clarence clerks

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6 22 expand to clerks in general (esp of big shot judge/ justices, mafia? amicus?

NO MERRI

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see Ginni 3 tag Gini she is hub networker

see eastman

SEE RAO MASS DEPORT ~ HABEAS

EASTMAN YOO

see james ho

INGRAHAM

CARRIE SEVERINO

CLINT BOLICK

see elbert lin H&W

LEO?

(paleo-) catholic mafia?

CLAREMONSTERS

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wendy long fedsoc JCN

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3 on // jan 6 comm?!

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graves tru n: clerkship determines scotus pick successor

she had rao track www?

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NAOMI REMINDS US OF KICKASS: THE PT IS FIND CLERK TO TAiLOR PRECEDENTS, TRUSTED SRC/ PAL 9 26

-=-=

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whitehouse wants hearing, house prolly not? 4 23

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List of law clerks for the tenth seat of the Supreme Court of the United States - Wikipedia

===

pjt 2025 mascott

She previously worked for Consovoy McCarthy, a Leo-tied law firm where half the partners are former Thomas clerks and which has assailed an array of legal precedents, including affirmative action policies.

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WEDDING — Amalia Halikias, a Heritage Foundation government relations director and Jeb Bush alum, and Bijan Aboutorabi, who recently completed a clerkship for Justice Clarence Thomas, got married yesterday in an Episcopal ceremony at the Cosmos Club. They met as students at Yale University and started dating after reuniting in D.C. in 2022.

JONES DAY

[### Bijan M. Aboutorabi | Lawyers

Jones Day

https://www.jonesday.com › lawyers › bijan-aboutorabi](https://www.jonesday.com/en/lawyers/a/bijan-aboutorabi)

Bijan Aboutorabi focuses on appeals and motions practice. Before joining Jones Day in 2023, Bijan served as a law clerk to Justice Clarence Thomas of the ...

[### Bijan Aboutorabi - Issues & Appeals Associate - Jones Day

LinkedIn · Bijan Aboutorabi

270+ followers](https://www.linkedin.com/in/bijan-aboutorabi-a56ba22a2/)

Washington, District of Columbia, United States · Issues & Appeals Associate · Jones Day

I focus on appeals and motions practice. Before joining Jones Day in 2023, I served as a law clerk to Justice Clarence Thomas of the Supreme Court of the ...

[### Bijan M. Aboutorabi, '18, and David Kenneth Suska, '16 ...

University of Chicago Law School

https://www.law.uchicago.edu › news › bijan-m-aboutor...](https://www.law.uchicago.edu/news/bijan-m-aboutorabi-18-and-david-kenneth-suska-16-join-jones-day-associates)

Dec 1, 2023 — The Firm has announced the addition of eight former U.S. Supreme Court clerks from the October 2022 Term to the Issues & Appeals Practice as ...

[### 2019 John Marshall Fellows

The Claremont Institute

https://www.claremont.org › 2019-john-marshall-fellows](https://www.claremont.org/2019-john-marshall-fellows/)

Bijan Aboutorabi is a law clerk to the Honorable William H. Pryor Jr. of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit. Beginning in August, he will be ...

[### Bijan Aboutorabi, Author at Yale Daily News

Yale Daily News

https://yaledailynews.com › blog › bijanaboutorabi](https://yaledailynews.com/blog/author/bijanaboutorabi/)

Two weeks ago, an alumnus of the Yale College Class of 2012, the field manager for his father's congressional re-election team, was caught on film […]

[### Three Alumni to Clerk on US Supreme Court in 2022-2023 ...

University of Chicago Law School

https://www.law.uchicago.edu › news › three-alumni-cler...](https://www.law.uchicago.edu/news/three-alumni-clerk-us-supreme-court-2022-2023-term)

Sep 7, 2022 — Bijan Aboutorabi, '18Three University of Chicago Law School alumni will clerk on the US Supreme Court during the October 2022 term.

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Earlier in his career,Elbert LINwas a partner in the appellate and communications litigation groups of a national law firm and served as a trial attorney in the Federal Programs Branch of the US Department of Justice’s Civil Division, where he received a Special Service Award. He has also been a law clerk at all three levels of the federal judiciary: for Justice Clarence Thomas on the US Supreme Court; for Judge William H. Pryor Jr. on the US Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit; and for Senior Judge Robert E. Keeton on the US District Court for the District of Massachusetts.

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7 23 an no lnx

'Not appropriate': Lawyers with Supreme Court business sent Venmo payments to former Clarence Thomas aide

Alex Henderson July 12, 2023

Justice Clarence Thomas, now 75, has never been more influential on the U.S. Supreme Court — or more controversial.

During the 1990s and 2000s, Thomas' views were not typical of the High Court on the whole. The Court leaned conservative in those days, but Ronald Reagan-appointed Justices Anthony Kennedy and Sandra Day O'Connor had issues with Thomas' far-right social conservatism. So did the late Justice John Paul Stevens, appointed by Republican President Gerald R. Ford in 1975.

The Court, however, has since moved so far to the right that Thomas has way more influence than he did 20 or 30 years ago. And he has been inundated with controversy, from his wife, Ginni Thomas' efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results to a series of bombshell reports in ProPublica detailing the gifts he received from billionaire GOP donor Harlan Crow — and failed to report.

READ MORE: 'Stonewalling': Tensions escalate between Harlan Crow and US Senate over gifts to Clarence Thomas

Now, questions are being raised about Rajan Vasisht, a former Justice Thomas aide.

The Guardian's Stephanie Kirchgaessner, in a report published on July 12, explains, "Several lawyers who have had business before the Supreme Court, including one who successfully argued to end race-conscious admissions at universities, paid money to a top aide to Justice Clarence Thomas, according to the aide's Venmo transactions. The payments appear to have been made in connection to Thomas' 2019 Christmas party."

The reporter adds, "The payments to Rajan Vasisht, who served as Thomas' aide from July 2019 to July 2021, seem to underscore the close ties between Thomas — who is embroiled in ethics scandals following a series of revelations about his relationship with a wealthy billionaire donor — and certain senior Washington lawyers who argue cases and have other business in front of the justice."

The former Thomas aide's Venmo account, according to Kirchgaessner, shows that in late 2019, he "received seven payments" from "lawyers who previously served as Thomas legal clerks."

READ MORE: Busted: Analysis reveals billionaire Clarence Thomas benefactor gave millions to dark money groups

The attorneys who made the Venmo transactions, Kirchgaessner reports, included Kate Todd (who was a White House deputy counsel under former President Donald Trump), Consovoy McCarthy (who made anti-affirmative action arguments to the Court), Elbert Lin (former West Virginia solicitor general and a major critic of environmental policies), and thelate Will Consovoy.

Richard Painter, ex-chief White House ethics lawyer under President George W. Bush, believes it is "not appropriate" for former Thomas clerks to essentially send the High Court payments via Venmo.

Painter told The Guardian, "There is no excuse for it. Thomas could invite them to his Christmas party, and he could attend Christmas parties as long as they are not discussing any cases. His Christmas party should not be paid for by lawyers. A federal government employee collecting money from lawyers for any reason.… I don't see how that works."

READ MORE: Ron DeSantis wants to 'improve' the Supreme Court toward the 'gold standard' of Clarence Thomas

The Guardian's full report is available at this link.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

Clarence Thomas in 1983: 'God only knows where' I would be if not for affirmative action ›

Mike Lee insists 'attack' on Clarence Thomas is over his 'audacity to be conservative as a Black man' ›

The Clarence Thomas 'cover-up' could lead to his downfall: watchdog ›

With the rise of Trump, The New York Times increasingly quoted or mentioned Yoo without referencing the torture memos

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finn

The lack of consensus also underscores the extent to which Justice Thomas’s shadow, including his network of supporters and former clerks, looms over various aspects of the investigation. Three of Justice Thomas’s former clerks — a federal judge, a top committee investigator and a key adviser to Mr. Trump — have major roles in the matter.

A main strategist in the effort to try to overturn the election, the lawyer:{John Eastman, was a former clerk of Justice Thomas’s. John Wood, one of the Jan. 6 committee’s top investigators and another former Thomas clerk, is leading the so-called gold team examining Mr. Trump’s inner circle.And a federal judge, Carl J. Nichols, who is hearing cases related to the Capitol riot, is also a former clerk of Justice Thomas’s.}:

This dynamic was on display during a deposition in December of Mr. Eastman, who was subpoenaed by the committee to talk about his role in helping Mr. Trump try to overturn the election. Mr. Wood began the questioning by noting that Mr. Eastman had once served as a clerk to Justice Thomas.

“Like you, John,” Mr. Eastman shot back....

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listserv run by connie, wife of clerk?

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the cabal is Laurence silberman clerks (ricky) master leaker says david brock

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1.6B$ Seid:

...Marble Freedom contributed $41.1 million to Donors Trust, a nonprofit that distributes money to conservative and libertarian groups in addition to nonpolitical organizations. The group is a donor-advised fund, which means its contributors can recommend where their donations to the fund are sent.

In the past, Donors Trust has funneled millions of dollars to groups that have amplified false claims about election fraud and advocated for more restrictive voting rules. The group has previously said that its donations are intended to "serve the public good."

Marble Freedom also donated $16.5 million to The Concord Fund, a nonprofit that has advocated for conservative nominees to the Supreme Court and other judgeships and is associated with a group that has pushed restrictive voting laws. Concord, which was previously known as the Judicial Crisis Network, raised $20.4 million from July 2019 to June 2020, according to its most recent tax return.

In addition to the three groups with political connections, Marble Freedom gave $18 million to Schwab Charitable Fund, another donor-advised fund.

 Marble Freedom lists two other board members in addition to Leo, both of whom are unpaid. One is Tyler Green, the former solicitor general of Utah, who has represented the Republican National Committee and other GOP groups in multiple voting-related lawsuits in recent years. Green, who is listed as Marble Freedom's administrative trustee, isalso a former law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. The trust's address is listed as a home in North Salt Lake, Utah, that Green owns. 

The board's third member is Jonathan Bunch, a former Federalist Society vice presidentwho has been involved with various groups led by Leo. Bunch is listed as Marble Freedom's successor trustee. Green and Bunch did not respond to requests for comment.

At the end of April 2021, Marble Freedom had more than $1.4 billion in assets -- positioning it to play a major role in conservative causes potentially for years to come.

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npr5th scotus clerk consovoy mccarthy

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During his four years in the White House, Donald Trump — with the help of then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell — appointed not only three U.S. Supreme Court Justices (Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch), but also, a long list lower federal court judges. One of them wasU.S. Circuit Judge James C. Ho, who, according to Reuters, is now boycotting Yale Law School clerks because of “cancel culture.”

During a Federalist Society speech in Kentucky on Thursday, September 29, Ho claimed that Yale “not only tolerates the cancellation of views — it actively practices it.” And Ho, stressing that he is no longer hiring law clerks from Yale, encouraged other right-wing judges to boycott Yale as well.

Ho said of Yale, “Cancellations and disruptions seem to occur with special frequency.”

One of the incidents Ho cited involved Kristen Waggoner, who now heads the far-right Christian fundamentalist legal group Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF). The Southern Poverty Law Center considers ADF, based in Scottsdale, Arizona, an anti-gay hate group.

During a March 2022 appearance at Yale, Waggoner was disrupted by pro-gay law students.

Ho told Reuters, “I don't want to cancel Yale. I want Yale to stop cancelling people like me."

Ho, born in Taiwan in 1973, has lived in the United States since childhood and is well-known in right-wing legal circles. The judge has had his critics on the libertarian right, but he is popular among social conservatives and Christian fundamentalists and was once a law clerk for Justice Clarence Thomas. Known for being a major culture-warrior, Ho has been active in the Federalist Society since the 1990s and has also worked with theFirst Liberty Institute (a right-wing Christian fundamentalist legal group). After Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death in 2020, Trump considered nominating Ho for the Supreme Court but ending up picking Barrett instead.

---

she is opus dei?!

rww 8 22 leo got 1.6b$ last year

[pix JCN President Carrie Severinocriticized the Supreme Court nomination of Ketanji Brown Jackson in a March 2022 Fox News appearance.

Just days after FBI agents carried out a search warrant for secret documents wrongly being held at former President Donald Trump’s Florida home, a right-wing dark-money group that helped secure a far-right majority on the Supreme Court launched a $1 million digital and cable ad campaign attacking Attorney General Merrick Garland.

The Judicial Crisis Network has been at the core of the massive and secretly funded dark-money campaign by right-wing funders and groups like the Federalist Society to secure ideological domination of the Supreme Court and federal judiciary. The group backed former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s abuse of power to prevent the Senate from considering former President Barack Obama’s nomination of Garland to the Supreme Court, and then spent tens of millions promoting confirmation of Trump’s nominees. More recently, JCN led attacks on the nomination of Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson and dishonest smears against several of President Joe Biden’s Justice Department nominees.

The new JCN ad seeks to undermine Garland’s credibility, accusing him of “cowering to the woke mob.” A press release announcing the ad buy claimed that Garland has “consistently bowed to the radical left’s agenda.” In a statement, the group’s president Carrie Severino repeated a false right-wing talking point accusing Garland of “calling concerned parents ‘domestic terrorists.’”

The ad also claims that Garland has betrayed his former judicial colleague Brett Kavanaugh by not stopping activists from protesting outside the Supreme Court justice’s home. As CNN noted, the rarely enforced law that JCN and right-wing politicians are demanding Garland use against protesters could also be interpreted to forbid the kind of protests at the Supreme Court that anti-abortion groups mobilized for years. The JCN ad notably does not mention that Garland supported recent legislation to beef up security for Supreme Court justices and their families.

Right-wing media outlets have given JCN’s campaign a boost, with Fox News reporting JCN’s assertion that the Garland ad is part of a broader $10 million campaign attacking Democrats over the court that will include “paid advertising, earned media, research, grassroots activity, and a coalition enterprise.”

Tags: Carrie Severino Donald Trump Donald Trump Supreme Court Judicial Crisis Network

---

trump judge

https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/03/08/judge-tosses-jan-6-obstruction-charge/

waPO NO LNX

LEGAL ISSUES U.S. judge dismisses lead federal charge against Jan. 6 Capitol riot defendant

The decision from Judge Carl Nichols in the case of a Texas man clouds the legal path of as many as 270 cases

By Spencer S. Hsu, Tom Jackman and Rachel Weiner

Updated March 8, 2022 at 7:58 p.m. EST|Published March 8, 2022

A federal judge said late Monday that the Justice Department cannot charge Jan. 6 defendants with obstructing Congress’s certification of President Biden’s 2020 election victory unless the defendants tampered with official documents or records in the attack on the U.S. Capitol.

In striking down the lead felony charge brought in the government’s Jan. 6 investigation — punishable by up to 20 years in prison — U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols broke with at least seven other U.S. trial judges in Washington who have ruled that prosecutors can use the obstruction charge in Capitol riot cases.

Nichols’s ruling could complicate the felony prosecutions of many of the roughly 275 Jan. 6 defendants facing the same pending count, with defense attorneys saying it could slow down plea negotiations or even eventually cause the government to recharge or retry cases.

The judge’s decision came right before significant developments showed the reach of his ruling if it is upheld on appeal. On Tuesday authorities announced longtime Proud Boys leader Henry “Enrique” Tarrio had been indicted on charges of conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding — accused of planning the Jan. 6 attack with other leaders of the extremist group. Hours after Tarrio’s indictment was made public, a jury convicted Guy Wesley Reffitt of obstruction of an official proceeding in the first Capitol breach trial.

Lead Capitol riot charge is constitutional, judges find

Nichols’s ruling, in the case of Garret Miller, of Texas, is not binding on other judges and does not set precedent. But prosecutors could appeal it, hoping to settle the issue before hundreds of similar cases proceed. That could take months, at best, to resolve at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. Or a defendant who has lost a similar motion could appeal when their case is concluded.

But if the government doesn’t appeal, continuing to prosecute obstruction cases creates the risk that convictions secured now will be undone by a future adverse ruling, forcing retrials. One defense lawyer familiar with Jan. 6 cases said colleagues are likely counseling clients not to plead guilty to a charge that may not be a crime. In that way, Nichols’s decision has given defendants more leverage in plea talks.

Miller’s lawyer, Clinton Broden of Dallas, said he expected prosecutors to appeal.

“The government obviously believed that the ends to be accomplished somehow justified charging him with a statute that was not applicable to his alleged conduct,” Broden said. “Judge Nichols correctly decided otherwise. This could result in a significant change as to how the government prosecutes the January 6 cases going forward.”

Barbara McQuade, a University of Michigan law professor and former U.S. attorney, said in an email the decision “throws a monkey wrench into DOJ’s efforts to hold accountable the people who attacked the Capitol on Jan 6.”

She noted that Nichols’s interpretation of obstructing an official proceeding “has already been rejected by seven other judges, and I would expect the higher courts to follow suit, but in the meantime, this decision will likely delay all cases where this offense has been charged or could have been charged, including against Donald Trump.”

At issue is an obstruction charge carrying some of the heaviest penalties leveled against nearly 300 defendants, including associates of the Oath Keepers, Proud Boys and Three Percenters, far-right groups that allegedly conspired and prepared for violence. The government has also brought the charge against scores of individuals not accused of attacking police or destroying property but facing some of the most egregious allegations — such as occupying the Senate chamber, sitting in the vice president’s chair and targeting government officials.

Prosecutors have sought to differentiate such acts from protest-related civil disobedience that rarely results in prison time and more politically charged offenses such as seditious conspiracy or the use of political violence against U.S. authorities to prevent Biden’s inauguration.

Defendants in well over a dozen cases assert that the joint House and Senate session that met Jan. 6, 2021, does not qualify as an official proceeding of Congress. They also argue that the law is unconstitutionally vague because it fails to put individuals clearly on notice as to how “corruptly” obstructing or influencing Congress differs from misdemeanor trespassing, parading or disorderly conduct in the Capitol. Defendants have also said that, among what they say are defects in the law, it does not cover individuals’ alleged illegal actions.

