stephanie coleman

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.

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.

nOVEMBER 24, 2010

Top Texas Advocate Dies in Plane Crash

Gregory Coleman, the former Texas solicitor general who argued in two of the most important U.S. Supreme Court cases in recent years, died Tuesday in a plane crash. Coleman was a former law clerk to Justice Clarence Thomas.

A partner in the Yetter Coleman firm of Austin and Houston, Coleman was piloting a small plane that crashed in fog in Destin, Florida. The flight related to family holiday plans, and his mother-in-law and and his wife's uncle who were passengers also died in the crash.

Our sibling publication Texas Lawyerhas more on the story and reaction from shocked friends and colleagues including current Texas SG James Ho, who called it a "deeply sad day."

A soft-spoken lawyer with a calm manner that worked well with the justices, Coleman, 47, argued at the high court just last month in Skinner v. Switzer, representing a Texas prosecutor in a dispute over DNA testing for a death row inmate.

But Coleman was best known for arguments in two 2009 cases, Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District No. 1 v. Holder, an important test of the Voting Rights Act, and Ricci v. DeStefano, a Connecticut affirmative action case. He won both cases in decisions that were viewed as victories for the Court's dominant conservative majority, though they were not as expansive as some conservatives hoped.

Coleman participated in The National Law Journal'sannual Supreme Court review panel discussion in D.C. in 2009, soon after his victories. In the voting rights case Coleman won for his client, a small utility district, the ability to escape from federal scrutiny under the law for its election practices. But the justices did not go so far as to declare the law unconstitutional.

"A lot of commentators have asked, well, were you disappointed that you didn't get Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act struck down?" Coleman said during the NLJ discussion. "The answer is clearly no. Yes, we asked for that. I do think the argument is right, but this is the first case that the Supreme Court has had in quite some time where any part of Section 5 or the apparatus surrounding it has been challenged. Three years ago, nobody was talking about Section 5 or whether its application to various parts of the country might be unfair. People are talking about that now. There are commentators on both sides of the philosophical aisle [who] have been suggesting that Congress really ought to rethink some of what it did in 2006. Maybe it should make some changes."

https://twitter.com/PiperK/status/1551712520787746816

legal doc eastman

i understand now why the Jan 6th Committee is looking at Ginni Thomas. She ran a group called "Frontliners for Liberty" with Stephanie Coleman that included both real and fake electors. John Eastman, who helped shape the extra-legal "Jan 6th Strategy," spoke to them. 1/

even John Eastman and the Claremont Institute head say the "Jan 6th Strategy" was "political" rather than "legal" in a podcast on Dec 18, 2020. 2/

pix with ginni and bannon

Another listed administrator of the Ginni Thomas led "FrontLiners for Liberty Group," Stephanie Coleman, has deleted almost all of her posts and photos from her FB page. Many of those photos were of her and Ginni Thomas together, including this one. :{https://:(style="border:0px solid black;box-sizing:border-box;color:inherit;display:inline;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;margin:0px;padding:0px;white-space:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;min-width:0px"):}:cnbc.com/2022/06/17/gin:{ni-thomas-tied-facebook-group-frontliners-for-liberty-could-be-a-new-focus-in-jan-6-investigation.html:(style="border:0px solid black;box-sizing:border-box;color:inherit;display:inline;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;margin:0px;padding:0px;white-space:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;min-width:0px"):}:

ref

no lnx

Ginni Thomas pressed 29 Ariz. lawmakers to help overturn Trump’s defeat, emails show

By Emma Brown

June 10, 2022

Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, speaks at a conference in 2017. (Susan Walsh/AP)

Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, pressed 29 Republican state lawmakers in Arizona — 27 more than previously known — to set aside Joe Biden’s popular vote victory and “choose” presidential electors, according to emails obtained by The Washington Post.

The Post reported last month that Thomas sent emails to two Arizona House members, in November and December 2020, urging them to help overturn Biden’s win by selecting presidential electors — a responsibility that belongs to Arizona voters under state law. Thomas sent the messages using FreeRoots, an online platform intended to make it easy to send pre-written emails to multiple elected officials.

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)

New documents show that Thomas indeed used the platform to reach many lawmakers simultaneously. On Nov. 9, she sent identical emails to 20 members of the Arizona House and seven Arizona state senators. That represents more than half of the Republican members of the state legislature at the time.

The message, just days after media organizations called the race for Biden in Arizona and nationwide, urged lawmakers to “stand strong in the face of political and media pressure” and claimed that the responsibility to choose electors was “yours and yours alone.” They had “power to fight back against fraud” and “ensure that a clean slate of Electors is chosen,” the email said.

Among the lawmakers who received the email was then-Rep. Anthony Kern, a Stop the Steal supporter who lost his reelection bid in November 2020 and then joined U.S. Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Tex.) and others as a plaintiff in a lawsuit against Vice President Mike Pence, a last-ditch effort to overturn Biden’s victory. Kern was photographed outside the Capitol during the riot on Jan. 6 but has said he did not enter the building, according to local media reports.

