appropriate.

Mr. Paoletta also believed that Mr. Trump could have exerted greater personal control over the Justice Department, although Mr. Paoletta said in an interview that he did not advocate using the presidency’s command over federal law enforcement for partisan and personal score-settling. He and other advisers likely to follow Mr. Trump back into power view White House authority to direct the Justice Department as proper under the so-called unitary executive theory. It holds that presidents can directly command the entire federal bureaucracy and that pockets of independent decision-making authority are unconstitutional.

“I believe a president doesn’t need to be so hands-off with the D.O.J.,” Mr. Paoletta said, adding: “It’s not an independent agency, and he is the head of the executive branch. A president has every right to direct D.O.J. to look at items that are his policy priorities and other matters of national importance.”

Mr. Trump is not known for pondering legal philosophy. But he has found common cause with lawyers who have a sweeping view of presidential power.

In his 2024 campaign, Mr. Trump has promised to “appoint a real special prosecutor to go after” President Biden and his family — shattering the post-Watergate norm of Justice Department independence. More than any legal policy statement on his campaign website, retribution may be the closest thing to a governing philosophy for Mr. Trump as he seeks a second term.

‘Legal Creativity’

Mr. Trump has rarely looked closely at a lawyer’s area of specialty. Instead, he has often looked at whether a particular lawyer can help him gain something he wants. He spent much of his first term railing against the lawyers who worked for him and wondering aloud why none of them could live up to the memory of his notoriously ruthless mentor, Roy Cohn, who represented Mr. Trump in his early business career in New York.

When he sought to overturn the 2020 election, Mr. Trump was unsatisfied with his government lawyers, including his second White House counsel, Mr. Cipollone, who largely rejected his efforts to subvert the results. Mr. Trump turned to a different set of outside lawyers.

Those lawyers included Rudolph W. Giuliani, John C. Eastman, Kenneth Chesebro, Jenna Ellis and Sidney K. Powell, all of whom have since been indicted in Georgia in a racketeering case that charged the former president and 18 of his allies with conspiring to overturn his election loss there in 2020. Ms. Powell, Mr. Chesebro and Ms. Ellis have pleaded guilty.

Mr. Trump was also infuriated that the justices he had put on the Supreme Court declined to repay his patronage by intervening in the 2020 election. As Mr. Trump criticized the court, Mr. Leo with the Federalist Society is said to have told associates he was disappointed that the former president’s rhetoric made his judicial appointment record look “transactional,” aimed at advancing Mr. Trump’s personal interests rather than a broader philosophical mission.

Image

Jeffrey Clark, a former high-ranking Justice Department official, was criminally charged in Georgia in connection with efforts to overturn Mr. Trump’s 2020 election loss in that state.Credit...Pool photo by Susan Walsh

In the same way, Mr. Trump had a falling-out with his attorney general, William P. Barr, who refused to falsely say that the Justice Department had evidence of widespread voter fraud. After Mr. Barr resigned, his deputy and successor, Jeffrey A. Rosen, also refused to throw the department’s weight behind Mr. Trump’s claims. Mr. Trump then explored the idea of installing Jeffrey Clark — an official who was willing to raise concerns about purported election fraud — as acting attorney general.

Mr. Clark has also been indicted in the Georgia case, but remains in favor with Mr. Trump and has met with the former president at his private clubs. Over the summer, at Mr. Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, N.J., Mr. Clark attended a fund-raiser for the people who have been imprisoned for rioting at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Mr. Clark will most likely be in contention for a senior Justice Department position in any second Trump administration, depending on the outcome of his legal travails. He has written a constitutional analysis, titled “The U.S. Justice Department Is Not Independent,” that amounts to an intellectual blueprint for direct presidential control of federal law enforcement.

He declined to comment. On a conservative podcast last year, Mr. Clark said that “extraordinary times call for extraordinary, responsive legal creativity.”

Jonathan Swan is a political reporter who focuses on campaigns and Congress. As a reporter for Axios, he won an Emmy Award for his 2020 interview of then-President Donald J. Trump, and the White House Correspondents’ Association’s Aldo Beckman Award for “overall excellence in White House coverage” in 2022. More about Jonathan Swan

Charlie Savage writes about national security and legal policy. He has been a journalist for more than two decades. More about Charlie Savage

Maggie Haberman is a senior political correspondent and the author of “Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America.” She was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for reporting on President Trump’s advisers and their connections to Russia. More about Maggie Haberman

A version of this article appears in print on , Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Seeking Lawyers to Bless Trump’s Full Ambition. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

See more on: Donald Trump, 2024 Elections: News, Polls and Analysis, Leonard A. Leo, Russell T. Vought, Stephen Miller

===

ggl 2025 9 24

[### Mark Paoletta - Project 2025

project2025admin.com

https://project2025admin.com › personnel › mark-paoletta](https://project2025admin.com/personnel/mark-paoletta/)

Mark Paoletta. Risk: Politicized Government OperationsBranch: ExecutiveLikely Agency or Office: Office of Management and BudgetCharacteristic: Trump ...

[### Inside the Trump Plan for 2025

The New Yorker

https://www.newyorker.com › Magazine › Audio](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/07/22/inside-the-trump-plan-for-2025)

Jul 15, 2024 — Jonathan Blitzer on how the Conservative Partnership Institute, a well-funded network of far-right activists, is preparing for Donald ...

[### Mark Paoletta on Kamala's Plan - O'Connor & Company

Apple

https://podcasts.apple.com › podcast › mark-paoletta-on...](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/mark-paoletta-on-kamalas-plans-to-disqualify-justice/id1061727141?i=1000669038207)

Sep 10, 2024 — MARK PAOLETTA: Kamala Harris supports Supreme Court packing plan that will DISQUALIFY Justice Clarence Thomas in May 2025 from participating in ...