:{Nichols wrote in a 29-page opinion that federal prosecutors erroneously interpreted a “catchall” provision Congress passed when it overhauled a long-standing obstruction-of-justice statute as part of the Sarbanes-Oxley corporate responsibility act in 2002. :{The law came in the wake of prosecutions of accountants and other officials involved in the Enron case, when a loophole was found in which those who shredded crucial documents were not committing a crime.}:

Lead felony charge against Jan. 6 defendants could be unconstitutionally vague, U.S. judge warns

The provision covers “whoever corruptly alters, destroys, mutilates or conceals a record, document or other object...or otherwise obstructs, influences or impedes any official proceeding.” Prosecutors have been charging defendants under the second part of that law, accusing them of obstructing the official proceeding of Congress’ attempt to count the electoral college vote on Jan. 6, 2021.

Nichols ruled that the government could not use the second part alone, and that the court “requires that the defendant have taken some action with respect to a document, record, or other object in order to corruptly obstruct, impede or influence an official proceeding.” Raiding the Capitol and forcing lawmakers to flee or wrongly trying to halt vote counting does not apply to that interpretation, the judge said.

Nichols dismissed 1 of 12 counts against Miller, who allegedly bragged about storming the Capitol and threatened lawmakers and police on social media. He is also charged with three felony counts of assaulting police and making interstate threats, accused of stating “Assassinate AOC” in response to a tweet by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) calling for President Donald Trump’s impeachment.

Nichols’s reasoning is likely to apply to the cases of at least seven other defendants who are before him on the same charge. One other, Beverly Hills spa owner Gina Bisignano, awaits sentencing after pleading guilty in a deal with prosecutors.

Of the roughly 733 defendants charged in federal court so far, 114 have pleaded guilty and been sentenced, but only 10 for felonies,according to Washington Post databases. Most convictions have been for misdemeanors related to trespassing. Only two of the 10 defendants convicted of felonies were sentenced for obstruction: “QAnon Shaman” Jacob Chansley, who is serving a 41-month prison sentence, and Paul Hodgkins, who is serving an eight-month sentence. Reffitt — who prosecutors said challenged the police at the head the mob determined to break into the Capitol — will be the third sentenced for obstruction.

:{:{}:

Nichols was appointed to the bench in 2019 by Trump. He served in the Justice Department’s civil division under President George W. Bush and clerked for Supreme Court Associate Justice Clarence Thomas. Given the novel application of the law, the conflicting rulings by the district court judges and the high stakes of the Jan. 6 probe, a government appeal would send the question to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and eventually to the U.S. Supreme Court, legal experts said.}:

Randall Eliason, a George Washington University law professor and former assistant U.S. attorney, said the ruling wasn’t that important but was a “small speed bump” for the Department of Justice.

“One way or another, this issue was always ultimately going to be decided by the D.C. Circuit, and even potentially by the Supreme Court,” he said. “So for now I think the government just soldiers on and continues to use the charge where it thinks it’s appropriate, given the widespread approval by other judges.”

But attorneys representing defendants in Jan. 6 cases said the ruling would likely impact their cases.

Stanley Woodward, who counts the wife of an alleged Oath Keepers leader among his clients, said the decision would “likely embolden” those who face the obstruction charge and “now see a greater possibility for a ... conviction to be overturned on appeal.”

Robert Jenkins, who represents a Proud Boy and other defendants, said he expects the ruling to “cause a pause on the trials that are currently in the works” as more attorneys appeal. “Everybody is going to now want to see what the D.C. circuit is going to say.” he said. “It really needs to be resolved before more people go to trial on that charge.”

Tarrio, the highest profile Proud Boy charged in the Capitol attack and who faces the obstruction charge, was arrested Tuesday in Miami on charges that he conspired with followers who attacked Congress last year. Tarrio has not yet entered a plea in the case but has denied that his group planned to commit violence that day.

The ruling also has broader implications. Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) has suggested Trump could be charged with obstruction of an official proceeding, as has the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 events — with the alleged obstruction in Trump’s case related to the counting of electoral college votes.

In an indictment and court filings, prosecutors assert that Miller, 35, predicted the likelihood of violence on Jan. 6, 2021. Authorities also accuse him of pushing past police to enter the Capitol, making various incriminating statements and posting on social media videos and pictures taken inside the building.

Miller has pleaded not guilty. Nichols has rejected a defense motion claiming Miller was a victim of selective government prosecution and has denied his release from jail pending trial. He has been held since his Jan. 20, 2021, arrest in Richardson, Tex.

Understanding the criminal allegations the Jan. 6 committee is constructing against Trump

:{:{Before Monday, all of at least seven judges who have ruled to date accepted Justice Department arguments that Congress intended a broad “catchall” provision for obstructive acts after the exposure of a massive corporate fraud in the early 2000s wiped out hundreds of billions of dollars of shareholder value, triggered by the collapse of Enron and the revelation that Enron’s outside auditor, the accounting giant Arthur Andersen, systematically destroyed potentially incriminating documents.}:

Congress’s whole point in enacting such general clauses is to cover “matters not specifically contemplated,” because lawmakers do “not know what inventive criminal minds” might come up with in the future, Assistant U.S. Attorney Jeffrey S. Nestler has said.}:

Second U.S. judge questions constitutionality of lead felony charge against Oath Keepers in Capitol riot

----

liz

John Wood, a former U.S. attorney who served during the George W. Bush administration, to be senior investigative counsel. left to run; gold team trump

===

an 722 ginni helped?

Crystal Clanton had worked for the far-right student group Turning Point USA when, in late 2017, The New Yorker's Jane Mayerreported that she had sent an overtly racist text to her co-workers. And now, according to Law.com, she is being hired as a clerk by a federal judge for the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals: William H. Pryor, Jr. , who hasn't responded to inquiries about the controversial hire.

In 2017, Mayer reported that Clanton sent a text telling others in Turning Point USA, "I hate Black people. Like fuck them all.… I hate blacks. End of story." Clanton served as Turning Point's national field director.

Law.com's Katheryn Hayes Tucker reports, "Pryor did not have an immediate response to messages October 8 seeking comment about the clerk and the vetting process used to choose clerks. Circuit Executive James Gerstenlauer also did not respond to messages October 8. Nor did the office that monitors the press e-mail account for the Eleventh Circuit. The clerk, Crystal Clanton, also could not be reached for comment."

On October 5, Above the Law published an article with the headline, "Law School Student Famous For Saying 'I HATE BLACK PEOPLE' Now Has Prestigious Federal Clerkship."

"It's not only the would-be law clerk herself that's driving the controversy," Tucker writes. "It's the life-changing nature of federal clerkships for young lawyers, who typically go on to big law or the bench. That, plus whatever level of assistance clerks provide their bosses in writing opinions that make law and affect litigants."

===

swanned into fedsoc BD

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omfg

no lnx

lAW SCHOOLS

Law School Student Famous For Saying ‘I HATE BLACK PEOPLE’ Now Has Prestigious Federal Clerkship

Hate doesn't seem to be slowing down her career prospects.

By KATHRYN RUBINO

on October 5, 2021

https://abovethelaw.com/2021/10/law-school-student-famous-for-saying-i-hate-black-people-now-has-prestigious-federal-clerkship/

I’d say Crystal Clanton just keeps failing upwards, but given that outrage is currency in right-wing circles, it is more accurate to say that her career is progressing on schedule. Do you remember why Clanton first became a news story? It’s been a minute, so I’ll cover the deets.

In December of 2017, the New Yorker reported that Clanton, who at the time worked at the conservative student group Turning Point USA, texted co-workers with this hateful message:

I HATE BLACK PEOPLE. Like fuck them all .?.?. I hate blacks. End of story.

From ABOVE THE LAW

Awful, right? And this was far from a one-off incident, as reported by Mediaite:

Numerous sources who worked with Clanton detailed how she would exchange racist remarks regularly with other TPUSA staffers — including Alana Mastrangelo, who currently works for the group, and Timox Prax, who was allegedly forced out of TPUSA this year over “bigoted” remarks — using Snapchat.

One such message reviewed by Mediaite features a photo of a man who appears to be Arab and a caption written by Clanton that reads, “Just thinking about ways to do another 9/11.” (The source who provided Mediaite with the image requested it not be published to protect their anonymity.)

Well, even though Clanton was forced out of the right-wing nonprofit, her career prospects were far from damaged. Shortly after she left Turning Point USA, Ginni Thomas — yes, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s wife — hired Clanton to assist with her media ventures. And Clanton lapped up her connection to the powerful jurist.

But that wasn’t the end of Clanton’s ambitions. She was admitted to ASSLaw— that’s George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School, for the uninitiated — and is scheduled to graduate this spring. And now we know that her post-graduation plans include an incredibly prestigious clerkship with Eleventh Circuit Judge William Pryor for 2023-24.

---

https://www.emptywheel.net/2022/04/02/on-ginni-thomas-obstruction-exposure-and-clarences-former-clerk-carl-nichols/

ON GINNI THOMAS’ OBSTRUCTION EXPOSURE AND CLARENCE’S FORMER CLERK, CARL NICHOLS

April 2, 2022/170 Comments/in 2020 Presidential Election, January 6 Insurrection /by emptywheel

In a motions hearing for January 6 assault defendant Garret Miller on November 22, former Clarence Thomas clerk Carl Nichols asked the appellate prosecutor for the January 6 investigation, James Pearce, whether someone asking Mike Pence to invalidate the vote count could be charged with the obstruction statute, 18 USC 1512(c)(2), that Miller was challenging.Pearce replied that the person in question would have to know that such a request of the Vice President was improper.

At a hearing on Monday for defendant Garret Miller of Richardson, Texas, Nichols made the first move toward a Trump analogy by asking a prosecutor whether the obstruction statute could have been violated by someone who simply “called Vice President Pence to seek to have him adjudge the certification in a particular way.” The judge also asked the prosecutor to assume the person trying to persuade Pence had the “appropriate mens rea,” or guilty mind, to be responsible for a crime.

Nichols made no specific mention of Trump, who appointed him to the bench, but the then-president was publicly and privately pressuring Pence in the days before the fateful Jan. 6 tally to decline to certify Joe Biden’s victory. Trump also enlisted other allies, including attorney John Eastman, to lean on Pence.

An attorney with the Justice Department Criminal Division, James Pearce, initially seemed to dismiss the idea that merely lobbying Pence to refuse to recognize the electoral result would amount to the crime of obstructing or attempting to obstruct an official proceeding.

“I don’t see how that gets you that,” Pearce told the judge.

However, Pearce quickly added that it might well be a crime if the person reaching out to Pence knew the vice president had an obligation under the Constitution to recognize the result.

“If that person does that knowing it is not an available argument [and is] asking the vice president to do something the individual knows is wrongful … one of the definitions of ‘corruptly’ is trying to get someone to violate a legal duty,” Pearce said.

At the time (as Josh Gerstein wrote up in his piece), we knew that former Clarence Thomas clerk John Eastman had pressured Pence to throw out legal votes.

But we’ve since learned far more details about Eastman’s actions, including his admissions to Pence’s counsel, Greg Jacob, that there was no way SCOTUS would uphold the claim. In fact, those admissions were cited in Judge David Carter’s opinion finding that Eastman himself likely obstructed the vote count by pressuring Pence to reject the valid votes, because he knew thatnot even Clarence Thomaswould buy this argument.

Ultimately, Dr. Eastman conceded that his argument was contrary to consistent historical practice, 37 would likely be unanimously rejected by the Supreme Court,38 and violated the Electoral Count Act on four separate grounds.39

[snip]

Dr. Eastman himself repeatedly recognized that his plan had no legal support. In his discussion with the Vice President’s counsel, Dr. Eastman “acknowledged” the “100 percent consistent historical practice since the time of the Founding” that the Vice President did not have the authority to act as the memo proposed.254 More importantly, Dr. Eastman admitted more than once that “his proposal violate[d] several provisions of statutory law,”255 including explicitly characterizing the plan as “one more relatively minor violation” of the Electoral Count Act.256 In addition, on January 5, Dr. Eastman conceded that the Supreme Court would unanimously reject his plan for the Vice President to reject electoral votes.257 Later that day, Dr. Eastman admitted that his “more palatable” idea to have the Vice President delay, rather than reject counting electors, rested on “the same basic legal theory” that he knew would not survive judicial scrutiny.258

We’ve also learned more details about Ginni Thomas’ role in pressuring Mark Meadows to champion an attempt to steal the election, including — after a gap in the texts produced to the January 6 Committee — attacking Pence.

The committee received one additional message sent by Thomas to Meadows, on Jan. 10, four days after the “Stop the Steal” rally Thomas said she attended and the deadly attack on the Capitol.

In that message, Thomas expresses support for Meadows and Trump — and directed anger at Vice President Mike Pence, who had refused Trump’s wishes to block the congressional certification of Biden’s electoral college victory.

“We are living through what feels like the end of America,” Thomas wrote to Meadows. “Most of us are disgusted with the VP and are in listening mode to see where to fight with our teams. Those who attacked the Capitol are not representative of our great teams of patriots for DJT!!”

“Amazing times,” she added. “The end of Liberty.”

Ginni Thomas famously remains close with a network of Clarence’s former clerks, so much so she apologized to a listserv of former Justice Thomas clerks for her antics after the insurrection.

Any former Thomas clerk on that listserv would likely understand how exposed in efforts to overturn the vote certification Ginni was.

As I said, little of that was known, publicly, when former Justice Thomas clerk Carl Nichols asked whether someone who pressured Pence could be exposed for obstruction. We didn’t even, yet, know all these details when Judge Nichols ruled in Miller’s case on March 7, alone thus far of all the DC District judges, against DOJ’s application of that obstruction statute. While we had just learned some of the details about Jacobs’ interactions with former Thomas clerk John Eastman, we did not yet know how centrally involved Ginni was — frankly, we still don’t know, especially since the texts Mark Meadows turned over to the January 6 Committee have a gap during the days when Eastman was most aggressively pressuring Pence.

DOJ may know but if it does it’s not telling.

But now we know more of those details and now we know that Judge Carter found that Eastman and Trump likely did obstruct the vote certification. All those details, combined with Nichols’ treatment of the Miller decision as one that might affect others, up to and including Ginni Thomas and John Eastman and Trump, sure makes it look a lot more suspect that a former Clarence Thomas clerk would write such an outlier decision.

Which brings us to the tactics of this DOJ motion to reconsider filed yesterday in the Miller case. It makes two legal arguments and one logical one.

As I laid out here, Nichols ruled that the vote certification was an official proceeding, but that the statute in question only applied to obstruction achieved via the destruction of documents. He also held that there was sufficient uncertainty about what the statute means that the rule of lenity — basically the legal equivalent of “tie goes to the runner” — would apply.

DOJ challenged Nichols’ claim that there was enough uncertainty for the rule of lenity to apply. After all, the shade-filled motion suggested, thirteen of Nichols’ colleagues have found little such uncertainty.

First, the Court erred by applying the rule of lenity. Rejecting an interpretation of Section 1512(c)(2)’s scope that every other member of this Court to have considered the issue and every reported case to have considered the issue (to the government’s knowledge) has adopted, the Court found “serious ambiguity” in the statute. Mem. Op. at 28. The rule of lenity applies “‘only if, after seizing everything from which aid can be derived,’” the statute contains “a ‘grievous ambiguity or uncertainty,’” and the Court “‘can make no more than a guess as to what Congress intended.’” Ocasio v. United States, 578 U.S. 282, 295 n.8 (2016) (quoting Muscarello v. United States, 524 U.S. 125, 138-39 (1998)) (emphasis added); see also Mem. Op. at 9 (citing “‘grievous’ ambiguity” standard). Interpreting Section 1512(c)(2) consistently with its plain language to reach any conduct that “obstructs, influences, or impedes” a qualifying proceeding does not give rise to “serious” or “grievous” ambiguity.

[snip]

First, the Court erred by applying the rule of lenity to Section 1512(c)(2) because, as many other judges have concluded after examining the statute’s text, structure, and history, there is no genuine—let alone “grievous” or “serious”—ambiguity.

[snip]

Confirming the absence of ambiguity—serious, grievous, or otherwise—is that despite Section 1512(c)(2)’s nearly 20-year existence, no other judge has found ambiguity in Section 1512(c)(2), including eight judges on this Court considering the same law and materially identical facts. See supra at 5-6.

[snip]

Before this Court’s decision to the contrary, every reported case to have considered the scope of Section 1512(c)(2), see Gov’t Supp. Br., ECF 74, at 7-9, 1 and every judge on this Court to have considered the issue in cases arising out of the events at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, see supra at 5-6, concluded that Section 1512(c)(2) “prohibits obstruction by means other than document destruction.” Sandlin, 2021 WL 5865006, at *5. [my emphasis; note, not all of the 13 challenges to 1512(c)(2) that were rejected made a rule of lenity argument, which is why AUSA Pearce cited eight judges]

Among the other things that this argument will force Nichols to do if he wants to sustain his decision, on top of doubling down on being the extreme outlier on this decision, is to engage with all his colleagues’ opinions rather than (as he did in his original opinion) just with Judge Randolph Moss’.

The government then argued that by deciding that 1512(c)(2) applied to the vote certification but only regarding tampering with documents, Nichols was not actually ruling against DOJ, because he can only dismiss the charge at this stage if the defendant, Miller, doesn’t know what he is charged with, not if the evidence wouldn’t support such a charge.

Although Miller has styled his challenge to Section 1512(c)(2)’s scope as an attack on the indictment’s validity, the scope of the conduct covered under Section 1512(c)(2) is distinct from whether Count Three adequately states a violation of Section 1512(c)(2).6 Here, Count Three of the indictment puts Miller on notice as to the charges against which he must defend himself, while also encompassing both the broader theory that a defendant violates Section 1512(c)(2) through any corrupt conduct that “obstructs, impedes, or influences” an official proceeding and the narrower theory that a defendant must “have taken some action with respect to a document,” Mem. Op. at 28, in order to violate Section 1512(c)(2). The Court’s conclusion that only the narrower theory is a viable basis for conviction should not result in dismissal of Count Three in full; instead, the Court would properly enforce that limitation by permitting conviction on that basis alone.