Kern did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday. He is seeking his party’s nomination for a seat in the Arizona state Senate and has been endorsed by former president Donald Trump.

On Dec. 13, the day before members of the electoral college were slated to cast their votes and seal Biden’s victory, Thomas emailed 22 House members and one senator. “Before you choose your state’s Electors … consider what will happen to the nation we all love if you don’t stand up and lead,” the email said. It linked to a video of a man urging swing-state lawmakers to “put things right” and “not give in to cowardice.”

Speaker of the House Russell “Rusty” Bowers and Rep. Shawnna Bolick, the two recipients previously identified, told The Post in May that the outreach from Thomas had no bearing on their decisions about how to handle claims of election fraud.

But the revelation that Ginni Thomas was directly involved in pressing them to override the popular vote — an act that would have been without precedent in the modern era — intensified questions about whether her husband should recuse himself from cases related to the 2020 presidential election and attempts to subvert it. Ginni Thomas’s status as a leading conservative political activist has set her apart from other spouses of Supreme Court justices.

Ginni Thomas did not respond to requests seeking comment for this report. She has long insisted that she and her husband operate in separate professional lanes.

A spokeswoman for the Supreme Court did not respond to questions for Clarence Thomas.

The Post obtained the emails under Arizona’s public records law, which — unlike the laws in some other key 2020 swing states — allows the public to access emails, text messages and other written communications to and from state lawmakers.

In March, The Post and CBS News obtained text messages that Ginni Thomas sent in the weeks after the 2020 election to Mark Meadows, then Trump’s chief of staff. The messages showed Thomas spreading false claims and urging Meadows to keep fighting for Trump to remain in the White House.

“That conflict of interest just screams at you,” said Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.), who serves on the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, on MSNBC in response to The Post’s May report revealing the emails to Bolick and Bowers.

Schiff pointed to Clarence Thomas’s decision not to recuse when Trump went to the Supreme Court to try to block the House committee from getting access to his White House records. The high court declined to block the release of those documents. Thomas, siding with Trump, was the only justice to dissent.

“Here you have the wife of a Supreme Court justice,” Schiff said, trying to “get Arizona to improperly cast aside the votes of millions. And also, to add to it, her husband on the Supreme Court, writing a dissent in a case arguing against providing records to Congress that might have revealed some of these same e-mails.”

After the May article, Mark Paoletta — a longtime ally of the Thomases who, as a member of the George H.W. Bush administration, played a role in the confirmation of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court — confirmed that Ginni Thomas signed the emails, but he sought to minimize her role.

“Ginni signed her name to a pre-written form letter that was signed by thousands of citizens and sent to state legislators across the country,” Paoletta wrote on Twitter on May 20. He described Thomas’s activities as “a private citizen joining a letter writing campaign” and added, sarcastically, “How disturbing, what a threat!”

The letter-writing campaigns were organized on FreeRoots.com, which advertised itself as a platform to amplify grass-roots advocacy across the political spectrum. A Post review of its archived webpages shows that it was heavily used in late 2020 by groups seeking to overturn the presidential election results.

One of those groups was Every Legal Vote, which organized the campaign to send the message that Ginni Thomas sent on Nov. 9. In those first days after the Nov. 3 election, Every Legal Vote described itself online as a “labor of love by American citizens, in partnership” with the nonprofit United in Purpose, according to webpages preserved by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. United in Purpose, which harnesses data to galvanize conservative Christian voters, in recent years hosted luncheons where Thomas presented her Impact Awards to right-wing leaders.

On Dec. 14, 2020, Biden electors in Arizona cast their votes, after the election results were certified by Secretary of State Katie Hobbs (D) and Gov. Doug Ducey (R).

Trump electors met in Arizona that day and signed a document declaring themselves the state’s “duly elected and qualified Electors.” One of them was Kern, the outgoing state representative.

Kern was among more than a dozen lawmakers who signed on to a letter to Congress that same day calling for the state’s electoral votes to go to Trump or “be nullified completely until a full forensic audit can be conducted.”

The lawmakers’ letter was an exhibit in Kern and Gohmert’s lawsuit asking a federal court to rule that Pence had the “exclusive authority and sole discretion” in deciding which electoral votes to count for a given state. The plaintiffs asked the Supreme Court to intervene after the case was dismissed in lower courts. The day after the Jan. 6 insurrection, the court declined in an unsigned order.

Personal life and death

Born in San Francisco to a military family, he graduated magna cum laude from Texas A&M University in 1987, with a degree in applied mathematical sciences, and received an MBA from the same institution in 1989, summa cum laude. In 1992, he graduated from University of Texas School of Law with high honors, Chancellors Academic Honor Society; while there, he was the managing editor of the Texas Law Review.