[### Mark Paoletta

X · MarkPaoletta

620+ likes · 2 weeks ago](https://twitter.com/MarkPaoletta/status/1833136759934201947)

ATTENTION: @KamalaHarris supports Supreme Court packing plan that will DISQUALIFY Justice Clarence Thomas in May 2025 from participating in ...

[### If Trump Wins, His Allies Want Lawyers Who Will Bless a ...

The New York Times

https://www.nytimes.com › U.S. › Politics](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/01/us/politics/trump-2025-lawyers.html)

Nov 1, 2023 — Close allies of Donald J. Trump are preparing to populate a new administration with a more aggressive breed of right-wing lawyer.

[### Project 2025 partners celebrate Supreme Court ruling on ...

Media Matters for America

https://www.mediamatters.org › project-2025 › project-2...](https://www.mediamatters.org/project-2025/project-2025-partners-celebrate-supreme-court-ruling-presidential-immunity)

Jul 2, 2024 — United States, which ruled that “former President Donald Trump is entitled to immunity from federal prosecution for official actions he took ...

[### Mark Paoletta - Breaking News, Photos and Videos

The Hill

https://thehill.com › people › mark-paoletta](https://thehill.com/people/mark-paoletta/)

Get the latest Mark Paoletta news brought to you by the team at The Hill.

[### Inside Trump '25: A radical plan for Trump's second term

Axios

https://www.axios.com › Politics & Policy](https://www.axios.com/2022/07/22/trump-2025-radical-plan-second-term)

Jul 22, 2022 — Former President Trump's top allies are preparing to radically reshape the federal government if he is re-elected, purging potentially thousands of civil ...

[### Mark Paoletta

https://twitter.com › MarkPaoletta › status](https://twitter.com/MarkPaoletta/status/1823818284053225561)

SenWhitehouse sponsored many bills directly benefitting wife Sandra & groups she works with. She's been paid MILLIONS for work. Ethics complaint filed but ...

===

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.

:{:{}:

"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 ›

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.

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.

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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https://www.trendsmap.com/twitter/tweet/1545042659466743809

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in reply to @mrspanstreppon

Wouter van der Horst

@DerWouter | 3,906 followers

@mrspanstreppon It really looks like Vought, Paoletta and Klukowski was a small cabal of fellow travelers that rooted in OMB in prelude to the insurrection. Thomas family friend and consigliere Paoletta had worked for Pence prior to OMB, which is curious since "hang MP" was...

mrs panstreppon @mrspanstreppon

A roundup of tweets about Ken Klukowski, the Family Research Council/Breitbart lawyer who hadn't worked for a law firm before & who became Jeffrey Clark's senior advisor on Dec 15 2020, the day after Trump fired Barr... pic.twitter.com/IUbNGDvzvG

15 20Report · 06:50, 7 Jul 2022 · View on Twitter

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In reply to @DerWouter

Wouter van der Horst

@DerWouter

... the direction of the MAGA crowd, significantly stoked by Ginni Thomas and her ilk, on Insurrection Day? Had Paoletta remained as "counsel to the Vice President" would he have counseled and pushed Pence to view his VP electoral vote counting role differently? Bet he would!

06:53, 7 Jul 2022

mrs panstreppon @mrspanstreppon

Some excellent points about Mark Paoletta & VP Pence.

07:39, 7 Jul 2022 · View on Twitter

Jan Forney@jan_forney

I’m said to see the historically non-partisan OMB Office of management & budget

who supply unbiased financial assessments of where we stand fiscally and of various policy proposals

ALSO compromised at least in part. The Cancer is truly systemic.

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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.

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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.

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His professional approach crystallized as it hardened with experience.

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“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.”

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His style has led to some internal conflict.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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

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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.

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“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.”

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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

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

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“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.”

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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ggl 922

Attorney With Ties to Anti-LGBT Groups Hired for Key ...

https://www.splcenter.org › hatewatch › 2019/09/20 › a...

Sep 20, 2019 — He is a special counsel reporting to Mark Paoletta, OMB general counsel, The New York Post's Jon Levine tweeted recently. Ken Klukowski (right) ...

mrs panstreppon on Twitter: "Paoletta was Klukowski's boss at ...

https://twitter.com › mrspanstreppon › status

Paoletta was Klukowski's boss at OMB & knows why Klukowski transferred to the DOJ Civil Division under Jeffrey Clark on Dec 15 2020... 2:35 AM · Jun 29, 2022 · ...

### mrs panstreppon on Twitter: "Per this June 23 2022 WP story ...

https://twitter.com › mrspanstreppon › status

Politico Playbook interviewed Mark Paoletta in Oct 2020. At the time, Paoletta worked alongside Ken Klukowski at OMB then headed by Russ Vought.

Sen. Van Hollen Calls for Paoletta to Relinquish Role as ...

https://www.justsecurity.org › sen-van-hollen-calls-for-...

Mar 12, 2020 — Mark Paoletta, the general counsel at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), needs to recuse himself from ongoing inquiries into the ...

Missing: klukowski ‎| Must include: klukowski

Jan. 6 hearings: Ex-DOJ officials who resisted Trump plot testify

https://www.msnbc.com › jan-6-hearings › live-blog › liv...

Jun 23, 2022 — (Today, Paoletta and Klukowski have reunited in private practice at Schaerr Jaffe, a boutique law firm well stocked with conservative legal ...

Wouter van der Horst's tweet - - Trendsmap

https://www.trendsmap.com › twitter › tweet

@mrspanstreppon It really looks like Vought, Paoletta and Klukowski was a small cabal of fellow travelers that rooted in OMB in prelude to the insurrection.