The government argues that that means, given Nichols’ ruling, the government must be given the opportunity to prove that Miller’s actions were an attempt to spoil the actual vote certifications that had to be rushed out of the Chambers as mobsters descended.

Even assuming the Court’s interpretation of Section 1512(c)(2) were correct, and that the government therefore must prove “Miller took some action with respect to a document, record, or other object in order to corruptly obstruct, impede[,] or influence Congress’s certification of the electoral vote,” Mem. Op. at 29, the Court cannot determine whether Miller’s conduct meets that test until after a trial, at which the government is not limited to the specific allegations in the indictment. 7 And at trial, the government could prove that the Certification proceeding “operates through a deliberate and legally prescribed assessment of ballots, lists, certificates, and, potentially, written objections.” ECF 74, at 41. For example, evidence would show Congress had before it boxes carried into the House chamber at the beginning of the Joint Session that contained “certificates of votes from the electors of all 50 states plus the District of Columbia.” Reffitt, supra, Trial Tr. at 1064 (Mar. 4, 2022) (testimony of the general counsel to the Secretary of the United States Senate) (attached as Exhibit B).

Those are the two legal arguments the government has invited Nichols to reconsider.

But along the way of making those arguments, DOJ pointed out the absurd result dictated by Nichols’ opinion: That Guy Reffitt’s physical threats against members of Congress or the threat Miller is accused of making against Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez would not be obstruction, because neither man touched any documents.

Any such distinction between these forms of obstruction produces the absurd result that a defendant who attempts to destroy a document being used or considered by a tribunal violates Section 1512(c) but a defendant who threatens to use force against the officers conducting that proceeding escapes criminal liability under the statute.

[snip]

Finally, an interpretation of Section 1512(c)(2) that imposes criminal liability only when an individual takes direct action “with respect to a document, record, or other object” to obstruct a qualifying proceeding leads to absurd results. See United States v. X-Citement Video, Inc., 513 U.S. 64, 69 (1994) (rejecting interpretation of a criminal statute that would “produce results that were not merely odd, but positively absurd”). That interpretation would appear, for example, not to encompass an individual who seeks to “obstruct[], influence[], or impede[]” a congressional proceeding by explicitly stating that he intends to stop the legislators from performing their constitutional and statutory duties to certify Electoral College vote results by “drag[ging] lawmakers out of the Capitol by their heels with their heads hitting every step,” United States v. Reffitt, 21-cr-32 (DLF), Trial Tr. 1502, carrying a gun onto Capitol grounds, id. at 1499, and then leading a “mob and encourag[ing] it to charge toward federal officers, pushing them aside to break into the Capitol,” id. at 1501-02, unless he also picked up a “document or record” related to the proceeding during that violent assault. The statutory text does not require such a counterintuitive result.

The mention of Reffitt is surely included not just to embarrass Nichols by demonstrating the absurdity of his result. It is tactical.

Right now, there are two obstruction cases that might be the first to be appealed to the DC Circuit. This decision, or Guy Reffitt’s conviction, including on the obstruction count.

By asking Nichols to reconsider, DOJ may have bought time such that Reffitt will appeal before they would appeal Nichols’ decision. But by including language about Reffitt’s threats to lawmakers, DOJ has ensured not just the Reffitt facts and outcome will be available if and when they do appeal, but so would (if they are forced to appeal this decision) a Nichols decision upholding the absurd result that Reffitt didn’t obstruct the vote certification. Including the language puts him on the hook for it if he wants to force DOJ to appeal his decision.

I said in my post on Nichols’ opinion that DOJ probably considered themselves lucky that Nichols had argued for such an absurd result.

They may count themselves lucky that this particular opinion is not a particularly strong argument against their application. Nichols basically argues that intimidating Congress by assaulting the building is not obstruction of what he concedes is an official proceeding.

By including Reffitt in their motion for reconsideration, DOJ has made it part of the official record if and when they do appeal Nichols’ decision.

This would be a dick-wagging filing even absent the likelihood that Nichols has some awareness of Ginni Thomas’ antics and possibly even Eastman’s. It holds Nichols to account for blowing off virtually all the opinions of his colleagues, including fellow Trump appointees Dabney Friedrich and Tim Kelly, forcing him to defend his stance as the outlier it is.

But that is all the more true given that there’s now so much public evidence that Nichols’ deviant decision might have some tie to his personal relationship with the Thomases and even the non-public evidence of Ginni’s own role.

Plus, by making any appeal of this opinion — up to the Supreme Court, possibly — pivot on how and why Nichols came up with such an outlier opinion, it would make Justice Thomas’ participation in the decision far more problematic.

---

Carl Nichols, March 7, 2022, Miller

David Carter, March 28, 2022, Eastman

Opinions upholding obstruction application:

Tags: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Carl Nichols, Clarence Thomas, Dabney Friedrich, David Carter, Garret Miller, Ginni Thomas, Greg Jacob, Guy Reffitt, James Pearce, John Eastman, Mark Meadows, Mike Pence, Randolph Moss, Tim Kelly

---

===

3 22 tossed jan 6

Nichols received a Bachelor of Arts in 1992 from Dartmouth College, where he majored in philosophy and graduated with high honors. He received a Juris Doctor in 1996 from the University of Chicago Law School, where he graduated Order of the Coif and was a member of the University of Chicago Law Review. He began his legal career as a law clerk to Judge Laurence Silberman of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.He then clerked for Associate Justice Clarence Thomasof the Supreme Court of the United States.^[2]^

---

seat 10 thurgood marshall

kagan, silberman sentelle?

Radhika Rao (shared with Blackmun) hastings, app no rel

1992

1993

Harvard (1990)

Cudahy (7th Cir.)

and clarence

List of law clerks for the tenth seat of the Supreme Court of the United States - Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_law_clerks_of_the_Supreme_Court_of_the_United_States_(Seat_10)

Clerk	Started	Finished	School (year)	Previous clerkship
Gregory G. Katsas	1991	1992	Harvard (1989)	Thomas (D.C. Cir.) / Becker (3d Cir.)
Christopher Landau	1991	1992	Harvard (1989)	Scalia / Thomas (D.C. Cir.)
Gregory E. Maggs	1991	1992	Harvard (1988)	Kennedy / Sneed (9th Cir.)
Arnon D. Siegel	1991	1992	Yale (1988)	Thomas (D.C. Cir.) / R. Patterson, Jr. (S.D.N.Y.)
Stephen R. McAllister (shared with White)	1991	1992	Kansas (1988)	B. White (twice) / Posner (7th Cir.)
Steven G. Bradbury	1992	1993	Michigan (1988)	Buckley (D.C. Cir.)
Jim Chen	1992	1993	Harvard (1991)	Luttig (4th Cir.)
Dan Himmelfarb	1992	1993	Yale (1991)	Luttig (4th Cir.)
Laura Ingraham	1992	1993	Virginia (1991)	Winter (2d Cir.)
Karl M. Tilleman (shared with Burger)	1992	1993	BYU (1990)	Noonan (9th Cir.)
Allison Hartwell Eid	1993	1994	Chicago (1991)	J. E. Smith (5th Cir.)
Eric C. Nelson	1993	1994	Yale (1992)	Luttig (4th Cir.)
Patrick F. Philbin	1993	1994	Harvard (1992)	Silberman (D.C. Cir.)
Stephen F. Smith	1993	1994	Virginia (1992)	Sentelle (D.C. Cir.)
James E. Gauch (shared with Burger)	1993	1994	Chicago (1989)	Nelson (6th Cir.)
Thomas Rex Lee	1994	1995	Chicago (1991)	Wilkinson (4th Cir.)
Caleb Nelson	1994	1995	Yale (1993)	Williams (D.C. Cir.)
Saikrishna B. Prakash	1994	1995	Yale (1993)	Silberman (D.C. Cir.)
John C. Yoo	1994	1995	Yale (1992)	Silberman (D.C. Cir.)
Eric A. Grant (shared with Burger)	1994	1995	Berkeley (1990)	E. Jones (5th Cir.)
Gregory S. Coleman	1995	1996	Texas (1992)	E. Jones (5th Cir.)
Laurie Allen Gallancy (Mullig)	1995	1996	Chicago (1990)	D. Ginsburg (D.C. Cir.)
Craig S. Primis	1995	1996	Harvard (1994)	Luttig (4th Cir.)
Helgi C. Walker	1995	1996	Virginia (1994)	Wilkinson (4th Cir.)
Brendan P. Cullen	1996	1997	Stanford (1995)	Silberman (D.C. Cir.)
John Eastman	1996	1997	Chicago (1995)	Luttig (4th Cir.)
Erik S. Jaffe	1996	1997	Columbia (1990)	D. Ginsburg (D.C. Cir.)
Michael E. O'Neill	1996	1997	Yale (1990)	Sentelle (D.C. Cir.)
Arthur S. Long	1997	1998	Harvard (1993)	Luttig (4th Cir.)
Carl J. :(style="background-color:#ffff66ff"):}::{Nichols [jan 6, bannon]	1997	1998	Chicago (1995)	Silberman (D.C. Cir.)
Wendy E. Stone **(Long)	1997	1998	Northwestern (1995)	Winter (2d Cir.)
John F. Wood LIZ J6	1997	1998	Harvard (1995)	Luttig (4th Cir.)
Nicole Stelle Garnett	1998	1999	Yale (1995)	M. Arnold (8th Cir.)
Eric J. Kadel Jr.	1998	1999	Virginia (1997)	Silberman (D.C. Cir.)
Patrick L. O'Daniel	1998	1999	Texas (1992)	Garwood (5th Cir.)
Peter B. Rutledge	1998	1999	Chicago (1997)	Wilkinson (4th Cir.)
Steven T. Cottreau	1999	2000	NYU (1998)	Wilkinson (4th Cir.)
C. Kevin Marshall	1999	2000	Chicago (1998)	Luttig (4th Cir.)
Kristen L. Silverberg	1999	2000	Texas (1996)	Sentelle (D.C. Cir.)
Sanford I. Weisburst	1999	2000	Chicago (1998)	Silberman (D.C. Cir.)
Jonathan F. Cohn	2000	2001	Harvard (1997)	O'Scannlain (9th Cir.)
Kate Comerford Todd	2000	2001	Harvard (1999)	Luttig (4th Cir.)
Eric D. Miller	2000	2001	Chicago (1999)	Silberman (D.C. Cir.)
Ann M. Scarlett	2000	2001	Kansas (1999)	Bowman (8th Cir.)
Matthew B. Berry	2001	2002	Yale (1997)	Silberman (D.C. Cir.)
Sigal Mandelker	2001	2002	Penn (2000)	E. Jones (5th Cir.)
Neomi Rao	2001	2002	Chicago (1999)	Wilkinson (4th Cir.)
Margaret A. Ryan	2001	2002	Notre Dame (1995)	Luttig (4th Cir.)
Victoria Dorfman	2002	2003	Harvard (2001)	Luttig (4th Cir.)
Adam K. Mortara	2002	2003	Chicago (2001)	Higginbotham (5th Cir.)
David Stras	2002	2003	Kansas (1999)	Luttig (4th Cir.) / Brunetti (9th Cir.)
Emin Toro	2002	2003	North Carolina (2001)	Henderson (D.C. Cir.)
Richard M. Corn	2003	2004	Chicago (2002)	Luttig (4th Cir.)
John A. Eisenberg	2003	2004	Yale (2002)	Luttig (4th Cir.)
Diane L. McGimsey	2003	2004	Berkeley (2002)	Wilkinson (4th Cir.)
Hannah Clayson Smith	2003	2004	BYU (2001)	Alito (3d Cir.)
Jennifer K. Hardy	2004	2005	Yale (2003)	E. Garza (5th Cir.)
Martha M. Pacold	2004	2005	Chicago (2002)	Bybee (9th Cir.) / Randolph (D.C. Cir.)
Jeff Wall	2004	2005	Chicago (2003)	Wilkinson (4th Cir.)
Henry C. Whitaker	2004	2005	Harvard (2003)	Sentelle (D.C. Cir.)
Chantel L. Febus	2005	2006	GW (2002)	E. Jones (5th Cir.) / Lamberth (D.D.C.)
James C. Ho	2005	2006	Chicago (1999)	J. E. Smith (5th Cir.)
John M. Hughes	2005	2006	Chicago (2004)	Luttig (4th Cir.)
Ashley E. Johnson	2005	2006	Vanderbilt (2004)	Luttig (4th Cir.)
John D. Adams	2006	2007	Virginia (2003)	Sentelle (D.C. Cir.)
David A. Bragdon	2006	2007	Virginia (2002)	Williams (D.C. Cir.)
Adam M. Conrad	2006	2007	Georgia (2005)	Sentelle (D.C. Cir.)
Brandt Arthur Leibe	2006	2007	Yale (2005)	Luttig (4th Cir.)
Eric D. McArthur	2007	2008	Chicago (2005)	Luttig (4th Cir.)
Carrie Severino	2007	2008	Harvard (2004)	Sentelle (D.C. Cir.)
Heath P. Tarbert	2007	2008	Penn (2001)	D. Ginsburg (D.C. Cir.)
Leila K. Thompson	2007	2008	NYU (2005)	Sentelle (D.C. Cir.) / Lamberth (D.D.C.)
William S.Consovoy	2008	2009	George Mason (2001)	E. Jones (5th Cir.)
Claire J. Evans	2008	2009	Rutgers – Camden (2002)	Sentelle (D.C. Cir.) / Chertoff (3d Cir.) / Simandle (D.N.J.)
Jennifer L. Mascott	2008	2009	GW (2006)	Kavanaugh (D.C. Cir.)
Patrick N. Strawbridge	2008	2009	Creighton (2004) jesuit	H. Dana (Maine) / M. Arnold (8th Cir.)
Tyler R. Green	2009	2010	Utah (2005)	McConnell (10th Cir.) / Cassell (D. Utah)
Brian P. Morrissey Jr.	2009	2010	Notre Dame (2007)	O'Scannlain (9th Cir.)
Elizabeth P. Papez	2009	2010	Harvard (1999)	Boggs (6th Cir.)
Marah C. Stith	2009	2010	Yale (2006)	O'Scannlain (9th Cir.)
Matthew A. Fitzgerald	2010	2011	Virginia (2008)	Carnes (11th Cir.)
Allison B. Jones (Rushing)	2010	2011	Duke (2007)	Sentelle (D.C. Cir.) / Gorsuch (10th Cir.)
Elbert Lin	2010	2011	Yale (2003)	Keeton (D. Mass) / W. Pryor (11th Cir.)
William R. Peterson	2010	2011	Texas (2008)	E. Jones (5th Cir.)
Liam P. Hardy	2011	2012	Georgetown (2008)	Ryan (C.A.A.F.) / Sentelle (D.C. Cir.)
Brian C. Lea	2011	2012	Georgia (2009)	Carnes (11th Cir.)
Matthew B. Nicholson	2011	2012	Virginia (2009)	Wilkinson (4th Cir.)
Michelle S. Stratton	2011	2012	LSU (2009)	E. Jones (5th Cir.)
Robert L. Dunn	2012	2013	Chicago (2010)	O'Scannlain (9th Cir.)
David M. Morrell	2012	2013	Yale (2010)	E. Jones (5th Cir.)
Kenton J. Skarin	2012	2013	Northwestern (2009)	Wilkinson (4th Cir.)
Janet Y. Galeria	2012	2013	Berkeley (2011)	Griffith (D.C. Cir.)
Rebekah S. Perry (Ricketts)	2013	2014	Yale (2010)	Cabranes (2d Cir.) / R. Sullivan (S.D.N.Y.)
Andrew Pinson	2013	2014	Georgia (2011)	Sentelle (D.C. Cir.)
Brian D. Schmalzbach	2013	2014	Virginia (2010)	Wilkinson (4th Cir.)
Katherine C. Yarger	2013	2014	Duke (2008)	Gorsuch (10th Cir.) / Eid (Colo.)
Jennifer M. Bandy (Dickey)	2014	2015	Duke (2012)	W. Pryor (11th Cir.)
G. Brinton Lucas	2014	2015	Virginia (2011)	Wilkinson (4th Cir.)
Haley Nix (**Proctor)	2014	2015	Yale (2012)	Griffith (D.C. Cir.)
Robert N. Stander	2014	2015	BYU (2011)	Sutton (6th Cir.) / Lee (Utah)
Sarah M. Harris	2015	2016	Harvard (2009)	Lynch (1st Cir.) / Silberman (D.C. Cir.)
Robert J. Leider	2015	2016	Yale (2012)	Sykes (7th Cir.)
Marisa C. Maleck (Johnson)	2015	2016	Chicago (2011)	W. Pryor (11th Cir.)
Scott G. Stewart	2015	2016	Stanford (2008)	O'Scannlain (9th Cir.)
Taylor A.R. Meehan	February 2016	2016	Chicago (2013)	Scalia / W. Pryor (11th Cir.)
Jonathan D. **Urick	February 2016	2016	Virginia (2013)	Scalia / Sutton (6th Cir.) / Thapar (E.D. Ky.)
Andrew N. Ferguson	2016	2017	Virginia (2012)	Henderson (D.C. Cir.)
Kasdin M. Mitchell	2016	2017	Yale (2012)	W. Pryor(11th Cir.)
Austin L. Raynor	2016	2017	Virginia (2013)	Wilkinson (4th Cir.)
Jacob T. Spencer	2016	2017	Harvard (2012)	J. E. Smith (5th Cir.) / O'Scannlain (9th Cir.)
Gregory F. Miller (hired by Scalia)	2017	2018	Berkeley (2012)	Thapar (E.D. Ky.) / Carnes (11th Cir.)
Gilbert C. Dickey	2017	2018	Chicago (2012)	W. Pryor (11th Cir.)
Brittney Marie Lane	2017	2018	Pepperdine (2012)	O'Scannlain (9th Cir.) / Sutton (6th Cir.)
Cameron Thomas Norris	2017	2018	Vanderbilt (2014)	W. Pryor(11th Cir.) / Henderson (D.C. Cir.)
:{:{Kathryn Anne Kimball (**Mizelle:(style="background-color:#ffff66ff"):}:)}:	2018	2019	Florida (2012)	Katsas (D.C. Cir.) / W. Pryor (11th Cir.) / Moody (M.D. Fla.)
Christopher Ernest Mills	2018	2019	Harvard (2012)	Sentelle (D.C. Cir.)
Russell Balikian	2018	2019	Yale (2012)	Sykes (7th Cir.) / Katsas (D.C. Cir.)
Madeline Ward Lansky	2018	2019	Chicago (2016)	W. Pryor (11th Cir.)
Brian Lipshutz	2019	2020	Yale (2015)	W. Pryor (11th Cir.) / Katsas (D.C. Cir.)
Caroline Cook Lindsay	2019	2020	Chicago (2016)	Sykes (7th Cir.) / Katsas (D.C. Cir.)
James Matthew ("Matt") Rice	2019	2020	Berkeley (2016)	Ikuta (9th Cir.)
Laura E. Wolk	2019	2020	Notre Dame (2016)	J.R. Brown (D.C. Cir.) / Hardiman (3d Cir.)
Philip M. Cooper	2020	2021	Chicago (2017)	W. Pryor (11th Cir.) / Stras (8th Cir.)
Joshua M. Divine	2020	2021	Yale (2016)	W. Pryor (11th Cir.)
Jack L. Millman	2020	2021	NYU (2016)	O'Scannlain (9th Cir.) / Carnes (11th Cir.)
Amy R. Upshaw	2020	2021	Chicago (2016)	Sykes (7th Cir.)
Christopher C. Goodnow	2021	2022	Harvard (2017)	Katsas (D.C. Cir.) / Sykes (7th Cir.)
Steven J. Lindsay	2021	2022	Yale (2017)	Griffith (D.C. Cir.)
Scott Proctor	2021	2022	Harvard (2017)	Sutton (6th Cir.)
J. Manuel Valle	2021	2022	Chicago (2017)	E. Jones (5th Cir.) / Larsen (6th Cir.)
Bijan M. Aboutorabi	2022	2023	Chicago (2018)	W. Pryor (11th Cir.) / Thapar (6th Cir.) / Mitchell (Ala.)
Michael Corcoran	2022	2023	Virginia (2017)	Bibas (3d Cir.) / J. E. Smith (5th Cir.)
Daniel J. Shapiro	2022	2023	George Mason (2018)	Rao (D.C. Cir.) / Jolly (5th Cir.)
Christine M. Buzzard	2022	2023	Yale (2013)	Sullivan (S.D.N.Y.) / J.R. Brown (D.C. Cir.)
C. William Courtney	2023	2024	Harvard (2019)	W. Pryor (11th Cir.) / Mitchell (Ala.)
Caroline Stephens Milner	2023	2024	Alabama (2018)	Rao (D.C. Cir.) / W. Pryor (11th Cir.)
Jasmine Stein	2023	2024	Yale (2019)	Thapar (6th Cir.)
Annie M. Wilson	2023	2024	Chicago (2017)	Wood (7th Cir.) / Pacold (N.D. Ill.) / Mitchell (Ala.)
Alexis Zhang	2024	2025	Yale (2020)	W. Pryor (11th Cir.) / Katsas (D.C. Cir.)