He married Stephanie Miller Coleman in 1987 and had three sons: Chase, Austin and Reid.

He died on November 23, 2010, when a Piper Malibu plane he was piloting en route to a Thanksgiving family gathering crashed on approach to an airport in Destin, Florida; two other people on board, Coleman's mother-in-law Charlene Miller (63, an assistant vice president of Texas A&M's research and graduate studies division), and her brother, James Black (58, an observer of BP's Gulf Coast restoration program), also died in the crash.^[4][5]

He was a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and is remembered asdeeply Christian,known for his integrity, honor and generosity both in his personal life and his professional life. He was eulogized by Clarence Thomas, supreme court justice and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit judge, the honorable Edith Jones.^[6] His interment was in the Texas State Cemetery, a privilege for those who have served Texas in an honorable capacity.^[7]

References

^ "Texas Attorney General". Archived from the original on 2014-02-22. Retrieved 2014-02-16.
^ Lattman, Peter (March 23, 2007). "Greg Coleman to Leave Weil Gotshal".
^ "Coleman, Gregory S." Yetter Coleman LLP.
^ "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 2014-02-22. Retrieved 2014-02-16.
^ "Gregory Coleman Obituary - Austin, TX | Austin American-Statesman". Legacy.com.
^ "Archived copy" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2013-04-11. Retrieved 2014-02-16.
^ "Gregory Scott Coleman [11628]". cemetery.tspb.texas.gov.

External links

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Feb

2011

Tuesday

12:00 a.m.

Affirmative Action

Speakers:

Gregory Coleman

Topics:

Civil Rights

Sponsors:

San Francisco Student Chapter

U.S. Supreme Court Round-Up: A Review of the 2009-10 Term

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Aug

2010

Wednesday

11:30 a.m.

U.S. Supreme Court Round-Up: A Review of the 2009-10 Term

Sullivans Steakhouse 300 Colorado Street

Austin, Texas

Speakers:

Gregory Coleman • Edward Dawson

Topics:

Federalism & Separation of Powers

Sponsors:

Austin Lawyers Chapter

Race Relations in the United States and Appellate Advocacy

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Oct

2009

Tuesday

12:00 p.m.

Race Relations in the United States and Appellate Advocacy

Speakers:

Gregory Coleman

Topics:

Civil Rights • Litigation

Sponsors:

Brigham Young Student Chapter

Ricci v. Destefano

This event has concluded.

Oct

2009

Tuesday

12:00 a.m.

Ricci v. Destefano

Speakers:

Christy Bishop • Gregory Coleman • Denny Thompson

Topics:

Civil Rights

Sponsors:

Akron Student Chapter

Ricci v. DeStefano

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Oct

2009

Monday

12:00 p.m.

Ricci v. DeStefano

Speakers:

Gregory Coleman

Topics:

Civil Rights

Sponsors:

Case Western Student Chapter

Annual U.S. Supreme Court Round-Up

This event has concluded.

Oct

2009

Thursday

12:00 p.m.

Annual U.S. Supreme Court Round-Up

The Capital Club Capital Towers 125 South Congress Street

19th Floor Jackson, Mississippi

Speakers:

Gregory Coleman • E. Grady Jolly • Robert McDuff

Topics:

Federalism & Separation of Powers

Sponsors:

Mississippi Lawyers Chapter

Supreme Court Roundup

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Sep

2009

Thursday

5:00 p.m.

CDT

Supreme Court Roundup

Eidman Courtroom

Austin, TX 78705

Speakers:

Gregory Coleman • Justin Driver • Daniel B. Rodriguez • Aaron M. Streett

Topics:

Federalism & Separation of Powers

Sponsors:

Texas Student Chapter

United States Supreme Court Update: A Review of the 2008-2009 Term With A View From the Lectern

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Jul

2009

Friday

11:30 a.m.

United States Supreme Court Update: A Review of the 2008-2009 Term With A View From the Lectern

Sullivans Steakhouse 300 Colorado Street

Austin, Texas

Speakers:

Gregory Coleman • Edward Dawson

Topics:

Federalism & Separation of Powers

Sponsors:

Austin Lawyers Chapter

The Northwest Austin MUD and Ricci Civil Rights Cases: A View From the Podium

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May

2009

Thursday

11:45 a.m.

The Northwest Austin MUD and Ricci Civil Rights Cases: A View From the Podium

Houston Club 811 Rusk

Speakers:

Gregory Coleman

Topics:

Civil Rights

Sponsors:

Houston Lawyers Chapter

The Northwest Austin MUD and Ricci Civil Rights Cases:

This event has concluded.

May

2009

Thursday

11:45 a.m.

The Northwest Austin MUD and Ricci Civil Rights Cases:

Houston Club 811 Rusk

Speakers:

Gregory Coleman

Topics:

Civil Rights

Sponsors:

Houston Lawyers Chapter