Thread by @mrspanstreppon on Thread Reader App

https://threadreaderapp.com › thread

Early yesterday morning, I addressed two tweets to Mark Paoletta, ... Paoletta hired Ken Klukowski, an associate of Bannon, at OMB & then at Shaaer Jaffe.

US Office of Management and Budget WAVES Visitor Records ...

https://www.whitehouse.gov › uploads › 2019/10

PDF

Aug 20, 2019 — This document, starting on the following page, is OMB's release of WAVES visitor records for the month of August 2019.

NEW: Two Men Very Close to Ginni Thomas—One of Them ...

https://sethabramson.substack.com › new-two-men-very-c...

Jul 16, 2022 — (3) Klukowski's immediate boss at OMB was Mark Paoletta—the man who is now Ginni Thomas' lawyer. What? Yes. Ginni Thomas lawyer Mark ...

November 8, 2019 VIA ELECTRONIC MAIL Dionne Hardy Office of ...

https://www.americanoversight.org › OMB-19-1419

PDF

OMBFOIA@omb.eop.gov. Re: Freedom of Information Act Request. Dear FOIA Officer: ... OMB-19-1419 ... Paoletta vi. Special Counsel Ken. Klukowski.

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Paoletta Letter to Congress re: Project Veritas

https://www.schaerr-jaffe.com › paoletta-letter-to-congr...

Mar 15, 2022 — Mark Paoletta, Partner at Schaerr | Jaffe LLP, released a letter urging Congress to investigate the FBI's raid of his client Project Veritas ...

Ginni Thomas lawyer questions need for her to testify before ...

https://thehill.com › homenews › house › 3540815-gin...

Jun 28, 2022 — Paoletta's letter to the committee was obtained and published by The Daily Caller. “Before I can recommend that she meet with you, I am asking ...

Ginni Thomas Testifies To House Jan. 6 Committee - Forbes

https://www.forbes.com › alisondurkee › 2022/09/29

20 hours ago — In his letter to lawmakers, Paoletta denied that any of her efforts constitute wrongdoing: her correspondence with Eastman was merely asking him ...

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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. Thisfake newsfits 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 listserv and 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.”

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.

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 the Thomas 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.[ co admin of facebook frontliners? eastman spoke]

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.

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https://www.alternet.org/2022/09/ginni-thomas-attempts-influence-overturn/

david b ncrm

Ginni Thomas‘ efforts to influence the overturning of the 2020 presidential election are even wider than previously known. Thomas, a far-right activist and lobby who happens to also be the spouse of the most right-wing U.S. Supreme Court justice, not only engaged in a months-long pressure campaign to influence then-Trump White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows to help overturn the results of the election, and pressured 29 GOP lawmakers in Arizona to overturn the election, but also pressured lawmakers in another critical battleground state, Wisconsin, to do so as well.

The Washington Post Thursday reports “new emails show that Thomas also messaged two Republican lawmakers in Wisconsin: state Sen. Kathy Bernier, then chair of the Senate elections committee, and state Rep. Gary Tauchen. Bernier and Tauchen received the email at 10:47 a.m. on Nov. 9, virtually the same time the Arizona lawmakers received a verbatim copy of the message from Thomas. The Bernier email was obtained by The Post, and the Tauchen email was obtained by the watchdog group Documented and provided to The Post.”

The Post published the text of the emails sent by Thomas.

“Please stand strong in the face of media and political pressure,” the emails read. The Post notes they were sent “just days after major media organizations called the presidency for Biden.”

“Please reflect on the awesome authority granted to you by our Constitution. And then please take action to ensure that a clean slate of Electors is chosen for our state,” they also say.

Thomas has promoted vile conspiracy theories about the 2020 election and other events.

“In posts on Facebook, she shared a George Soros conspiracy-theory meme and criticized the teenage survivors of the school massacre in Parkland, Fla., for supporting gun control,” The New York Times Magazine reported in February. “She complained when a town near her Virginia home put up a banner in support of Black Lives Matter, saying the group was filled with extremists ‘seeking to foment a cultural revolution,’ and traded barbs on her public Facebook page.”

Thomas sits on the board of the highly-influential and highly-secretive religious right wing Council for National Policy, which also includes more prominent members like Turning Point USA‘s Charlie Kirk, where Thomas has also served.

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no lnx

Investigations

Ginni Thomas pressed Wisconsin lawmakers to overturn Biden’s 2020 victory

The conservative activist and wife of the Supreme Court justice emailed lawmakers in two states in the weeks after the election

By Emma Brown

September 1, 2022

[Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, takes part in the 2017 Conservative Political Action Conference at National Harbor in Maryland. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, the conservative activist and wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, pressed lawmakers to overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 victory not only in Arizona, as previously reported, but also in a second battleground state, Wisconsin, according to emails obtained under state public-records law.

The Washington Post reported this year that Ginni Thomas emailed 29 Arizona state lawmakers, some of them twice, in November and December 2020. She urged them to set aside Biden’s popular-vote victory and “choose” their own presidential electors, despite the fact that the responsibility for choosing electors rests with voters under Arizona state law.

The new emails show that Thomas also messaged two Republican lawmakers in Wisconsin: state Sen. Kathy Bernier, then chair of the Senate elections committee, and state Rep. Gary Tauchen. Bernier and Tauchen received the email at 10:47 a.m. on Nov. 9, virtually the same time the Arizona lawmakers received a verbatim copy of the message from Thomas. The Bernier email was obtained by The Post, and the Tauchen email was obtained by the watchdog group Documented and provided to The Post.

Thomas sent all of the emails via FreeRoots, an online platform that allowed people to send pre-written emails to multiple elected officials.