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/05/ginni-and-clarence-thomas-steal-2024-election-coup.html

dahlia &

no lnx many

Clarence and Ginni Thomas Are Telling Us Exactly How the 2024 Coup Will Go Down

BY DAHLIA LITHWICK AND MARK JOSEPH STERN

MAY 23, 2022

Justice Clarence Thomas sits side-by-side with his wife and conservative activist Virginia Thomas.

On Friday, the Washington Post broke the news that Ginni Thomas sent emails to Arizona elections officials asking them to set aside the will of the voters and submit a slate of fake electors who would support Donald Trump, even after he demonstrably lost the 2020 presidential election. The news barely caused a ripple because there is seemingly nothing to be done about Justice Clarence Thomas’ refusal to recuse in cases that materially affect his spouse, even as he has already decided several matters surrounding the 2020 election … and also because that same spouse had written far more inflammatory, QAnon-style texts to Trump’s chief of staff urging him to set aside the 2020 contest, and nothing was done about that either.

In reality, of course, there is plenty to be done about Supreme Court justices who decline to be bound by federal recusal statutes and judicial ethics canons. But unless and until there is a ravenous public appetite for reforms to the court, we will continue to watch this play out in mute horror, as though it’s a Netflix special about the Tudors, and the only recourse we have is to return to our mutton farming. Reforms aside, there is another more crucial lesson from the Thomases’ tag-team efforts to seat a president who lost an election: What’s past is prologue, and what was done sloppily in 2020 is being mapped out by experts for 2024.

It’s easy to dismiss the demented texts and emails from a sitting justice’s spouse to public officials who have long-standing professional connections to that justice as zany conspiracy theorizing. Ginni Thomas can be lumped into the QAnon weirdos bucket with Cleta Mitchell, Sidney Powell, Rudy Giuliani, and Mike Lindell—hapless insurrection enthusiasts who were unable to marshal a single winning argument in an actual court of law after the 2020 election. But the other way to look at the texts and emails that were pinging around the highest echelons of power and influence in the weeks after November 2020 is as a warning and road map for what is already being put into place for the next presidential contest.But next time, the lawyers won’t be sweating brown makeup or referencing crackpot theories of Italian election meddling.

What Thomas was emailing was a prefabbed piece of legal advocacy that urged Arizona state officials to “Please stand strong in the face of political and media pressure. Please reflect on the awesome authority granted to you by our constitution. And then please take action to ensure that aclean slateof electors is chosen for our state.” That isn’t just words. It’s actually a theory underlying the subversion of an entire presidential election. It’s also a theory her husband has endorsed as a matter of constitutional law. It didn’t work in 2020 because the legal and political structures to support it weren’t in place at the time. Those pieces are being put into place as we type this.

Recall, for instance, that back in November of 2020, it wasn’t clear there were five votes at the Supreme Court to support the proposition that state legislatures could simply set aside election results they deemed tainted by impropriety. Recall that when lawyer/insurrectionists John Eastman (a Thomas clerk) and Jeffrey Bossert Clark floated that notion at the White House and elsewhere, serious DOJ attorneys told them in no uncertain terms to go away. Recall finally that one of the lawmakers in Arizona, Shawnna Bolick, is married to a state Supreme Court justice and is parent to Clarence Thomas’ godchild. Bolick, as Jane Mayer of the New Yorker reported in 2021,later introduced legislation that “would enable a majority of the legislature to override the popular vote … and dictate the state’s electoral college votes itself.” In other words, what Bolick couldn’t lawfully do in 2020 is a thing she hopes to do under color of law in future. Oh, and Bolick is now running for secretary of state, the office that oversees state elections.

The New York Times reported this weekend on the proliferation of Bolick’s fellow travelers: election-deniers seeking or holding office in states that will decide the winner of the 2024 presidential race. According to their tally, at least 357 sitting Republican legislators in swing states “have used the power of their office to discredit or try to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.”That number amounts to “44 percent of the Republican legislators in the nine states where the presidential race was most narrowly decided.” Moreover, election deniers around the country are running for secretary of state and attorney general—vying to be swing states’ top election officer and top cop, respectively. If successful, they can use this power to aggressively investigate bogus claims of voter fraud, attempt to nullify Democratic ballots, refuse to certify the true results, and even try to approve an “alternative” slate of electors for the loser. This is what Ginni Thomas was pushing two years ago, and what her husband has already deemed constitutionally permissible.

Will any of this work? The Thomases clearly think it will. At the same time Ginni was lobbying state legislators to overturn the results, Clarence was developing and promoting a constitutional theory that would lend legitimacy to just such a brazen coup. The justice has become an avid fan of the “independent state legislature doctrine,” a verifiably false, pseudo-originalist theorythat allows state legislatures to ignore the real results and rig elections for Republicans. Thomas repeatedly deployed this theory during the 2020 race in an effort to void mail ballots in battleground states(which disproportionately favored Democrats). He later peddled a somewhat sanitized version of the Big Lie, falsely asserting that mail ballots—specifically, those used to elect Joe Biden in 2020—are highly susceptible to voter fraud.Ever since, he has continued to champion the theory whenever lower courts’ election law rulings happen to help Democrats. As our colleague Richard Hasen has pointed out, it looks increasingly likely that the Supreme Court will decide this issue by 2024.

The symmetry between Ginni and Clarence Thomas’ work has never been more obvious. While Clarence fought to give state legislatures the constitutional authority to reject election results, Ginni lobbied state legislators to do exactly that. A casual observer might assume they were working in tandem, with Clarence handling the law and Ginni working on the political side. They aren’t particularly subtle about it. You need only read Ginni’s emails and Clarence’s opinions to see exactly how the 2024 coup attempt will go down because it’s identical to the 2020 coup attempt: If a Democrat prevails, red state officials will question the legitimacy of the results, giving state legislatures an opportunity to throw them out and declare the Republican to be the real winner. This has nothing to do with liberals squelching Ginni Thomas’ feminist drive to have a separate and distinct political life apart from that of her spouse. More power to her. This has everything to do with two public actors working together to ensure that red state legislatures decide future elections in lieu of the voters.

The question remaining isn’t whether it’ll happen; the question is whether it’ll succeed. The Thomases tried this approach in 2020, but like Trump’s other allies, they developed their strategy a bit too late and didn’t buff out the crackpot edges until recently. But this time they’re putting in the work with plenty of time to spare. If Republicans succeed in pulling off a much more respectable coup in 2024, Americans will have every right to be furious and appalled. But no one will have any excuse to be surprised, because Clarence, Ginni, Eastman, Clark, and their many powerful friends are currently laying out the game plan right before our eyes.

For more on Ginni Thomas’ role in efforts to overturn the 2020 election, listen to this episode of What Next.

wfb beware bs cya

...In January and February, the New Yorker and the New York Times Magazine each published longform pieces alleging that Thomas had a much larger role in the events of Jan. 6. The Times in particular cast Thomas as an important trouble-shooter in the leadup to the rally, reporting she acted as an intermediary among bickering activists organizing the event.

Citing second-hand information from organizer Dustin Stockton, the Times reported that Thomas acted as a peacemaker between two feuding faction leaders—Jenny Beth Martin of Tea Party Patriots and Amy Kremer of Women for America First—convincing both to participate in the rally for the sake of shared goals.

Thomas, Martin, and Kremer each reject that claim.

"I played no role with those who were planning and leading the Jan. 6 events," Thomas said. "There are stories in the press suggesting I paid or arranged for buses. I did not. There are other stories saying I mediated feuding factions of leaders for that day. I did not."

One of the factions Thomas supposedly negotiated with wasn't even involved with organizing the rally. Martin's Tea Party groups were not sponsors of the Ellipse event, nor did her organizations spend money to support the effort.

"We condemn the violence. We are shocked, outraged, and saddened at the turn of events on January 6," Martin said in a statement.

Kremer contested the allegation about Thomas in texts exchanged with Times reporter Danny Hakim, one of the Thomas story's two authors. Those exchanges happened on background, meaning Hakim could not attribute any statement to Kremer in the Times story.

After the article was published, Kremer gave Hakim an on-the-record statement rejecting the allegation that Thomas acted as a peace-broker for her and Martin. Hakim tweeted the statement, but the story was never updated online and remained unchanged as of the publication of this story.

Kremer told the Free Beacon that the Times disregarded her background denials in order to push a false narrative about Thomas. And she said it was "egregious" that the Times did not update its story when she issued an on-the-record comment that cast doubt on one of the article's biggest claims.

"The NYT seems to be more of an activist organization than a media outlet focused on real journalism," Kremer told the Free Beacon. "They certainly have no regard for the truth."[her politifact recd not gt]

"We do not go into detail on our editorial process," a Times spokesman told the Free Beacon. "Our reporting was fair and accurate and we stand behind it."

Longtime Thomas confidant Mark Paoletta was the first to reveal the Hakim-Kremer texts.

There was a skirmish among Justice Thomas's sprawling network of ex-clerks after John Eastman, a lawyer who advised Trump on tactics for stopping certification of the results, sent emails to a listserv called Thomas Clerk World casting doubt on the integrity of the election. The exchanges appeared in part in the New Yorker and the Times.

Helgi Walker, who clerked for the justice and practices in the Washington, D.C., offices of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, said the exchanges were uncharacteristic for the listserv and that bad feeling hasn't lingered. Law clerk networks are generally friendly and intimate, but the Thomas clerk network is famously close.

"The Thomas clerk family—and we do refer to it as a family because that's what it is—is one of the most special and close-knit groups I have ever been a part of," Walker told the Free Beacon. "It really was a blip, and our group is strong—stronger than ever."

The Times story opens with two memoranda from a conservative advocacy group, theCouncil for National Policy, that outlined pressure tactics for influencing Republican lawmakers ahead of certification and damage control strategies after the Jan. 6 riot. The article billed Thomas as a "leader" of the council who had "taken on a prominent role at the council during the Trump years," noting she was appointed to the organization's advisory board in 2019.

Thomas told the Free Beacon that she played no role in crafting either document. Thomas says she has not even seen them as of this writing, nor did she disseminate them when they were released. She said both the Times and the New Yorker overstated her connection to the council.

"As a member of their [501]c4 board, candidly, I must admit that I do not attend many of those separate meetings, nor do I attend many of their phone calls they have," Thomas told the Free Beacon. "At CNP, I have moderated a session here and there. I delivered some remarks there once too."...

On February 2, 1987, Reagan nominated Sentelle to a position on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to replace Antonin Scalia. Sentelle was confirmed by the United States Senate in an 87-0 vote on September 9, 1987.Sentelle's judicial clerks are known as Sentelle-tubbies.^[1]

https://www.americanoversight.org/ginni-thomas-republican-connections-raise-ethics-concerns-for-scotus

The activism of prominent conservative Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, has for years raised questions about partisan influence on the judicial system and ethics in the Supreme Court. American Oversight is actively investigating Ginni Thomas’ connections and influence in right-wing networks and their potential impact on Justice Thomas’ ethics decisions. Records we have obtained through public records requests reveal Ginni Thomas’ ties to the Trump administration as well as evidence of Justice Thomas’ contact with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

As detailed in a recent :{update:(style="box-sizing:inherit;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}:, emails between Ginni Thomas and DeSantis, obtained by American Oversight and reported on by *Politico*, suggest that Justice Thomas may have been in :{regular contact:(style="box-sizing:inherit;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}: with the Republican governor. On June 10, 2021, Ginni Thomas :{reached out:(style="box-sizing:inherit;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}: to DeSantis’ scheduling office to invite him to speak to a “coalition” of “conservative patriots.” Thomas :{explained:(style="box-sizing:inherit;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}: that the governor would know her because her “husband has been in contact with him … on various things of late.”

Ginni Thomas said the “cone of silence coalition” of “about 83 national leaders” was formerly known asGroundswelland included former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows among its attendees. The group, now called the :{Third Century Group:(style="box-sizing:inherit;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear;background-color:#ffff66;"):}: (TC Group), was focused on “the greatest threats and opportunities to constitutional governance,” Thomas :{wrote:(style="box-sizing:inherit;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}: in her email, “and admittedly we are weary about the GOP divisions, lack of courage and lack of leadership.” Thomas also wrote that the group met “through the help of [conservative organization] Judicial Watch.”

DeSantis was eventually :{scheduled:(style="box-sizing:inherit;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}: to present during the group’s July 21 virtual meeting. According to an :{email:(style="box-sizing:inherit;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}: from a vice president at the Heritage Foundation who was planning to introduce the governor at the meeting, DeSantis was invited to speak “about whatever is on his mind in terms of national politics” and the attendees were “very concerned about [critical race theory], election integrity and immigration.”

:{The Coalition Formerly Known as Groundswell

Formerly known as Groundswell, TC Group is a secretive right-wing strategy group led by Ginni Thomas and others, which has been bringing together conservative activists for :{nearly a decade:(style="box-sizing:inherit;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}:. Members have :{included:(style="box-sizing:inherit;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}: former Trump chief strategis}:tStephen Bannon and former Trump National Security Adviser John Bolton, among others. The network was :{well-connected to the Trump administration:(style="box-sizing:inherit;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}: — in 2019, Thomas and others :{compiled lists:(style="box-sizing:inherit;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}: of anti-Trump officials in executive agencies for the administration to dismiss and replace with Trump allies.

Public records obtained by American Oversight show the degree of access Thomas and her coalition had in the Trump administration. A calendar entry from :{March 5, 2020:(style="box-sizing:inherit;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}:, showsRuss Vought, then the deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget, was scheduled to have “Breakfast with Ginni Thomas.”

On :{Dec. 10, 2018:(style="box-sizing:inherit;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}:, Thomas, on behalf of her lobbying firm Liberty Consulting,invited a Department of Health and Human Services official — likely :{Steven Wagner:(style="box-sizing:inherit;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}:, the director of the Administration for Children and Families — to a “Conversation and Strategic Discussion” with conservative commentatorJordan Peterson. The invitation noted that the event would be “closed to press and off the record” and that “a primary goal of this meeting is to determine specific action steps/solutions for winning back the next generation.” The reception was hosted by Thomas along with conservative Christian activist Bill Dallas and the Heritage Foundation’s Bridgett Wagner. The :{list of participants:(style="box-sizing:inherit;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}: included prominent conservatives.

On :{Aug. 22, 2018:(style="box-sizing:inherit;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}:, Neomi Rao, then the administrator of OMB’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, was scheduled to have a “Groundswell Mtg.” It is not confirmed whether this is Ginni Thomas’ Groundswell. Early in her career, Rao served as a law clerk for Justice Thomas on the Supreme Court, and in 2019, she was appointed by Trump to serve as federal judge in Washington, D.C.

:{Thomas’ Activism Raises Judicial Ethics Questions

}:Ginni Thomas’ career as a prominent conservative activist, more heavily involved in politics :{than any other spouse:(style="box-sizing:inherit;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}: of a Supreme Court justice in history, has for years raised concerns among :{legal experts:(style="box-sizing:inherit;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}: who note that justices typically avoid even being seen as partisan. Through her activism, Ginni Thomas has taken stances on issues that have come before the Supreme Court, such as on abortion, gun rights, and the :{Affordable Care Act:(style="box-sizing:inherit;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}:, and recently took on major role in challenging Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election. Justice Thomas’ repeated :{failure to recuse himself:(style="box-sizing:inherit;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}: on multiple matters relevant to his wife’s advocacy, especially as the court hears increasingly politically polarized cases, has been the subject of scrutiny.

Recently, Ginni Thomas was among the conservatives who :{signed a letter:(style="box-sizing:inherit;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}: criticizing the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. A month later, Justice Thomas was the only Supreme Court justice to support Trump’s request to block that committee from accessing White House records.

Ginni Thomas also played a role in challenging the 2020 election results as a leader of the conservative Council for National Policy (CNP), according to the *New York Times*. Following the November 2020 election, CNP directed its members to :{spread misinformation about the election:(style="box-sizing:inherit;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}: and pressured Republican lawmakers in Arizona, Georgia, and Pennsylvania to challenge the election results by awarding their states’ electoral votes to Trump. In a newsletter, CNP’s political advocacy arm :{advised:(style="box-sizing:inherit;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}:, “There is historical, legal precedent for Congress to count a slate of electors different from that certified by the Governor of the state.” :{Fake electoral certificates:(style="box-sizing:inherit;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}: submitted by Trump allies in swing states to Congress to dispute Biden’s victory were obtained by American Oversight last year.

American Oversight continues to investigate Ginni Thomas’ connections and influence. We have filed records requests seeking communications between Thomas and federal agencies during the Trump administration, and in January 2022, we submitted public records requests to attorneys generals and governors across the country for communications with both Ginni Thomas and Justice Thomas.

===

nyt

Friendship of Justice and Magnate Puts Focus on Ethics

Justice Clarence Thomas was given a $15,000 bust of Lincoln in 2001 by a group for which a friend is a trustee.

By Mike McIntire

June 18, 2011

PIN POINT, Ga. — Clarence Thomas was here promoting his memoir a few years ago when he bumped into Algernon Varn, whose grandfather once ran a seafood cannery that employed Justice Thomas’s mother as a crab picker.

Mr. Varn lived at the old cannery site, a collection of crumbling buildings on a salt marsh just down the road from a sign heralding this remote coastal community outside Savannah as Justice Thomas’s birthplace. The justice asked about plans for the property, and Mr. Varn said he hoped it could be preserved.

“And Clarence said, ‘Well, I’ve got a friend I’m going to put you in touch with,’ ” Mr. Varn recalled, adding that he was later told by others not to identify the friend.

The publicity-shy friend turned out to be Harlan Crow, a Dallas real estate magnate and a major contributor to conservative causes. Mr. Crow stepped in to finance the multimillion-dollar purchase and restoration of the cannery, featuring a museum about the culture and history of Pin Point that has become a pet project of Justice Thomas’s.

The project throws a spotlight on an unusual, and ethically sensitive, friendship that appears to be markedly different from those of other justices on the nation’s highest court.

The two men met in the mid-1990s, a few years after Justice Thomas joined the court. Since then, Mr. Crow has done many favors for the justice and his wife, Virginia, helping finance a Savannah library project dedicated to Justice Thomas, presenting him with a Bible that belonged to Frederick Douglass and reportedly providing $500,000 for Ms. Thomas to start a Tea Party-related group. They have also spent time together at gatherings of prominent Republicans and businesspeople at Mr. Crow’s Adirondacks estate and his camp in East Texas.

In several instances, news reports of Mr. Crow’s largess provoked controversy and questions, adding fuel to a rising debate about Supreme Court ethics. But Mr. Crow’s financing of the museum, his largest such act of generosity, previously unreported, raises the sharpest questions yet — both about Justice Thomas’s extrajudicial activities and about the extent to which the justices should remain exempt from the code of conduct for federal judges.

Although the Supreme Court is not bound by the code, justices have said they adhere to it. Legal ethicists differed on whether Justice Thomas’s dealings with Mr. Crow pose a problem under the code. But they agreed that one facet of the relationship was both unusual and important in weighing any ethical implications: Justice Thomas’s role in Mr. Crow’s donation for the museum.

The code says judges “should not personally participate” in raising money for charitable endeavors, out of concern that donors might feel pressured to give or entitled to favorable treatment from the judge. In addition, judges are not even supposed to know who donates to projects honoring them.

While the nonprofit Pin Point museum is not intended to honor Justice Thomas, people involved in the project said his role in the community’s history would inevitably be part of it, and he participated in a documentary film that is to accompany the exhibits.

Deborah L. Rhode, a Stanford University law professor who has called for stricter ethics rules for Supreme Court justices, said Justice Thomas “should not be directly involved in fund-raising activities, no matter how worthy they are or whether he’s being centrally honored by the museum.”

On the other hand, the restriction on fund-raising is primarily meant to deter judges from using their position to pressure donors, as opposed to relying on “a rich friend” like Mr. Crow, said Ronald D. Rotunda, who teaches legal ethics at Chapman University in California.

“I don’t think I could say it’s unethical,” he said. “It’s just a very peculiar situation.”

Justice Thomas, through a Supreme Court spokeswoman, declined to respond to a detailed set of questions submitted by The New York Times. Mr. Crow also would not comment.

Supreme Court ethics have been under increasing scrutiny, largely because of the activities of Justice Thomas and Ms. Thomas, whose group, Liberty Central, opposed President Obama’s health care overhaul — an issue likely to wind up before the court. Mr. Crow’s donation to Liberty Central was reported by Politico.

In January, the liberal advocacy organization Common Cause asked the Justice Department to investigate whether Justices Thomas and Antonin Scalia should have recused themselves from last year’s Citizens United campaign finance case because they had attended a political retreat organized by the billionaire Koch brothers, who support groups that stood to benefit from the court’s decision.

A month later, more than 100 law professors asked Congress to extend to Supreme Court justices the ethics code that applies to other federal judges, and a bill addressing the issue was introduced.

It is not unusual for justices to accept gifts or take part in outside activities, some with political overtones.

Justice Stephen G. Breyer has attended Renaissance Weekend, a retreat for politicians, artists and media personalities that is a favorite of Democrats, including former President Bill Clinton. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg participated in a symposium sponsored by the National Organization for Women’s Legal Defense and Education Fund, and a philanthropic foundation once tried to give her a $100,000 achievement award. She instructed that the money be given to charity.

[Algernon Varn, whose grandfather once ran a seafood cannery where Justice Clarence Thomas's mother worked, on the site of the old cannery. Mr. Varn said Justice Thomas put him in touch with a buyer to restore the property and build a museum.]

But in the case of Justice Thomas and his dealings with Mr. Crow, the ethical complications appear more complex.

Conservative Ties

Mr. Crow, 61, manages the real estate and investment businesses founded by his late father, Trammell Crow, once the largest landlord in the United States. The Crow family portfolio is worth hundreds of millions of dollars and includes investments in hotels, medical facilities, public equities and hedge funds.

A friend of the Bush family, Mr. Crow is a trustee of the George Bush Presidential Library Foundation and has donated close to $5 million to Republican campaigns and conservative groups. Among his contributions were $100,000 to Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, the group formed to attack the Vietnam War record of Senator John Kerry, the 2004 Democratic presidential candidate, and$500,000 to an organization that ran s urging the confirmation of President George W. Bush’s nominees to the Supreme Court.

Mr. Crow has not personally been a party to Supreme Court litigation, but his companies have been involved in federal court cases, including four that went to the appellate level. And he has served on the boards of two conservative organizations involved in filing supporting briefs in cases before the Supreme Court. One of them, the American Enterprise Institute, with Mr. Crow as a trustee, gave Justice Thomas a bust of Lincoln valued at $15,000 and praised his jurisprudence at an awards gala in 2001.

The institute’s Project on Fair Representation later filed briefs in several cases, and in2006the project brought a lawsuit challenging federal voting rights laws, a case in which Justice Thomas filed a lone dissent, embracing the project’s arguments. The project director, an institute fellow named Edward Blum, said the institute supported his research but did not finance the brief filings or the Texas suit, which waslitigated pro bono by aformer clerk of Justice Thomas’s. [SHELBY? WILEY BERT REIN? CONSOVOY?]

“When it came time to file a lawsuit,” he said, “A.E.I. had no role in doing that.”...

===

raw story

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

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas' right leaning political views have been obvious for decades in his writings for the Court. A new report in the Daily Beast, however, spotlights just how intertwined his financial connections are to an ultra-conservative judicial activist.

When Thomas was looking to promote the release of his memoir last October he chose to hire a public relations firm, CRC Advisors, run by the former chief of the Federalist Society, Leonard Leo. Leo is a top fundraiser for right-wing judicial activist groups. The Daily Beast reports that "Leo has raised hundreds of millions of dollars over the three decades on behalf of right-wing dark money groups to influence the federal judiciary and Supreme Court. He advised and persuaded Republican presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump in their appointments of Justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett, and Chief Justice John Roberts—and prepped Justice Thomas for his nomination hearings."

The report also says that Leo is the "hub" of dark money groups that stealthily fund and link up with parties who argue cases before the Supreme Court, something that Supreme watchers have dubbed an "amicus flotilla."

Leo’s affiliations with the court - and especially Thomas - are especially pronounced. He made the justice the godfather of one of his children and has hosted him on vacation at his New England retreat.

Paul Collins is a professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and author of several books about the high court. He says Thomas’ choice of Leo’s firm is “strange” and “unnecessary.”

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

:{https://www.alternet.org/2022/05:(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}::{/clarence-thomas-conflicts-of-interest/:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:

no lnx twt

https://www.alternet.org/2022/05/ginni-thomas/

the latest revelations about the actions of Ginni Thomas, the far right wing activist, lobbyist, and spouse of a sitting U.S. Supreme Court justice who had unprecedented access to the Trump White House are leading experts to demand Clarence Thomas’ recusal while calling the combination of their actions “breathtaking corruption,” and noting the Justice’s extraordinary hypocrisy.

Later Friday morning The Washington Post reported that Ginni Thomas pressed two Arizona lawmakers to overturn the will of Arizona’s voters in the 2020 presidential election by choosing a “clean” slate of electors, representing Donald Trump and not Joe Biden. The Post notes Thomas did not mention any candidate by name but reports “the context was clear."

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,” an email bearing Ginni Thomas’ name, sent to the Arizona lawmakers, reads.

It included a link to a video of a man delivering a message meant for swing-state lawmakers, urging them to “put things right” and “not give in to cowardice.”

“You have only hours to act,” said the speaker, who is not identified in the video.

Thomas also pressed Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows to work to overturn the election, as has been widely reported.

Her efforts, combined with Justice Thomas’ actions on the Supreme Court, amount to “breathtaking corruption,” writes Slate’s legal expert Mark Joseph Stern.

“The conflict of interest between Ginni and Clarence Thomas has never been greater. While Clarence was applying the ‘independent state legislature doctrine’ from the bench, Ginni was using the exact same theory to try to overturn the 2020 election. Just breathtaking corruption,” Stern says.

He adds:

Former federal prosecutor Joyce Vance, now an NBC News/MSNBC legal analyst and law professor, issued a strong warning.

Either Justice Thomas recuses in every case that comes to the Court where his wife is heavily involved in the action or the public’s confidence in the Court will be damaged beyond repair.”

Reuters reporter covering the U.S. Supreme Court, Lawrence Hurley:

Former federal corruption prosecutor Noah Bookbinder, who is president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) says it is “outrageous” Justice Thomas has refused to recuse:

"New evidence that Ginni Thomas’s participation in efforts to overturn the 2020 election was even greater than we knew; in this case pressure on AZ legislators to overturn that state’s vote. Makes it even more outrageous that Justice Thomas did not recuse.”

“Wow!” exclaimed Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and former New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof. “Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, pressed Arizona legislators to overturn Biden’s win and choose a‘clean slate of electors.’ In other words, she supported a coup to overthrow an elected president. What did her husband know?”

Economist and frequent political commentator David Rothschild observes, “Ginni Thomas was conspiring with high ranking Republicans to overturn [the] republic, and her husband was either privy to or actively involved in this conspiracy before using his position to coverup his wife’s role.”

Former SDNY Asst. U.S. Attorney Richard Signorelli sums up:

https://arizonadailyindependent.com/2022/05/20/rep-bolick-emails-to-and-from-wife-of-u-s-supreme-court-justice-show-no-pressure-or-quid-pro-quo/

if you were to rely solely on certain recent media reports, you might be under the impression Rep. Shawnna Bolick (R-Phoenix) did something improper by receiving two mass-generated emails sent by organizations associated with the wife of a supreme court justice.

Virginia “Ginni” Thomas is a well-known conservative involved in organizations which supported Donald Trump’s reelection efforts. She is also married to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who happens to the godfather to the son of Bolick’s husband Clint, a justice on the Arizona Supreme Court.

But a closer look at two unsolicited emails sent in 2020 to Bolick’s legislative email account from an account in Ginni Thomas’ name about the outcome of the 2020 presidential election shows there were no improper or unethical communications between the women, nor any suggestion of a quid pro quo because of any personal relationship.

The same can be said for two replies sent by Bolick.

In fact, several election officials say Bolick responded on Nov. 10, 2020 to the first email the way she should have – by referring Thomas to the Arizona Attorney General Office with any evidence of voter fraud or election interference. Even Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer describes Bolick’s reply as “eminently reasonable.”

Bolick also stressed in that reply to Thomas that bringing forth any such evidence was “the most productive” thing to do while various election lawsuits worked their way through the courts.

“From there we will see our best options moving forward to protect the integrity of the election,” Bolick wrote.

A further reading of the two Ginni Thomas emails show they have all the characteristics of auto-generated messages sent to recipients on a mailing list. Bolick even notes in a Nov. 12 followup reply to Thomas that Bolick’s legislative office received the same “Dear Representative Bolick” email three times in a span of a few minutes.

Thomas’ Nov. 9, 2020 email noted that Article II of the U.S. Constitution gives Arizona’s legislators the “awesome responsibility” for choosing state’s presidential electors. It also requested a meeting with the recipients. A Dec. 13, 2020 email simply asked recipients to watch an attached two-minute video.

But Bolick isn’t the only Arizona legislator to receive the two emails under Thomas’ name.

Public records released by the Clerk of the House of Representatives confirm Speaker Rusty Bowers (R-Mesa) received both, although it appears he never responded. There is also no indication that Bolick, Bowers, or their staff ever made arrangements for the requested meeting.

Bolick’s current campaign to be the Republican nominee for Arizona Secretary of State has been questioned by some media outlets in light of the Ginni Thomas emails, as has her legislative record of introducing election integrity bills. The suggestion woven into much of the reporting is that Thomas was using the emails to exert “pressure” on Bolick due to the personal connection between the two husbands.

It did not take long for Bolick to slap down what she called “the conjecture” about the communications.

“The dishonest media wants to distract attention from election fraud and our efforts to secure elections,” she stated Friday morning. As to questions about Bolick’s motivation for introducing an election integrity bill last session, she provided a link to a February 2021 Op-Ed she wrote explaining her intentions

:{Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court justice, pressed Arizona lawmakers ...:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:top;display:inline-block;max-width:100%;overflow:hidden;text-overflow:ellipsis;white-space:nowrap"):}:

Bolick is married to Clint Bolick, an associate justice of the Arizona Supreme Court, who worked with Clarence Thomas early in his career and has said he considers the justice a mentor. Shawnna...

:{https://arizonadailyindependent.com:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline"):}::{ › 2022 › 05 › 20 › rep-bolick-emails-to-and-from-wife-of-u-s-supreme-court-justice-show-no-pressure-or-quid-pro-quo:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline"):}:

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Virginia "Ginni" Thomas is a well-known conservative involved in organizations which supported Donald Trump's reelection efforts. She is also married to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who happens to the godfather to the son of Bolick's husband Clint, a justice on the Arizona Supreme Court. Read more by Terri Jo Neff >>

:{https://www.azmirror.com:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline"):}::{ › 2022 › 05 › 20 › emails-show-ginni-thomas-asked-gop-lawmaker-shawnna-bolick-for-help-overturning-bidens-arizona-win:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline"):}:

:{Emails show Ginni Thomas asked GOP lawmaker Shawnna Bolick for help ...:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:top;display:inline-block;max-width:100%;overflow:hidden;text-overflow:ellipsis;white-space:nowrap"):}:

The Bolicks and Thomases are close: Bolick's husband, Arizona Supreme Court Justice Clint Bolick, is a longtime friend of Clarence Thomas, and the U.S. Supreme Court Justice is godfather to Bolick's son. Thomas also emailed House Speaker Rusty Bowers, who repeatedly told Trump and others in his orbit in the weeks after the 2020 election ...

to clerks

https://www.politicususa.com/2021/02/02/ginni-thomas-apology.html

in an email list of former Supreme Court clerks for Clarence Thomas, the justice's wife, Ginni Thomas, reportedly made amends for her political posts related to the 2020 election.

The longtime conservative activist apologized to the group for messages, which included pro-Trump posts and support for the "Stop the Steal" rally that preceded the Jan. 6 siege of Congress, according to emails shared with the Washington Post by members of the mailing list.

"I owe you all an apology. I have likely imposed on you my lifetime passions," Thomas said on Jan. 18. "My passions and beliefs are likely shared with the bulk of you, but certainly not all. And sometimes the smallest matters can divide loved ones for too long. Let’s pledge to not let politics divide THIS family, and learn to speak more gently and knowingly across the divide."

In one email following the election, the date of which is unclear, Thomas said, "Many of us are hurting, after leaving it all on the field, to preserve the best of this country." She added: "I feel I have failed my parents who did their best and taught me to work to preserve liberties."

on the day of the storming of the U.S. Capitol, which led to five deaths, Thomas endorsed a nearby rally attended by former President Donald Trump to protest the affirmation of President Biden's 2020 victory, with posts such as, “LOVE MAGA people!!!!” and “GOD BLESS EACH OF YOU STANDING UP or PRAYING.” Days later, as reported by *Slate*, Thomas amended a post expressing her "LOVE" of the demonstrators by adding: "[Note: written before violence in US Capitol]."