“Please stand strong in the face of media and political pressure,” read the emails sent Nov. 9, just days after major media organizations called the presidency for Biden. “Please reflect on the awesome authority granted to you by our Constitution. And then please take action to ensure that a clean slate of Electors is chosen for our state.”

Neither Thomas nor her lawyer, Mark Paoletta, responded to requests for comment.A Supreme Court spokeswoman did not respond to a message seeking comment from Clarence Thomas.

Ginni Thomas’s political activism is highly unusual for the spouse of a Supreme Court justice, and for years it has raised questions about potential conflicts of interest for her husband. She has said that the two of them keep their professional lives separate.

But scrutiny of the Thomases intensified this year after The Post and CBS News obtained copies of text messages that Ginni Thomas exchanged with Mark Meadows, then President Donald Trump’s White House chief of staff, in the weeks following the 2020 election. Thomas repeatedly urged Meadows to keep fighting to overturn the election results. After Congress certified Biden’s victory Jan. 6, 2021, she expressed anger at Vice President Mike Pence, who had refused to intervene to keep Trump in office. “We are living through what feels like the end of America,” Thomas wrote to Meadows four days later.

Thomas was also in touch during the post-election period with John Eastman, the pro-Trump lawyer who once clerked for her husband, and whose role in the effort to overturn Biden’s win has drawn scrutiny from both the Justice Department and the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot. In early December 2020, Thomas invited Eastman to speak at a meeting of Frontliners for Liberty, which she described as a group of grass-roots activists, according to an email that Eastman published online.

The agenda for the meeting has not been publicly disclosed. But a federal judge ruling on which records had to be turned over in response to a subpoena from the committee wrote that the agenda shows Eastman discussed “State legislative actions that can reverse the media-called election for Joe Biden.” U.S. District Judge David O. Carter ordered Eastman to give congressional investigators emails related to Thomas and meetings of herFrontliners group, finding that the meetings “furthered a critical objective of the January 6 plan: to have contested states certify alternate slates of electors for President Trump.”

The House committee asked Thomas to sit for a voluntary interview in June. The committee also sought a broad range of documents from her, including any related to plans to overturn the election and all communications with members of Congress and their staff and Justice Department employees, according to a copy of the request published by the conservative Daily Caller.

At the time, Thomas indicated she would comply. “I can’t wait to clear up misconceptions. I look forward to talking to them,” Thomas told the Daily Caller, her former employer.

Less than two weeks later, on June 28, Paoletta told the committee that while Thomas remained willing to sit for an interview, he did not believe there was “sufficient basis” for her to do so.

In a letter obtained by The Post, Paoletta — a longtime close associate of the Thomases — described Ginni Thomas’s text messages to Meadows as “entirely unremarkable” and said they do not suggest she had any role in the attack on the Capitol. He cast her invitation to Eastman as simply an invitation to speak, not an endorsement of his views or “any indication of a working relationship.” He also said she played no role in organizing the email campaign to Arizona lawmakers and did not draft or edit the form letters she sent.

In an interview, Bernier, the Wisconsin lawmaker, said it would have been appropriate for the state legislature to consider decertifying the 2020 results in the weeks following the election if evidence had emerged of significant voter fraud. “But as we went through the process and the legal challenges were made and discounted by the judicial system, there was nothing proven as far as actual voter fraud,” she said.

Bernier said she had not realized that Thomas was among the thousands of people who emailed her after the election, but she said Thomas “has a First Amendment right to speak her mind.”

“I was married for 20 years. I took on some identity of my husband, but I had my own mind,” Bernier said. “Just because you’re married to someone doesn’t mean that you’re a clone.”

Tauchen did not respond to messages seeking comment.

Democratic lawmakers renewed calls to create a code of ethical conduct for the U.S. Supreme Court amid mounting scrutiny of Justice Thomas and his wife. (Video: The Washington Post)

Thomas’s Nov. 9 email was one of thousands sent via the FreeRoots platform that inundated Bernier and Tauchen’s offices in the weeks after the election, records show.

The Wisconsin State Journal reported in January 2021 that of more than 10,000 pages of emails received during that period by Bernier and state Rep. Ron Tusler (R), then the chair of his chamber’s elections committee, the majority were “mass-generated form letters making nonspecific claims about alleged irregularities, a right-wing fraud-finding effort and a clip from Fox’s Sean Hannity show.”

The fact that Thomas sent one of the FreeRoots emails to Bernier has not been previously reported. “Please do your Constitutional duty!” read the subject line of the message she sent.

According to the records disclosed by Bernier’s office to The Post, Thomas was the fourth of more than 30 people who sent that particular form email Nov. 9 and 10. The first sender of that email, three hours before Thomas, was a person named Stephanie Coleman, according to the records.

A woman named Stephanie Miller Coleman is the widow of one of Clarence Thomas’s former clerks. She was listed as the co-administrator, with Thomas, of a private Facebook group for Frontliners. The page listing the group’s administrators is no longer publicly visible.

Coleman did not respond to a message seeking comment.

Ginni Thomas’s communications with key players in the effort to overturn the election have led to calls for her husband to recuse himself from cases related to the 2020 election and attempts to subvert it. Clarence Thomas has given no indication that he intends to do so.

This year, eight Supreme Court justices declined Trump’s request to block congressional investigators from gaining access to White House records that might shed light on the events of Jan. 6, 2021. Thomas was the only justice to dissent, siding with Trump.

Jacqueline Alemany contributed to this report.

More from Investigations

https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2022/05/20/ginni-thomas-arizona-election-emails/?itid=lk_inline_manual_4

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/what-is-ginni-thomas-saying-now-the-evolution-of-an-unusually-outspoken-supreme-court-spouse/2018/12/26/883da960-f753-11e8-8c9a-860ce2a8148f_story.html?itid=lk_inline_manual_28&itid=lk_inline_manual_16

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wapo no lnx

INVESTIGATIONS

John Eastman says Ginni Thomas invited him to speak on ‘election litigation’

By Emma Brown, Jacqueline Alemany and Josh Dawsey

June 16, 2022

Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, speaks at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Oxon Hill, Md., on Feb. 23, 2017. (Susan Walsh/AP)

John Eastman, the lawyer who played a key role in efforts to pressure Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the 2020 election, confirmed Thursday that the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas invited him a month after the election to speak at a meeting she was helping to organize.

Eastman’s disclosure came a day after The Washington Post reported that the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol had obtained email correspondence between him and Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, a conservative activist and staunch supporter of former president Donald Trump. Individuals involved in the investigation said the emails — which have not been made public — showed that Thomas’s efforts to help overturn the election were more extensive than previously known, The Post reported.

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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,

By David 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 gumshoe Barbara Comstock is 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

What could be Florida Gov. DeSantis’ undoing on the national stage? HBCUs.

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.

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https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/ginni-thomas-is-clearly-freaking-out-after-yesterdays-bombshell-january-6-hearing/ar-AAYZY97

2x?

...how 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]

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lnx

...How 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.

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.

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

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ref 1

https://www.queerty.com/ginni-thomas-may-need-great-fing-criminal-lawyer-latest-revelation-20220616

...More bad news for Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

Ginni’s far-right activism, and in particular her involvement in the efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, continues to come into clearer focus. Now the Washington Post is reporting that she exchanged emails with John Eastman, the Trump lawyer who drafted a memo outlining a plan to subvert the electoral process.

It’s a horrible look for Ginni, who we now attended Trump’s Jan. 6 “Stop the Steal” rally,urged 29 GOP lawmakers in Arizona to ignore Biden’s victory in the state,and sent unhinged text messages to ex-White House chief of staff Mark 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.

The Post reports that Thomas’ emails with Eastman show that Thomas’s “efforts to overturn the election were more extensive than previously known,” according to two sources who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Eastman was among those who spoke at The Ellipse just before the Capitol riot. He is credited with drafting a memo that legal experts have described as a “coup cloaked in legal language,” outlining a plan for former Vice President Mike Pence to block the certification of President Biden’s victory.

Democrats have made the case that Ginni’s repeated efforts to tamper with the election mean her husband should recuse himself from any case involving January 6 or the 2020 election. He was the only justice to cast a vote against forcing Trump to hand over records to the House select committee investigating the Capitol insurrection.

MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell took it a step further, arguing that she’ll need a “great f***ing criminal lawyer” now that she’s so deeply implicated in the attempted coup.

And many observers think it’s officially time for Clarence Thomas to be impeached...

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https://www.queerty.com/ginni-thomas-screwed-psychotic-text-messages-blame-20220325

as her husband, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, withers away in a hospital bed somewhere with mysterious “flu-like symptoms”, the wolves have begun circling around extreme right-wing activist Ginni Thomas.

According to private messages obtained by Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward and CBS News correspondent Robert Costa, Ginni repeatedly pestered ex-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows about overturning Biden’s victory in the weeks following the 2020 presidential election.

The reporters got their hands on a total of 29 texts— 21 sent by her; eight by him—that reveal the two talking about how they might thwart democracy. The messages come from the 2,320 texts Meadows handed over to the House select committee investigating the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Yahoo! News reports:

The messages, which do not directly reference Justice Thomas or the Supreme Court, show for the first time how Ginni Thomas used her access to Trump’s inner circle to encourage and seek to guide the president’s strategy to overturn the election results — and how receptive and grateful Meadows said he was to receive her advice. Among Thomas’ stated goals in the messages was for lawyer Sidney Powell, who promoted incendiary and unsupported claims about the election, to become “the lead and the face” of Trump’s legal team.

Here are just a few highlights from Ginni’s totally-not-crazy-sounding texts to Meadows:

“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.”
“Mark, I wanted to text you and tell you for days you are in my prayers!! Help This Great President stand firm.”
“Where the heck are all those who benefited by Presidents coattails?!!!”
“Just forwarded to yr gmail an email I sent Jared this am. Sidney Powell & improved coordination now will help the cavalry come and Fraud exposed and America saved.”

The release of the messages has prompted new scrutiny into Clarence Thomas’ lone dissent in a January 6-related case earlier this year.

In January, the Supreme Court rejected ex-president Donald Trump‘s bid to block the release of certain presidential records requested by the House committee investigating the Capitol riot. Thomas was the only one of the nine justices who dissented. At the time, he provided no explanation for why he would have approved Trump’s request.[twt]

In a recent interview with the Washington Free Beacon, Ginni insisted that she and her husband have their “own separate careers, and our own ideas and opinions too.”

“Clarence doesn’t discuss his work with me, and I don’t involve him in my work,” she affirmed.

Read Woodward and Costa’s full report here. And check out what folx are saying on Twitter about the whole thing

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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 the QAnon-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 release to 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.

...

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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.

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

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.

Yet 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 the Thomas 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.

Mark 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 Donald Trump who had gathered to overturn Biden’s election. In a Facebook post that went viral, she linked to a news item about the protest, writing, “love maga 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 or praying.” Two days after the insurrection, she added a disclaimer to her feed, noting that she’d written the posts “before violence in US Capitol.” (The posts are no longer public.)

Later that January, the Washington 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.

According to the Post, 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.”

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mma 7 22

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 restrictionist Ken 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, big money, 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

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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)

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.

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

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

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

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-Gazette the 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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

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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

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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 the Masterpiece 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.)...

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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

2 Career

3 External links

4 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[

^ Jump up to: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.

^ Sarasohn, Judy (November 30, 2006). "Everett to Take Helm at Black Think Tank" – via washingtonpost.com.