The rift within the email group, which is more commonly a source for baby announcements and congratulations on work promotions, appeared to widen in the days after the Capitol riot.

When one member shared an article from Christianity Today on how religious symbols were appropriated by rioters who invaded the Capitol, former clerk Wendy Stone Long called the piece "offensive drivel."

"Many of my friends and I had been praying our knees off that January 6 would see light and truth being shed on what we believe in our hearts waslikely a stolen election," she wrote. "Many of us marched peacefully and yes, many also prayed and shared another important message, 'Jesus saves.'"

Trump was impeached by the House on a single article of incitement of insurrection after he spoke at a "Stop the Steal" rally in Washington, D.C., and urged his followers to march on the U.S. Capitol, where lawmakers were counting electoral votes to affirm Biden's victory. The legal team representing Trump, who faces a Senate trial next week, argues the process is unconstitutional.

John Eastman, a lawyer who spoke at the rally and filed lawsuits alleging election fraud, said, "Rest assured that those of us involved in this are working diligently to ascertain the truth."

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

Justice Thomas is said not to be actively involved in the conversations, and the clerk who provided the emails told the Washington Post: "Ginni does not speak for CT."

https://www.protocol.com/policy/thomas-clerk-hawley

no lnx vid 2021

during the Supreme Court's most recent term, Justice Clarence Thomas fired two very public warning shots at Big Tech. First, in an unprompted statement last fall, he called for Section 230 to be reined in, saying the law had been interpreted too broadly by the courts. He followed that up months later with a concurring opinion that suggested Facebook and others ought to be regulated as common carriers.

The two pieces of writing didn't escape the notice of tech policy watchers. What did go relatively unnoticed, though, was just who was working in Thomas' chambers at the time: a clerk named Josh Divine, who was coming off of a stint working for one of Big Tech's biggest critics and a vocal proponent of Section 230 reform, Senator Josh Hawley.

As far as Supreme Court clerks go, Divine's resume is somewhat unique. The road to Supreme Court clerkship usually involves working as a lower court clerk or spending a year or two at a big law firm. Prior to working for Hawley, Divine had done both. But he was also the only clerk this term to have come straight from Capitol Hill, having recently served as deputy counsel in Hawley's Senate office. According to experts on Supreme Court clerkships, Divine may be one of few people to have ever followed that Senate-to-Supreme Court trajectory at all. "It's not the norm," said Todd Peppers, a professor at Washington and Lee University and author of several books on Supreme Court clerks.

"That's relatively unusual," said Artemus Ward, a professor at Northern Illinois University's College of Law, who has also written extensively about clerkships.

Just how much impact, if any, Divine had on Thomas' recent turn against tech is almost impossible to know for certain. Supreme Court clerks and the justices they serve are notoriously tight-lipped, and neither Divine nor the Supreme Court's public information office responded to Protocol's request for comment. But the similarities between Thomas' writing and Divine's own public comments on Section 230 are striking.

Mirror, mirror

In April 2020, just months before he left Hawley's Senate office for Thomas' chambers, Divine laid out his argument for Section 230 reform in a teleforum for the Federalist Society. The talk was substantially more succinct and conversational than Thomas' statement on Section 230 in the Malwarebytes case later that year.

But Divine's speech and Thomas' statement mirror each other almost paragraph-for-paragraph and point-for-point.Their logic follows the same order, using the same examples, down to a recent case involving Snapchat, which both Thomas and Divine cited as an example of Section 230 gone wrong.

Here's Divine on Snapchat:

Snapchat has a product called speed filter. It basically allows you to take a picture, and then part of the picture displays your current speed. Now, most people recognize that this kind of tool is primarily attractive to reckless drivers, and indeed encourages reckless driving. Well, under current doctrine, it's entirely protected. Now, the problem with this is that a plaintiff who sues somebody over something like speed filter, they're not complaining about specific speech. They're complaining about a reckless platform design decision.

And here's Thomas' statement, months later:

Another [court] granted immunity on a claim that a social media company defectively designed its product by creating a feature that encouraged reckless driving. A common thread through all these cases is that the plaintiffs were not necessarily trying to hold the defendants liable "as the publisher or speaker" of third-party content. Nor did their claims seek to hold defendants liable for removing content in good faith. Their claims rested instead on alleged product design flaws—that is, the defendant's own misconduct.

Both Divine and Thomas also focus on the different liabilities traditionally faced by publishers, like newspapers, and distributors, like newsstands. At the crux of both of their arguments is the idea that while Section 230 may protect platforms from being treated as publishers, courts have improperly expanded it to prevent platforms from being treated as distributors, as well.

Here's Divine at the teleforum:

When you consider the whole text, I think it's really tough to conclude that Section 230 eliminates distributor liability and does so implicitly when the same statute elsewhere recognizes and imposes that very same kind of liability.

And here's Thomas:

It is odd to hold, as courts have, that Congress implicitly eliminated distributor liability in the very Act in which Congress explicitly imposed it.

The similarities continue throughout. But experts on both clerkships and Section 230 caution that these and other overlaps aren't some grand evidence of Divine pulling the strings behind the scenes. After all, the history of Section 230 is what it is, and Divine wouldn't be the first to make these arguments, especially not among members of the conservative Federalist Society. "I'm a little leery of the idea that a bunch of extraordinarily bright, but green and experienced law clerks are running the show," Peppers said.

But it also wouldn't be the first time a clerk with substantial expertise in an area had a potentially heavy hand in drafting a justice's argument, Ward said: "It's not too much of a stretch to think about that. Clerks do all the writing for the justices."

"My first thought is that Justice Thomas would be silly not to take advantage of a clerk's expertise," said Lawrence Baum, a professor of political science at Ohio State University, who also focuses on the Supreme Court.

Key advisors

The topic of Supreme Court clerks' influence has been the subject of extensive study and fascination for decades. As early as 1957, former chief justice William Rehnquist wrote that "[t]here is the possibility of the bias of the clerks affecting the Court's certiorari work."

More recently, Peppers co-authored a 2008 paper that studied law clerks' influence on Supreme Court Justices' decisions and concluded that there is "a clear correlation between clerk partisanship and the Justices' voting — one that persists in the face of even strong controls for the ideology of the Justice."

Clerks contribute to the court in a few important ways, Peppers said. They review cert petitions and prepare memoranda on them, giving clerks at least some say in what cases the court takes up. They also prepare first drafts of opinions. In his 2006 book, "Sorcerers' Apprentices," Ward found that about a third of clerks surveyed said they had written drafts that were then published unedited during their clerkships.

"My research showed they were quite influential," Ward said. "They're key advisors who absolutely have influence on their bosses in the same way key staffers in Congress or at the White House have influence on their bosses."

Even opinions that are heavily edited by the justices — and most are — often still bear the mark of the clerk who wrote the first draft. "There's a big difference between starting off with a blank piece of paper and starting off with a draft written by someone else," Peppers said.

Which is what makes Divine's political pedigree worthy of note. One reason clerks have historically had very little real-world work experience to speak of, Ward said, is to prevent them from having undue influence on the court. "What you don't want if you're a justice is to have a clerk who tries to act like a justice," Ward said.

But lately, the tides have begun to shift, with more and more clerks taking the position after working in lower courts or even in major law firms for years. It may be unusual for someone like Divine, who has worked in politics, to take such a position, but it's not completely singular. Last year's group of new clerks included someone who'd worked for a stint at the White House under President Trump and a former assistant attorney general of Texas.

Ward views this change as a natural evolution of an ongoing trend. "As partisanship ramps up and we get more hyper-partisan in Washington, it may be that justices are looking for more of that — more assurance that the clerks are going to be co-partisans with them," Ward said.

That's especially true of Thomas, who is known to be both extremely partisan in his selection of clerks and extremely close with his clerks. While other Justices have hired across party lines, Thomas has been open about the fact that he does not. "I won't hire clerks who have profound disagreements with me," he once said, according to a 2010 New York Times story about partisanship in the clerkship. "It's like trying to train a pig. It wastes your time, and it aggravates the pig."

Hiring someone with a clear history in politics may help eliminate any doubt about where they stand. "If they have a more extensive record, a justice can be more reassured that we're on the same side and would be working toward a common end," Baum said.

All of this makes it impossible to attribute Thomas' stance on Section 230 directly to Divine's influence. At a time of escalating tensions between conservatives and tech giants, Thomas' views on tech regulation could be coming from any number of places. It could be, in fact, that Thomas selected Divine as a clerk precisely because Thomas was already interested in reforming Section 230 and saw a fellow traveler in Divine.

"Sometimes when people wring their hands and worry about law clerk influence, you forget these are extraordinarily smart people who have had a long time to think about their views," Peppers said.

Peppers is reluctant to attribute Thomas' turn against tech to Divine, but he acknowledges that the timing of the clerkship is "suggestive."

"It might not raise a red flag," Peppers said, "but it certainly might raise an eyebrow."

Ward tends to agree, but he adds that there is reason for concern about the creeping influence of politics in the courts. It's not that he believes the Supreme Court is some kind of apolitical body. The idea that the law and politics are separate, Ward said, is "bogus."

But he believes that the more the court is influenced by highly experienced, politically savvy staffers who are forbidden from speaking publicly and who are not vetted by Congress, the less accountable the court becomes as an institution. "That," Ward said, "should trouble all of us."

Issie Lapowsky ( @issielapowsky) is Protocol's chief correspondent, covering the intersection of technology, politics, and national affairs. She also oversees Protocol's fellowship program. Previously, she was a senior writer at Wired, where she covered the 2016 election and the Facebook beat in its aftermath. Prior to that, Issie worked as a staff writer for Inc. magazine, writing about small business and entrepreneurship. She has also worked as an on-air contributor for CBS News and taught a graduate-level course at New York University's Center for Publishing on how tech giants have affected publishing.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/07/clarence-thomas-trump/593596/

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The Clarence Thomas Effect

The notoriously quiet Supreme Court justice has had a far-reaching influence on the personnel of the Trump administration, which may be his most lasting legacy.

By Emma Green

JULY 10, 2019

Clarence Thomas is the longest-serving justice currently sitting on the Supreme Court. For much of his tenure, court watchers and critics have dismissed his jurisprudence as largely irrelevant, demoting him to the late Justice Antonin Scalia’s judicial sidekick. In the public imagination, he is most remembered for his worst moment. Last fall’s confirmation hearings for Justice Brett Kavanaugh resurrected the debate over Anita Hill, the woman who famously accused Thomas of sexual harassment during his 1991 confirmation hearings.

And yet, during his time on the Court, Thomas has written prolifically and introduced ideas that have gradually gained influence among other justices. Of all the Supreme Court justices, Thomas takes an approach to the law that is arguably the purest embodiment of the conservative judicial philosophies known astextualism, which holds that the plain meaning of the text of a law is all that matters in judicial interpretation, and originalism, which holds that the Constitution should be interpreted only as its authors intended.

The most significant part of Thomas’s legacy, however, may take shape long after he has stopped writing opinions.Personnel is policy. Thomas’s vast network, more than that of any other justice, has defined President Donald Trump’s administration and the federal judiciary Trump has built. Through his clerks and mentees, the notoriously silent justice may end up with an outsize voice in the legal system for years to come.

Numbers are the first evidence of the sizable Thomas effect. He has had more of his former clerks nominated to federal judgeships under Trump than any other justice, past or present: 10, compared with Anthony Kennedy’s seven and Scalia’s five. Roughly one-fifth of Thomas’s former clerks either are in the Trump administration or have been nominated to the federal bench by the president. The clerks whom Thomas trained, has mentored, and actively stays in touch with are taking up lifetime appointments, and on the whole, they are quite young: Allison Jones Rushing, who now sits on the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, is just in her mid-30s.

[Read: Conservative women are leading the defense of Kavanaugh]

These relatively small numbers offer insight into the broad influence Thomas has had on the Trump-era legal establishment. Even clerks who aren’t in formal positions of public service have gained prominence under Trump: Laura Ingraham, the conservative commentator who clerked for Thomas during his early years on the bench, has hosted one of the top-rated programs on Fox News since October 2017 and is an outspoken supporter of the president. Another former clerk, Carrie Severino, the chief counsel and policy director of the Judicial Crisis Network, has been one of the most vocal advocates for Trump’s judicial nominees, including Kavanaugh.

The Thomas effect started taking shape early on in the Trump administration. As Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern noted as early as mid-2017, when the pattern was still nascent, “Everywhere you turn in Trumpland, you’ll find a slew of Thomas’ former clerks in high places.” In part, this effect may have been driven by the people making the hires. Gregory Katsas, who clerked for Thomas on the D.C. Circuit and the Supreme Court, joined the Trump administration right after the inauguration as a deputy assistant to the president and deputy counsel. Later, when Katsas was nominated to his own judgeship on the D.C. Circuit Court, he told U.S. senators that he had been involved in “interviewing and recommending candidates for various executive and judicial appointments.”

At least three other people who have worked in Trump’s White House counsel’s office are also former Thomas clerks: John Eisenberg, David Morrell, and Kate Todd. When the Trump administration released its list of potential Supreme Court nominees in November 2017, four former Thomas clerks were included: Thomas Lee, Margaret Ryan, David Stras, and Allison Eid.

Any new administration has a huge number of positions to fill across the executive branch. When Trump took office, he also faced significant judicial vacancies—142 empty seats, according to data from the American Bar Association. By comparison, when Barack Obama took office in 2008, there were only 53 federal judicial vacancies. These jobs are filled like any other: through personal networks and recommendations. Under Trump, the most influential source of potential candidates for these vacancies has been the Federalist Society,a professional network for conservative and libertarian lawyers. “It happens that a lot of the people in the White House counsel’s office are Federalist Society members, and as a result of having been Federalist Society members, they have their own set of contacts,” said John Malcolm, who works on judicial issues at the Heritage Foundation and is chairman of the Federalist Society’s criminal-law practice group. The organization’s executive vice president, Leonard Leo, has had an influential role in advising the Trump administration on possible nominees.

Although stories about the Federalist Society often focus on the intellectual role and legacy of the late Justice Scalia, who was an early faculty adviser to the group at the University of Chicago, Thomas is a central figure in the Federalist Society universe.William Eskridge, a law professor at Yale known for his work on LGBTQ legal issues, told me the Federalist Society is “a social circle. It’s a professional circle. It’s a circle that gives [the justices] law clerks. It’s a circle that gives them positive publicity.” And, he added, “Thomas is at the center of that.”

[Read: The Supreme Court hands a victory to the pro-life movement]

Scalia famously described himself as a “fainthearted originalist,” although he later repudiated that label. By contrast, Thomas’s originalism has been “unflinching,” as one conservative law professor wrote in a recent column for The New York Times.Scalia himself told a Thomas biographer that Thomas does not believe in the legal principle of generally following settled precedent. “Among Federalist Society members, he probably would be their No. 1 favorite justice of anyone on the Court,” Severino told me. “As wonderful as Justice Scalia is, Thomas is someone who has inspired a lot of young lawyers.”

The Thomas effect may be due to more than just the power of networks, however. Thomas has been on the Supreme Court bench since 1991, and his clerks are entering their professional peaks during a Republican administration. Several former clerks told me Thomas goes out of his way to stay in touch with his clerks and cultivate their careers; they have monthly lunches and regularly get together for intergenerational reunions. Each year, Thomas takes his clerks on a field trip to the site of the deadliest battle in the Civil War. “I want them to go to Gettysburgand to think about … the price that was paid for this country to exist,” he said in an interview with the appeals-court judge Diane Sykes at a Federalist Society event in 2013. “I love my law clerks,” Thomas added. “These kids are my family.”

Thomas’s clerks tend to fit a particular profile. They come from all over the country, including law schools outside the Ivy League, which makes them particularly suitable candidates for federal judgeships. “Judges have to have ties to the local area typically,” said Saikrishna Prakash, a former Thomas clerk and professor of law at the University of Virginia. “The Thomas clerks, because they come from more regions in the country, and certainly go to law schools all over the country, are more apt to go outside of the I-95 corridor.” After their clerkships, these lawyers often go into public service, taking up positions in U.S. attorneys’ offices or as professors, which means they don’t mind the pay cut that often comes with a move to the federal bench. (A federal district-court judge can expect to make slightly more than $200,000 a year; by comparison, partners at top-tier law firms can earn multimillion-dollar salaries.)And, like Thomas, they tend to be very conservative, committed originalists and textualists. As Eskridge put it, they are true believers.

The Trump administration’s most marked achievement in terms of shifting the federal judiciary has come through Circuit Courts of Appeals.Trump has far outpaced his recent predecessors, with 42 confirmed appointments to these courts over the past two and a half years; by comparison, Obama had gotten less than half as many appeals-court judges confirmed by this point in his first term. These seats are where Thomas clerks will have the most influence—and are outpacing the former clerks for conservative justices. Former Thomas clerks have now been confirmed to the Fourth, Fifth, Eighth, Ninth, and Tenth Circuits, along with two judges confirmed to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals—Katsas and Neomi Rao, the former head of Trump’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. The D.C. Circuit is particularly influential, because it is responsible for reviewing the actions of federal agencies; in recent years, it has issued important decisions on topics ranging from Obamacare to gun rights.

Thomas is famously silent during oral arguments. But as a writer, he has been prolific:He wrote the most concurrences, dissents, and opinions of any justice during each of the past five terms, according to data from SCOTUSblog. Over time, his work has significantly shifted the window of acceptable legal opinions on various issues, said John Yoo, a former Thomas clerk and law professor at UC Berkeley who is best known for his work on the George W. Bush administration’s torture memos. “When I clerked for him, he published some opinions I thought were really radical, and the legal profession would never be interested,” Yoo told me. “Now those opinions are heavily debated in law schools and are very influential.” He specifically mentioned Thomas’s concurrence in a 1995 case on affirmative action, Adarand v. Peña, and another concurrence in a case on the Constitution’s commerce clause, United States v. Lopez.