^ CNN, Elizabeth Landers and Jamie Gangel (January 5, 2018). "Exclusive: Top Pence aides quietly depart in new year | CNN Politics". www.cnn.com.

^ "National Journal (June 21, 2003) "The Hill People - House Energy and Commerce Committee"".[dead link]

^ Jump up to: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.

^ "News Center". Energy and Commerce Committee.[dead link]

^ House Energy and Commerce Committee Republicans (February 7, 2007) "Oversight & Investigations Subcommittee Accomplishments" Archived July 23, 2011, at the Wayback Machine

^ Legal Bisnow (March 18, 2009) "Road Tripper"[dead link]

^ White House Counsel to the President, Fred Fielding (August 1, 2007) Archived November 4, 2009, at the Wayback Machine

^ Mike Pence (December 4, 2007) "Pence and Delahunt Announce Staff for Select Committee" Archived June 27, 2009, at the Wayback Machine

^ Section-by-Section of Rule Changes – 111th Congress Archived January 5, 2010, at the Wayback Machine

^ Lattman, Peter (September 28, 2006). "The Mysterious, Strapping Whisperer". Wall Street Journal.

^ "MyGrandfathersSon.com". Archived from the original on September 5, 2008. Retrieved August 1, 2018.

^ Thompson, Teri; Vinton, Nathaniel; O'Keeffe, Michael; Red, Christian (May 11, 2009). "American Icon". The New York Times.

^ USA Today (July 26, 2002) "Rep. Tauzin Turns Business Scandals Into Must-See TV"

^ Paoletta, Mark (February 2, 2007). "Oversight Never Ended at Energy and Commerce" – via Roll Call.

^ The Advisor (Spring 2008) "Congressional Investigations: Storm Clouds on the Horizon" Archived February 14, 2011, at the Wayback Machine

^ "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 peopleDuquesne University alumniGeorgetown University Law Center alumni American political consultants Trump administration personnel

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am oversight foia stephen miller pow

Specified White House Office Officials: Specified Agency Custodians: i. Stephen Miller (including but not limited to the email address stephen.miller@who.eop.gov) ii. Robert Gabriel (including but not limited to the email address robert.gabriel@who.eop.gov) iii. Jennifer Cytryn (including but not limited to the email address jennifer.cytryn@who.eop.gov) iv. McLaurine Klingler (including but not limited to the email address mclaurine.klingler@who.eop.gov) i. Director Mick Mulvaneyii.Deputy Director Russell Voughtiii. Chief of Staff Michelle Williams iv. Senior Advisor and Former Acting Chief of Staff Wesley Denton v. General Counsel Mark Paoletta vi. Special Counsel Ken Klukowskivii. Deputy Associate Director for Legislative Affairs, Kerrie Carr Please provide all responsive records from January 1, 2018, through the date a search is conducted.

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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.

BIRTHDAY OF THE DAY: Mark Paoletta, OMB general counselhttps://www.politico.com › news › 2020/10/05 › playb...

Oct 5, 2020 — In my career, I have worked nearly eight years in the White House under two administrations, 10 years on Capitol Hill at the House Energy & ...

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

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

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

Rep. Jason Smith on Twitter: "Today I asked Mark Paoletta, former ...https://twitter.com › repjasonsmith › status

Today I asked Mark Paoletta, former OMB general counsel, if the Executive Branch violated GAO's standard of the Impoundment Control Act when it began ...

Hard-charging White House budget lawyer in middle of ...https://www.washingtonpost.com › 2020/01/28 › hard-...

Jan 28, 2020 — Mark Paoletta, general counsel at the White House Office of Management and Budget, signed off on the delay of security assistance to Ukraine ...

Mark Paoletta | Email, General Counsel, @omb.eop.govhttps://app.lead411.com › Mark_Paoletta_28342064

Mark Paoletta is the General Counsel of White House Office of Management and Budget. Lead411's profile includes an email address, @bostonpolicy.com, ...

Mark Paoletta - Federal News Networkhttps://federalnewsnetwork.com › tag › mark-paoletta

Should you be concerned over OMB's decision that GAO's antideficiency determinations are non-binding? The Office of Management and Budget's general counsel ...

ggl 6 22

Mark Paoletta, Author at The Federalisthttps://thefederalist.com › author › markpaoletta

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

The New Yorker Lies Again About Clarence Thomas And His ...https://thefederalist.com › Latest

Jan 24, 2022 — 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. He is a ...

Michael Pack And Mark Paoletta, Author at The Federalisthttps://thefederalist.com › author › packpaoletta

1 day ago — Mark Paoletta and Michael Pack are co-editors of the forthcoming book ... Paoletta is an attorney and worked on Justice Thomas' confirmation.

New York Times Invents Yet Another Story To Smear Trump ...https://thefederalist.com › Latest

Sep 27, 2021 — 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. He is a ...

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

Mark Paoletta. @MarkPaoletta. Partner. @SchaerrJaffeLLP. I Sr Fellow. @AmRenewCtr. I Trump OMB General CounseI I Chief Oversight Counsel, Congress I Asst WH ...

Missing: federalist ‎| Must include: federalist

Mark Paoletta on Twitter: "10/10 Hearing is continuation of ...https://twitter.com › MarkPaoletta › status

PREVIEW

5:05

Conversation. Mark Paoletta · @MarkPaoletta ... No court with a Federalist Society member sitting in judgment has legitimacy.

Apr 28, 2022

Hard-charging White House budget lawyer in middle of ...https://www.washingtonpost.com › 2020/01/28 › hard-...

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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https://news.yahoo.com/house-hearing-airs-ethics-allegations-205020273.html

12 22 yahoo

House Democrats blasted the Supreme Court over alleged ethical lapses on Thursday, mounting a hearing that showcased a religious-right lobbying campaign aimed at the justices and claims of an alleged leak from the court of a key decision in 2014.

At a hearing before the House Judiciary Committee, a former evangelical minister who organized the lobbying effort, the Rev. Robert Schenck, detailed his efforts to deploy wealthy social conservatives as “stealth missionaries” to befriend conservative justices.

“The operation’s overall goals were to gain insights into the conservative justices’ thinking and to shore up their resolve to render solid, unapologetic opinions, particularly against abortion,” Schenck testified. “I called this our ministry of emboldenment.”

House Judiciary Committee Chair Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) said disclosures in news outlets, including POLITICO, about a lobbying drive targeting the justices have cast doubt on how the Supreme Court arrived at its earthshaking decision in June that overturned the federal constitutional right to abortion.

“We are now left wondering how much of this decision ending decades of established precedent was influenced by the organized wealthy donors and lobbying to move conservative justices to the right,” Nadler said.

Nadler and other Democratic members said Schenck’s account underscored the need to pass legislation imposing a binding ethics code on the Supreme Court.

“Supreme Court justices cannot self-police their own ethics, and we shouldn’t expect them to,” Nadler said.

Schenck said that the efforts he undertook to try to build ties with the conservative justices through meals and hosting them at private homes took advantage of lax ethics rules at the high court.

“There were clear rules in place limiting the way one could interact with the representative branches … none of that applied at the Supreme Court,” Schenck said “We knew that there was a great deal of liberty and latitude there and made our operation at the judicial branch, at that level, much easier.”

However, a lawyer and former Supreme Court clerk called as a GOP witness, Mark Paoletta,blasted Schenck as a “con man” and argued he should not be trusted because of his public admissions that he lied at times during his lobbying drive.

“Schenck’s entire project was a grift and had zero impact on any justice,” Paoletta declared.

Paoletta, who worked on the Senate confirmation of Justice Clarence Thomas and has represented his wife, Virginia Thomas, in connection with the House Jan. 6 Committee probe, said it was absurd to think that justices like Thomas or Samuel Alito would be susceptible to pressure to be more conservative on issues like abortion rights.

“You are smearing the court and encouraging the public to question the court and its rulings,” Paoletta added. “This political assault on the court is a dangerous game.”

No one from the Supreme Court testified at Thursday’s hearing, but the court has issued statements disputing many of Schenck’s allegations. The court did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the hearing and about an assertion that it had been asked “again and again” to send a witness but failed to do so.

Schenck has also claimed that in 2014 he learned of the outcome of a widely watched Supreme Court case about the rights of businesses with religious owners to avoid providing contraception coverage under Obamacare, Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores. Schenck says that about three weeks before the decision was released, he learned that Alito was writing the opinion and that the religious business owners had prevailed.

Schenck said the typically confidential information came from Gayle Wright, following a dinner she and her husband had at Alito’s home in Alexandria, Va. Wright has denied Schenck’s account. Alito issued a statement last month saying neither he nor his wife disclosed the outcome or authorship of the Hobby Lobby decision prior to its release.

Republican lawmakers sought to undercut Schenck, accusing him of dishonesty and citing his admission that he propagated “consequential lies” before making a break with the religious right several years ago.

“I look back and realize that many of the things I promulgated were not true,” he conceded Thursday. “I did not know at the time.”

Republican House members faulted their Democratic colleagues for drawing attention to the alleged 2014 leak, while not calling any hearing to explore how POLITICO obtained a draft opinion in the major abortion case the high court issued in June. Alito also authored that decision, seen as a landmark victory for conservatives.

“You held zero hearings on it,” Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) complained.

“Not one hearing about the real leak, but here we are having a hearing on the fake leak,”Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) said.

Jordan also noted that POLITICO reported recently, that after months of investigation, that it “was unable to locate anyone who heard about the Hobby Lobbydecision directly from either Alito or his wife before its release at the end of June 2014.”

Jordan read that part of the article aloud twice for emphasis, although he omitted the word “directly” in both instances. Biggs later read the passage in its entirety.

Despite heated exchanges between Democratic and GOP lawmakers, members of both parties said they favored requiring some ethics code for the Supreme Court.

“If you can buy off the Supreme Court … the left will be way better at it than we are,” Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) said.

Paoletta accused Democrats of “gaslighting” because they didn’t show much interest in ethics practices when Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s husband continued to practice law after she was sworn in to the court.

However, Rep. Val Demings (D-Fla.) said that was no reason to fail to move forward with legislation to impose an ethics code on the high court.

“We’re talking about it now. Sometimes we’re late,” she said.

CORRECTION: This story has been updated to reflect Mark Paoletta's previous work on the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

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Mark Paoletta (@MarkPaoletta) · Twitter

https://twitter.com/MarkPaoletta

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Yet Another Baseless Attack on Ginni Thomas www.nationalreview.com/…

Twitter · 3 days ago

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Dec 8, 2022 — However, a lawyer and former Supreme Court clerk called as a GOP witness, Mark Paoletta, blasted Schenck as a “con man” and argued he should ...

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ABC7 New York

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Feb 9, 2023 — Ginni Thomas' lawyer, Mark Paoletta, suggested in testimony last year ... During an April 2022 hearing titled "Building Confidence in the ...

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Jan 28, 2020 — Mark Paoletta, general counsel at the White House Office of ... helped guide Clarence Thomas through his 1991 Senate confirmation hearings, ...

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https://www.jacksonville.com › reason › 2016/10/30 › cl...

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Mark Davis was 11 years old when he opened a handwritten letter that ... toward the end of the hearings, sexual harassment allegations by Anita Hill, ...

Reverend who accused Alito of 2014 leak in Hobby Lobby ...