On the Court, Thomas’s purist approach may cost him the ability to convince his fellow justices on controversial cases. “He’s less of a traditional politician,” Yoo told me. “I think he’s more interested in saying, ‘This is the correct view of the Constitution,’ rather than assembling five votes. And that’s a trade-off.” Thomas’s views often come out in dissents or concurrences, offered solo or joined by just one or two other justices.“He has not, until recently, written any of the blockbuster majority opinions,” Yoo said, “because to do that, you have to horse-trade to get votes.” (Notable majority opinions by Thomas include a 2001 case concerning the rights of a religious student group, Good News Club v. Milford Central School, and a 2018 First Amendment case involving a crisis-pregnancy center, NIFLA v. Becerra.)

This is all the more reason the rise of Thomas’s former clerks is important. His approach to controversial legal questions—generally opposing affirmative action, favoring limited power for federal agencies, defending gun rights, and more—has been developed and popularized over his decades on the bench, and will be carried forward by a new generation of judges. He openly defies what he sees as bad precedent—just last month, Thomas wrote in a concurrence that “the Constitution itself is silent on abortion.”

[Adam Cohen: Clarence Thomas knows nothing of my work]

Other conservative justices’ clerks have had a significant footprint in the Trump administration. Two of former Justice Anthony Kennedy’s clerks, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, now sit on the Supreme Court. Trump’s secretary of health and human services, Alex Azar, and his solicitor general, Noel Francisco, both clerked for Scalia, as did the White House counselor Emmet Flood and the recently confirmed Seventh Circuit judge, Amy Coney Barrett, who is widely thought to be on Trump’s short list for any potential future Supreme Court slots.

Thomas’s influence, however, is particularly broad, reaching from the Department of Justice to the White House to the federal bench. Thomas is now 71 years old. If he follows the path of his colleagues Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who are both in their 80s, he could easily have a decade or more to go on the Supreme Court. His greatest legacy, however, may be in the intellectual seeds he has planted in the generation of lawyers who came up studying his work.

Olivia Paschal contributed reporting to this article.

Emma Green is a former staff writer at The Atlantic.

https://abovethelaw.com/2017/08/the-clarence-thomas-clerk-mafia-legal-brain-trust-of-the-trump-administration/

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you can learn a lot about a judge based on the law clerks that she hires. And you can also learn a lot about a judge from her clerks’ post-clerkship careers.

What can we say about Justice Clarence Thomas based on the career trajectories of his former law clerks? We can safely call him the legal godfather of the Trump administration.

Yes, President Donald Trump’s first Supreme Court appointee, Justice Neil Gorsuch, is a former law clerk to Justice Anthony M. Kennedy. But if you look at the Trump administration as a whole, you’ll see a proliferation of CT clerks in positions of great power and prominence. Many former SCOTUS clerks hold positions in Trumpworld, but the Thomas clerks predominate.

If you don’t believe me (perhaps because you don’t share my admitted textualist and originalist leanings), take it from a pair of prominent progressive legal commentators,Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern. In The Clarence Thomas Takeover, a comprehensive and well-argued Slate piece (that’s being gleefully circulated among Thomas clerks right now), Lithwick and Stern make a strong case for the dominance of the CT clerk mafia:

Everywhere you turn in Trumpland, you’ll find a slew of Thomas’ former clerks in high places. They are serving in the White House counsel’s office (Greg Katsas, John Eisenberg, David Morrell); awaiting appointment to the federal judiciary (Allison H. Eid, David Stras); leading the departments of the Treasury (Heath P. Tarbert, Sigal Mandelker) and Transportation (Steven G. Bradbury); defending the travel ban in court (Jeffrey Wall); and heading the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (Neomi Rao). Thomas clerks are also working with dark money groups to execute Trump’s agenda (Carrie Severino) and boosting him in the far-right media (Laura Ingraham).

To be sure, clerks to other conservative justices also occupy top posts in the Trump administration. On this list of 26 White house Counsel staffers, for example, there are seven former SCOTUS clerks (three Thomas clerks, two Scalia clerks, and two Alito clerks).

But numbers don’t tell the whole story. There’s also the issue of sensibility and attitude, as explained by Professor Steve Vladeck:

Stephen Vladeck, who teaches law at the University of Texas and serves as a Supreme Court analyst for CNN, says it’s instructive to compare the career paths of clerks who worked for Thomas and those who served under Scalia.The latter, Vladeck says, have gravitated more toward the conservative establishment—institutions like law schools and legal foundations. The Thomas clerks, who have “a bit more of a libertarian or populist streak,” are a more logical fit for the key legal jobs serving the Trump White House.It is the Thomas alums that have risen to prominence in the past six months, and they are working zealously to put their mentor’s ideas into action.

And this makes sense, Lithwick and Stern argue, given the philosophical similarities between Thomas and Trump:

Donald Trump’s crude understanding of the United States government aligns startlingly well with Thomas’ sophisticated political worldview. The president’s belief that the commander in chief can wage war in whatever way he wishes corresponds neatly to Thomas’ theory of the “unitary executive,” and his visceral hostility to the Affordable Care Act dovetails with Thomas’ abhorrence of the federal social safety net. The two men also share an absolutist opposition to gun control, a belief that the government may favor and promote Christianity over other faiths, a deep skepticism of the elite academic establishment, and a nostalgia for the perceived America of yesteryear. Both take a hard-line stance against illegal immigration and show little concern for the rights of individuals accused of terrorism. Thomas is a thinker and Trump is a feeler, but together they have arrived at similar conclusions. They want less government, a more authoritarian executive, more God, fewer racial entitlements, and more guns.

One can agree or disagree with Lithwick and Stern’s normative judgments, but it’s hard to argue with their bottom line: Justice Thomas and President Trump think alike, and even if there’s not much CT can do by himself to help DJT (other than cast votes for the administration), he has certainly provided President Trump with lots of brainpower — lawyers who are very smart, and very conservative:

Thomas is known to be ideologically rigid when it comes to hiring (and in everything else). Prior to 2013, every clerk he’d brought on during his Supreme Court tenure had first served under an appellate-level judge who’d been appointed by a Republican president.* Even Scalia occasionally hired “counter-clerks,” liberal-leaning men and women who had clerked for Democratic appointees on lower courts. Thomas has expressed no interest in this kind of ideological diversity. (To his credit, he does value educational diversity, intentionally hiring clerks from lower-ranked schools. Compare that with Scalia, who was openly biased against schools outside the T14.)

[UPDATE (6:10 p.m.): Actually, as Ed Whelan just pointed out, “a quick check of Wikipedia would have revealed that Thomas has hired three clerks since [the 2010 New York Times article the authors rely upon] who had clerked for Democratic appointees. (Plus, one of Thomas’s first clerks had previously clerked for JFK appointee Byron White.)”]

Interestingly enough, the Thomas clerks serving in the Trump administration hail mostly from T14 schools (just as President Trump himself graduated from elite U. Penn, his populist rhetoric notwithstanding). Of the dozen CT clerks name-checked by Lithwick and Stern in the first blockquote above, eleven out of twelve went to T14 schools: three from conservative-leaning U. Chicago; two each from Harvard, Yale, and Chicago; and one each from UVA and Michigan. (The exception is Justice Dave Stras, a graduate of Kansas Law — a fact that could help his SCOTUS chances, given the constant complaints about too many Harvard/Yale justices on the Court.)

As the old saying (or book title) goes, “Ideas have consequences.” You might not like all the consequences of a Trump presidency for the legal world (or world more generally) — but when it comes to many of the ideas, credit Clarence Thomas.

P.S. You should definitely read Lithwick and Stern’s full article, in which they note — correctly, in my view — that “liberals consistently underestimate Thomas’ influence.” Maybe the Trump administration will bring an end to that.

The Clarence Thomas Takeover [Slate]

Earlier: Supreme Court Clerk Hiring Watch: To Know A Judge, Know Her Clerks

David Lat is the founder and managing editor of Above the Law and the author of Supreme Ambitions: A Novel. He previously worked as a federal prosecutor in Newark, New Jersey; a litigation associate at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz; and a law clerk to Judge Diarmuid F. O’Scannlain of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. You can connect with David on Twitter (@DavidLat), LinkedIn, and Facebook, and you can reach him by email at dlat@abovethelaw.com.

TOPICS

Acting Solicitor General Jeffrey Wall, Allison Eid, Allison H. Eid, Carrie Severino, Clarence Thomas, Constitutional Law, Dahlia Lithwick, Dave Stras, David Morrell, David Stras, Department of Justice, Federal Government, Gregory G. Katsas, Gregory Katsas, Heath P. Tarbert, Heath Tarbert, Jeffrey Wall, John Eisen, Judicial Nominations, Judicial Nominees, Justice, Laura Ingraham, Mark Joseph Stern, Neomi Rao, Politics, SCOTUS, Sigal Mandelker, Slate, Steve Vladeck, Steven Bradbury, Supreme Court, White House Counsel

ref dahlia 2017

https://slate.com/news-and-politics**/2017**/08/clarence-thomas-legal-vision-is-becoming-a-trump-era-reality.html

no lnx many?

There’s a reason Clarence Thomas writes so many solo dissents and concurrences. The second-longest-tenured justice on the Supreme Court has spent more than 25 years staking out a right-wing worldview that can generously be described as idiosyncratic. Thomas’ Constitution is one that gives a president at war the powers of a king while depriving Congress of any meaningful ability to regulate the country. His opposition to the very existence of much of the federal regulatory state, too, has never quite found five votes on the court. No other justice, except perhaps Neil Gorsuch if he continues down his current path, would carry his conservative principles to such an extreme position with regard to presidential authority and congressional constraint.

Now a judge who’s spent his career teetering off the right edge of the federal bench finds himself at the center of the table. Thomas was on hand at the inauguration to swear in Vice President Mike Pence, using the same Bible that Ronald Reagan used when he was sworn in for both of his terms as president. But Thomas is more than just the Trump administration’s philosophical hero. His once-fringy ideas are suddenly flourishing—not only on the high court, through his alliance with Gorsuch, but also in the executive branch.

Donald Trump’s crude understanding of the United States government aligns startlingly well with Thomas’ sophisticated political worldview. The president’s belief that the commander in chief can wage war in whatever way he wishes corresponds neatly to Thomas’ theory of the “unitary executive,” and his visceral hostility to the Affordable Care Act dovetails with Thomas’ abhorrence of the federal social safety net. The two men also share an absolutist opposition to gun control, a belief that the government may favor and promote Christianity over other faiths, a deep skepticism of the elite academic establishment, and a nostalgia for the perceived America of yesteryear. Both take a hard-line stance against illegal immigration and show little concern for the rights of individuals accused of terrorism. Thomas is a thinker and Trump is a feeler, but together they have arrived at similar conclusions. They want less government, a more authoritarian executive, more God, fewer racial entitlements, and more guns.

While Trump may share Thomas’ intuitions, he is far too witless to grasp, let alone implement, the justice’s complex theories of law. And save for the occasional ruling in the administration’s favor, there isn’t much Thomas can do directly to guide the course of Trump’s presidency. Nevertheless, the justice’s fingerprints are all over the executive branch. That’s because he’s trained a small army of acolytes to implement his larger project of shrinking the regulatory state and fighting back against the supposed chokehold of political correctness. (It’s exactly this scourge of “political correctness,” both Trump and Thomas would have you believe, that allowed claims of improper sexual conduct to briefly overshadow their professional accomplishments.)

Everywhere you turn in Trumpland, you’ll find a slew of Thomas’ former clerks in high places. They are serving in the White House counsel’s office (Greg Katsas, John Eisenberg, David Morrell); awaiting appointment to the federal judiciary (Allison H. Eid, David Stras); leading the departments of the Treasury (Heath P. Tarbert, Sigal Mandelker) and Transportation (Steven G. Bradbury); defending the travel ban in court (Jeffrey Wall); and heading the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (Neomi Rao). Thomas clerks are also working with dark money groups to execute Trump’s agenda (Carrie Severino) and boosting him in the far-right media (Laura Ingraham).

[Jeffrey Wall

Former Thomas clerk Jeffrey Wall is now Trump’s acting solicitor general. Department of Justice

In an era in which former clerks seem, on balance, to be drifting away from Washington jobs, a whole lot of members of the old Thomas crew are moving back home. It’s near impossible to count every former Supreme Court clerk who is now playing a role in the sprawling executive branch, but it’s easy to see that an enormous number of Thomas protégés are stepping into positions of immense power. Every expert we spoke to, among them the New Yorker’s Jeffrey Toobin, agreed the Trump administration has brought on a striking number of Thomas clerks.

To be sure, a number of clerks who trained under Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, and other conservative justices have taken jobs with the government. But Stephen Vladeck, who teaches law at the University of Texas and serves as a Supreme Court analyst for CNN, says it’s instructive to compare the career paths of clerks who worked for Thomas and those who served under Scalia. The latter, Vladeck says, have gravitated more toward the conservative establishment—institutions like law schools and legal foundations. The Thomas clerks, who have “a bit more of a libertarian or populist streak,” are a more logical fit for the key legal jobs serving the Trump White House. It is the Thomas alums that have risen to prominence in the past six months, and they are working zealously to put their mentor’s ideas into action.

Consider Wall, Trump’s acting solicitor general, who left his law firm, Sullivan & Cromwell, to join the administration. Wall is the attorney who, back in May, so adroitly argued the travel ban case before the lower federal appeals courts and aggressively litigated the case in pleadings this summer at the Supreme Court. It was Wall who insisted on the “presumption of regularity” in the litigation, cautioning the judges to focus on the long tradition of deference to executive authority—especially in the realm of national security—and to ignore Trump’s incendiary tweets and campaign statements.

Wall has said that the judges for whom he has clerked are still his “close friends.” Perhaps most significantly, at an event last year celebrating Thomas’ 25th anniversary on the court, Wall defended the justice’s singular relevance and influence, rejecting any criticism that Thomas hasn’t had a profound impact on the court as “pernicious and wrongheaded.” (He’s quite right about that; liberals consistently underestimate Thomas’ influence.) Describing his former boss as an “intellectual catalyst,” Wall said that Thomas “is content to sow ideas that result later in changes in the law.”

That’s precisely the influence we are now seeing at work across the federal government. In arguing the travel ban cases, Wall insisted that limiting Muslim immigrants’ access to the United States does not amount to unlawful animus, that the president must have near-total authority to control the nation’s borders, and that his decisions must not be second-guessed by the courts. These are classic Thomas principles, and the justice himself embraced them in a partial dissent when the court allowed only part of the ban to take effect.

Thomas’ influence can also be seen in the work of Neomi Rao,whom the Senate recently confirmed to lead the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. Until her appointment as Trump’s regulatory czar, Rao served as a professor at George Mason University’s law school—an institution that, at Rao’s urging, was recently renamed in honor of Antonin Scalia. Rao has devoted her academic career to criticizing the administrative state—the web of agencies and committees that promulgate federal regulations. Her attacks on the government sit at the intersection of two quintessential Thomas principles: an aversion to regulations (especially labor and environmental rules) and a hostility toward limits on executive authority.

[Neomi Rao

Former Thomas clerk Neomi Rao is set to lead the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. Screenshot via YouTube

Rao believes, for instance, that independent agencies are unconstitutional. These commissions—which include the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Federal Communications Commission, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and the Federal Reserve—flourish in part because they are removed from political pressures. Rao would like to change that. She believes that since these agencies are part of the executive branch, the president must be empowered to fire and replace their leaders.

Thomas sees his clerks as trainees in a very specific ideological program.

It seems extremely likely that Rao has been placed in her perch at OIRAnot only to bust traditional agency regulations but also to bring independent agency rules under her purview. While her office does not currently review rules by independent agencies, she has argued that it should. Thomas has strongly suggested that all agencies within the executive branch, independent or not, must ultimately be accountable to the president. If Rao gives herself veto power over these agencies’ rules, she will bring Thomas’ vision a step closer to the reality. In the process, she could nullify whatever vestiges of liberalism are still lingering from the Obama era. For example, the EEOC recently took the position that federal law protects gay employees, directly contradicting Trump’s Justice Department. If Rao’s view wins out, Trump could fire as many EEOC commissioners as he needs to in order to reverse the agency’s position. Thomas, who takes a dim view of nondiscrimination law and gay rights, would be doubly proud.

The justice must already be delighted at the work of his former clerk Allison Eid, whom Trump has nominated to the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Eid currently serves on the Colorado Supreme Court, where she established her conservative bona fides by dissenting from a ruling that prohibited the state from sending public funds to private religious schools. The court’s decision was compelled by the Colorado Constitution, which bars the government from spending “any public fund or moneys … to help support or sustain any school … controlled by any church or sectarian denomination.”But according to Eid, this constitutional bar on public funding of parochial schools was likely motivated by unconstitutional animus toward religion—even though its plain text indicates nothing more than a desire to observe the separation of church and state.

Eid’s dissent, which she wrote in 2015, maps neatly onto Thomas’ own concurrence in 2017’s Trinity Lutheran v. Comer. In Trinity, the court ruled that Missouri could not deny a grant to a Christian school solely on account of its “religious character.” (A day after the court decided Trinity, it vacated the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision on parochial schools, effectively vindicating Eid’s dissent.) Thomas asserted that the court had not gone far enough in Trinity: He wrote that the government may never “discriminate against religion” by refusing to subsidize houses of worship and sectarian programs. Thomas, like Eid, appears to believe that when a state declines to fund religious activity—even out of respect for the Establishment Clause—it engages in unconstitutional discrimination. When Eid is confirmed, he will gain a critical ally in his fight for ever-more entanglement between church and state. And she will be the first of many Trump picks who are as immutable in their views as their former bosses. This is a movement and a cause, not just constitutional theory.

[Allison H. Eid

Trump has nominated former Thomas clerk Allison H. Eid to the 10th Circuit. Joe Amon/The Denver Post via Getty Images]

Thomas, who has described his clerks as his “little family,” sees them as trainees in a very specific ideological program.He famously invites them to watch The Fountainhead at his home each yearand has taken them on annual trips to Gettysburg to reflect on what he views as the conservative lessons of the Civil War. He also tutors his clerks on his judicial philosophy, instilling in them a profound reverence for his own vision of the rule of law.