:{:{}:

SCOTUSblog

https://www.scotusblog.com › Newsfeed

:{:{}:

Dec 9, 2022 — But for Republican members the hearing was indeed partisan. As in past hearings, Mark Paoletta, a lawyer who represented Justice Clarence ...

Mark Paoletta (@MarkPaoletta) / Twitter

:{:{}:

Twitter

https://twitter.com › MarkPaoletta

:{:{}:

hearing examining censorship, Democrats tried to strike testimony from Republican witnesses that they don't like. What's that sound like? Censorship.

### Mark Paoletta on Twitter

https://twitter.com › MarkPaoletta › status

At. @HouseJudiciary ; hearing,. @RepJeffries ; asked for evidence to support my assertion the Left hates Justice Thomas b/c he is a black conservative. After I ...

Rove a no-show at hearing, aide skirts questions

:{:{}:

CNN.com

http://www.cnn.com › POLITICS › attorney.firings

:{:{}:

Aug 2, 2007 — Scott Jennings, who also is a special assistant to Bush, arrived at the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing with his attorney, Mark Paoletta, ...

Republicans call ethics hearing a double-standard

:{:{}:

SCOTUSblog

https://www.scotusblog.com › Newsfeed

:{:{}:

Apr 28, 2022 — Testifying before the panel, lawyer and former Trump administration official Mark Paoletta argued that the hearing was not an attempt to ...

Hearing on Politics and the Supreme Court | C-SPAN.org

:{:{}:

C-SPAN

https://www.c-span.org › video › hearing-politics-supre...

:{:{}:

2:46:22

MARK PAOLETTA IS A PARTNER AT SCHAERR MIRABEL JAFFE LLP, REPRESENTING CLIENTS AND HEARINGS AND INVESTIGATIONS. BEFORE ENTERING PRIVATE PRACTICE, ...

C-SPAN · Dec 9, 2022

Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words

:{:{}:

Amazon.com

https://www.amazon.com › Created-Equal-Clarence-T...

:{:{}:

... Thomas in His Own Words [Pack, Michael, Paoletta, Mark] on Amazon.com. ... Good book to hear the life story of someone who grew up dirt poor in the ...

"); background-repeat: repeat-x; display: inline-block; overflow: hidden; position: relative; background-size: 14px 11.4px; height: 11.4px; width: 68px;">"); background-repeat: repeat-x; display: block; background-size: 14px 11.4px; height: 11.4px; width: 70px;"> Rating: 4.9 · ‎528 reviews · ‎$19.19 · ‎30-day returns · ‎In stock

House Judiciary Subcommittee Hearing Explores ...

:{:{}:

People for the American Way

https://www.pfaw.org › Blog Posts

:{:{}:

Apr 29, 2022 — Other than Republican witness Mark Paoletta, the experts agreed that the recent revelations about Justice Thomas and his wife Ginni raised ...

Ethics of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, other ...

:{:{}:

USA Today

https://www.usatoday.com › politics › 2022/04/28 › s...

:{:{}:

Apr 28, 2022 — But the discussion at a House subcommittee hearing largely split along party ... Many Republican lawmakers, plus Mark Paoletta, a partner at ...

Created Equal by Michael Pack, Mark Paoletta - Audiobook

:{:{}:

Audible

https://www.audible.com › ... › Politics & Activism

:{:{}:

Created Equal as it's meant to be heard, narrated by Charles Constant, Shamaan Casey, Pamela Klein. Discover the English Audiobook at Audible.

"); background-repeat: repeat-x; display: inline-block; overflow: hidden; position: relative; background-size: 14px 11.4px; height: 11.4px; width: 68px;">"); background-repeat: repeat-x; display: block; background-size: 14px 11.4px; height: 11.4px; width: 70px;"> Rating: 5 · ‎208 votes · ‎$14.95 to $21.91 · ‎Free delivery · ‎In stock

Conservative activist Virginia Thomas appears for interview ...

:{:{}:

PBS

https://www.pbs.org › newshour › politics › conservati...

:{:{}:

Jan 6, 2023 — Thomas' attorney, Mark Paoletta, said last week that Thomas had agreed to meet with the panel and is “eager to answer the committee's ...

Virginia Thomas, the wife of Justice Clarence ...

:{:{}:

PBS

https://www.pbs.org › newshour › politics › virginia-t...

:{:{}:

Jan 6, 2023 — Attorney Mark Paoletta said Thomas is “eager to answer the ... The panel announced Wednesday that it will reconvene for a hearing on Sept.

Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court justice, testifies ...

:{:{}:

NPR

https://www.npr.org › 2022/09/29 › ginni-thomas-wife-s...

:{:{}:

Sep 29, 2022 — The statement by Thomas' lawyer Mark Paoletta says she "had ... to hear from Ginni Thomas, her discussions and coordination to Mark Meadows ...

Ginni Thomas cooperative in Jan. 6 committee interview

:{:{}:

Axios

https://www.axios.com › Politics & Policy

:{:{}:

Sep 29, 2022 — ... the 2020 elections," her attorney Mark Paoletta told Axios in a statement. ... Jan 6. committee postpones hearing, citing Hurricane Ian.

UNDUE INFLUENCE: OPERATION HIGHER COURT AND ...

:{:{}:

Congress.gov

https://www.congress.gov › event › house-event › text

:{:{}:

[House Hearing, 117 Congress] [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office] UNDUE INFLUENCE: ... 32 Mark Paoletta, Schaerr Jaffe LLP Oral Testimony.

### The ginned-up case against the Thomases

https://www.congress.gov › house › documents

Mark Paoletta. 6–8 minutes ... 6 committee gets ready to hold public hearings into the ... House chief of staff Mark Meadows, urging him to investigate.

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mark paoletta bak

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