It’s no surprise that so many of Thomas’ clerks share a belief system with their former boss, and with each other. Thomas is known to be ideologically rigid when it comes to hiring (and in everything else). Prior to 2013, every clerk he’d brought on during his Supreme Court tenure had first served under an appellate-level judge who’d been appointed by a Republican president.* Even Scalia occasionally hired “counter-clerks,” liberal-leaning men and women who had clerked for Democratic appointees on lower courts. Thomas has expressed no interest in this kind of ideological diversity. (To his credit, he does value educational diversity, intentionally hiring clerks from lower-ranked schools. Compare that with Scalia, who was openly biased against schools outside the T14.)

[Trump’s reactionary view of conservatism is causing a schism at the Supreme Court.

Like all justices, Thomas tends to get his clerks from a handful of feeder judges. Thomas’ chief feeders are J. Michael Luttig and J. Harvie Wilkinson of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, Laurence Silberman and David Sentelle of the D.C. Circuit, Edith Jones of the 5th Circuit, and William Pryor of the 11th Circuit—all rock-ribbed conservatives except for Wilkinson, who has recently drifted to the center. By drawing from this pool, Thomas ensures he won’t hear many progressive counterpoints to his conservative instincts. And that’s OK with him. Thomas has said that picking clerks is like “selecting mates in a foxhole,”explaining: “I won’t hire clerks who have profound disagreements with me. It’s like trying to train a pig. It wastes your time, and it aggravates the pig.”

While Thomas is famously one of the most personable justices on the high court—the stories of his generosity to former clerks and court staff are myriad—he has also cultivated a with-us-or-against-us mindset that owes more to AM radio than George Will, and that maps perfectly onto Trump’s Fox News–inflected worldview. Thomas is close buddies with Rush Limbaugh (he officiated at Limbaugh’s third wedding) as well asfringe radio dogmatist Mark Levin. Georgetown law professor Peter Edelman has described him as “the Tea Party of the Supreme Court.”

Thomas does not travel in the same conservative legal circles as John Roberts. Throughout his campaign, Trump derided the chief justice as an open traitor to the conservative project, explaining that “what he did with Obamacare was disgraceful.” Trump called Roberts a “nightmare for conservatives” in January 2016 and claimed that he writes like a “dummy.” He has described Thomas, meanwhile, as his favorite justice, calling him “very strong and consistent.” We also know from a leaked email sent to the Daily Beast in February that Thomas’ wife, Ginni Thomas, tried to organize conservative activists to defend Trump’s initial travel ban. This political activism did not preclude Thomas from participating in the court’s travel ban decisions, in which he has twice supported the president. There is a long-standing debate about whether Ginni Thomas’ political activities might affect her husband’s votes.

At the very least, the fact that she openly aligns herself with Trump—even as the rest of the justices try to ignore the unseemliness of it all—reflects his comfort with the Trumpian worldview.

It feels increasingly evident that Trump’s reactionary view of conservatism is causing a schism at the Supreme Court. Over the past two terms, a split has opened up between the two center-right justices, Roberts and Kennedy, and the three far-right justices, Samuel Alito, Gorsuch, and Thomas. One explanation for the trend is that the center of the court is distancing itself from the hard-right crusaders, whom Democratic Sen. Mazie Hirono recently dubbed “the three horsemen of the apocalypse.” This rift, if it continues, presages a possible split between the kinds of judges and justices Trump prefers—polemicists and bomb throwers—and the more traditional movement conservatives who have historically populated the federal bench. If Trump seeds the lower courts with judges like Allison Eid who share Thomas’ views, he stands to reshape the country for decades. That means that long after the Cabinet appointees and White House lawyers leave the scene, constitutional law will bear the thumbprints of Thomas and his clerks. Thanks to Trump, Thomas’ ideas—about the unitary executive, the wall between church and state, and so much more—will now surely outlive both men.

Both Trump and Thomas have spent decades as the brunt of liberal jokes and slights. Both see themselves as innocent victims of women and interest groups that have fabricated claims against them. Both have seen their ideas slip from the very fringes of political discourse into the ascendancy.

Now, Thomas stands as a symbol of what a faltering, lawless Trump may yet accomplish—if his supporters can turn a blind eye on the faltering lawlessness. At the precise moment in which the more than 120 vacancies on the federal courts may be the only reason for conservatives to hold their noses and stand by Trump, it’s Clarence Thomas who stands as a living embodiment of wars already won and triumphs yet to come.

*Correction, Aug. 3, 2017: This story originally misstated that during his Supreme Court tenure, Clarence Thomas had never hired a clerk who’d served under a judge appointed by a president from the opposite party. Before 2013, Thomas had not brought on a clerk who’d worked under an appellate-level judge appointed by a Democrat.

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2x? no lnx cf WFB BS ~

[pix Clarence and Ginni Thomas at a Heritage Foundation event to celebrate his 30 years on the Supreme Court last October.

The Long Crusade of Clarence and Ginni Thomas

The Supreme Court justice and his wife battled for years for a more conservative America. New reporting shows how far she was willing to go after Donald Trump’s 2020 election loss.

By Danny Hakim and Jo Becker

Published Feb. 22, 2022

UpdatedFeb. 23, 2022

The call to action was titled “Election Results and Legal Battles: What Now?” Shared in the days after the 2020 presidential election, it urged the members of an influential if secretive right-wing group to contact legislators in three of the swing states that tipped the balance for Joe Biden — Arizona, Georgia and Pennsylvania. The aim was audacious: Keep President Donald J. Trump in power.

The group, theCouncil for National Policy, brings together old-school Republican luminaries, Christian conservatives, Tea Party activists and MAGA operatives, with more than 400 members who include leaders of organizations like the Federalist Society, the National Rifle Association and the Family Research Council. Founded in 1981 as a counterweight to liberalism, the group was hailed by President Ronald Reagan as seeking the “return of righteousness, justice and truth” to America.

As Trump insisted, without evidence, that fraud had cheated him of victory, conservative groups rushed to rally behind him.

The council stood out, however, not only because of its pedigree but also because one of its newest leaders was Virginia Thomas, the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas and a longtime activist in right-wing circles. She had taken on a prominent role at the council during the Trump years andby 2019 had joined the nine-member board of C.N.P. Action, an arm of the council organized as a 501(c)4 under a provision of the tax code thatallows for direct political advocacy. It was C.N.P. Action that circulated the November “action steps” document, the existence of which has not been widely known. It instructed members to pressure Republican lawmakers into challenging the election results and appointing alternate slates of electors:“Demand that they not abandon their Constitutional responsibilities during a time such as this.”

Such a plan, if carried out successfully, would have almost certainly landed before the Supreme Court — and Ginni Thomas’s husband. In fact, Trump was already calling for that to happen. In a Dec. 2 speech at the White House, the president falsely claimed that “millions of votes were cast illegally in swing states alone” and said he hoped “the Supreme Court of the United States will see it” and “will do what’s right for our country, because our country cannot live with this kind of an election.”

The Thomases have long posed a unique quandary in Washington. Because Supreme Court justices do not want to be perceived as partisan, they tend to avoid political events and entanglements, and their spouses often keep low profiles. But the Thomases have defied such norms. Since the founding of the nation, no spouse of a sitting Supreme Court justice has been as overt a political activist as Ginni Thomas.In addition to her perch at the Council for National Policy, she founded a group called Groundswell with the support of Stephen K. Bannon, the hard-line nationalist and former Trump adviser. It holds a weekly meeting of influential conservatives, many of whom work directly on issues that have come before the court.

Ginni Thomas insists, in her council biography, that she and her husband operate in “separate professional lanes,” but those lanes in fact merge with notable frequency. For the three decades he has sat on the Supreme Court, they have worked in tandem from the bench and the political trenches to take aim at targets like Roe v. Wade and affirmative action.Together they believe that “America is in a vicious battle for its founding principles,” as Ginni Thomas has put it. Her views, once seen as on the fringe, have come to dominate the Republican Party. And with Trump’s three appointments reshaping the Supreme Court, her husband finds himself at the center of a new conservative majority poised to shake the foundations of settled law. In a nation freighted with division and upheaval, the Thomases have found their moment.

This article draws on hours of recordings and internal documents from groups affiliated with the Thomases; dozens of interviews with the Thomases’ classmates, friends, colleagues and critics, as well as more than a dozen Trump White House aides and supporters and some of Justice Thomas’s former clerks; and an archive of Council for National Policy videos and internal documents provided by an academic researcher in Australia, Brent Allpress.

The reporting uncovered new details on the Thomases’ ascent: how Trump courted Justice Thomas; how Ginni Thomas used that courtship to gain access to the Oval Office, where her insistent policy and personnel suggestions so aggravated aides that one called her a “wrecking ball” while others put together an opposition-research-style report on her that was obtained by The Times; and the extent to which Justice Thomas flouted judicial-ethics guidance by participating in events hosted by conservative organizations with matters before the court. Those organizations showered the couple with accolades and, in at least one case, used their appearances to attract event fees, donations and new members.

New reporting also shows just how blurred the lines between the couple’s interests became during the effort to overturn the 2020 election, which culminated in the rally held at the Ellipse, just outside the White House grounds, aimed at stopping Congress from certifying the state votes that gave Joe Biden his victory. Many of the rally organizers and those advising Trump had connections to the Thomases, but little has been known about what role, if any, Ginni Thomas played, beyond the fact that on the morning of the March to Save America, as the rally was called, she urged her Facebook followers to watch how the day unfolded. “LOVE MAGA people!!!!” she posted before the march turned violent. “GOD BLESS EACH OF YOU STANDING UP or PRAYING!”

[ImagePresident Donald J. Trump greeting Justice Thomas during Trump’s inauguration ceremony in 2017.

President Donald J. Trump greeting Justice Thomas during Trump’s inauguration ceremony in 2017. Credit...Alex Wong/Getty Images]

But her role went deeper, and beyond C.N.P. Action. Dustin Stockton, an organizer who worked with Women for America First, which held the permit for the Ellipse rally, said he was told that Ginni Thomas played a peacemaking role between feuding factions of rally organizers “so that there wouldn’t be any division around January 6.”

“The way it was presented to me was that Ginni was uniting these different factions around a singular mission on January 6,” said Stockton, who previously worked for Bannon. “That Ginni was involved made sense — she’s pretty neutral, and she doesn’t have a lot of enemies in the movement.”

Ginni Thomas, who turns 65 on April 25, did not respond to requests for comment, and Justice Thomas, who is 73, declined to comment through a court spokesperson. In a posting on a private Facebook group for her high school classmates, Ginni Thomas wrote that “a NYT reporter” might have “contacted you looking for stories, etc on me. This reporter seems to have been told to write a hit piece” and “has knocked on many doors and written many emails. They all contact me and are not responding. ” she wrote. “Whatever. ‍♀️” (The message was forwarded by one of those classmates to the reporter in question.)

In the weeks that followed Jan. 6, as public condemnation of the insurrection grew to include some Republican leaders like Senator Mitch McConnell, the Council for National Policy circulated in its newsletter another previously unreported memo, written by one of its members, that outlined strategies to make the Capitol riot seem more palatable. “Drive the narrative that it was mostly peaceful protests,”a leading member of the group advised, according to a copy reviewed by The Times. “Amplify the concerns of the protestors and give them legitimacy.”

In the year since the insurrection, a number of friends and allies of the Thomases, and even a former Thomas clerk, have received subpoenas from the congressional committee investigating the events of Jan. 6. Ginni Thomas co-signed a letter in December calling for House Republicans to expel Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger from their conference for joining the Jan. 6 committee. Thomas and her co-authors said the investigation “brings disrespect to our country’s rule of law” and “legal harassment to private citizens who have done nothing wrong,” adding that they would begin “a nationwide movement to add citizens’ voices to this effort.”

A few weeks later, the Supreme Court ruled 8 to 1 to allow the release of records from the Trump White House related to the Jan. 6 attack. Justice Thomas was the sole dissenter.

Nearly 10 months after the dramatic events at the Capitol, Ginni Thomas ventured out onto a small balcony inside the Heritage Foundation, the conservative redoubt that stands on Massachusetts Avenue a few blocks from the Capitol. In a bright red dress, she beamed and waved to friends in the crowd who gathered last October to celebrate her husband’s three decades on the Supreme Court. Beyond a sweeping bank of windows, the sun had sunk to just above the horizon, next to the Washington Monument.

The attendees represented the cream of Washington’s Republican legal establishment, “really a who’s who of all-stars,” as one of them, Donald F. McGahn II, the first White House counsel under Trump, would say when the speeches started. Many had clerked for Justice Thomas, including a number of Trump-appointed judges who are themselves touchstones on the right, like Neomi Rao and James Ho. Others were activists who had worked alongside Ginni Thomas, a Tea Party veteran.

Though efforts to overturn the election had failed and Joe Biden was deep into his first year as president, the mood in the room was buoyant, even triumphal. Justice Thomas, who for years labored at the margins of the court, now found himself with a new 6-to-3 conservative majority.At the Heritage tribute, Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, called Thomas “a legal titan” and “the brightest possible north star.” Playing to the crowd of nearly 250 of his party’s elite, he dryly asked: “What could I, Mitch McConnell, possibly know about a notable leader who is parsimonious with his public statements? Who shuns the performative aspect of public life? And who is viewed as a boogeyman by the radical left? What would I know about that?” Among the crowd’s laughter, Thomas’s deep baritone was most audible.

‘He has charted a very radical approach to judging — it’s surprising, actually, how far the court has moved in his direction.’

Much has changed since Thomas joined the court in 1991, when the judicial orthodoxy of the right had little traction — including the belief that Roe v. Wade, which established a right to abortion, relied on a phantom “right to privacy” that isn’t explicit in the Constitution, or that there was “no device more destructive to the notion of equality” than affirmative action and racial quotas, as former Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist once wrote in a dissenting opinion. During his first decade on the court, Thomas was often characterized by his critics as a cipher who almost never asked questions from the bench and was anunderwhelming understudy to Justice Antonin Scalia.

But on the right, Thomas has come to be regarded as an epochal justice. The man who succeeded Thurgood Marshall, becoming the second Black justice, may end up with a legacy just as consequential. Trump’s conservative appointments have tipped the balance of the Supreme Court toward Thomas and his originalist philosophy, which purports to interpret the Constitution as it would have been in the era in which it was written, transforming him into a shadow chief justice. When the consensus-seeking justice who formally holds that title, John G. Roberts Jr., sides with the court’s shrunken liberal wing, as is increasingly the case, it falls to Thomas, who has served the longest on the court, to assign who will write the majority opinion.

Three decades into his lifetime term, Thomas has not built his reputation by writing landmark majority rulings. Instead, he has been setting the stage for a shift in influence, writing solo opinions on issues like free speech, guns and abortion that are now poised to become majority opinions. “Take his jurisprudence on unborn life,” McConnell told the Heritage Foundation crowd. “Every time, without fail, Justice Thomas writes a separate, concise opinion to cut through the 50-year tangle of made-up tests and shifting standards and calmly reminds everybody that the whole house of cards lacks a constitutional foundation.”

“Justice Thomas does not break, or bend, or bow,” he said. “We need a federal judiciary full of men and women who are as bright as Justice Thomas, as expertly trained as Justice Thomas, but most importantly, most importantly, as committed to total unflinching judicial independence.” But in Thomas’s own remarks, he alluded to the shared purpose of those gathered. “It is a joy, an absolute joy, to be able to stand here and celebrate this moment,” he said, “not because of me but because of you all and what we’re trying to defend in this great country.”

If Thomas has been laying the groundwork for a conservative revolution, so has his wife, who once worked at Heritage herself. Groundswell, the group she founded, plotted what it called a “30-front war” on hot-button issues and seeded talking points throughout the right-wing media, including with Bannon’s own publication at the time, Breitbart News. “She’s an operator; she stays behind the scenes,” Bannon said in an interview. “Unlike a lot of people who just talk, she gets shit done.”

The Thomases have long emphasized how little distance there is between them. As Justice Thomas once wrote, his searing 1991 confirmation, buffeted by sexual-harassment allegations, brought them closer together: “The fiery trial through which we passed had the effect of melding us into one being — an amalgam, as we like to say.” At the Heritage Foundation celebration, he made it clear that bruised feelings about the “very, very dark time” of his confirmation have lingered, thanking “the senators who voted for me, all 52 of them.” He named supporters who had stuck by him, including Heritage’s president at the time, Kay Coles James, who he said was “among my prayer partners 30 years ago.” And he called his wife “the rock of my life.”

[The Thomases during his Supreme Court confirmation hearings in 1991.Credit...Doug Mills/AP Photo

While no one suggests that Thomas is writing his opinions to please his wife, he does speak of a shared Thomas philosophy. And his wife has advocated hard-line positions on many of the cultural and political issues that come before the justices, presenting an unprecedented conundrum for the Supreme Court. Orin Kerr, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, said that while there are no clear-cut rules outlining when justices need to recuse themselves, there are appearance concerns. “I’m sure there are justices’ spouses who have had strong opinions about politics,” Kerr said. “What’s unusual here is that Justice Thomas’s wife is an activist in politics. Historically, this is the first example of something like this that I can think of at the Supreme Court.”

Justice Thomas has flipped such criticisms on their head, saying that those who raise such issues were “bent on undermining” the court. And he defended “my bride” in a 2011 speech at an event sponsored by the Federalist Society, a conservative legal group, as reported by Politico at the time. He said she worked “24/7 every day in defense of liberty,” adding, “We are equally yoked, and we love being with each other because we love the same things.” If the Thomases are at the height of their powers, the question, now, is how they will use that power in the years to come.

“He has charted a very radical approach to judging — it’s surprising, actually, how far the court has moved in his direction,” John Yoo,a law professor at U.C.-Berkeley and former Thomas clerk known for drafting some of the “torture memos” under President George W. Bush, said during a discussion at the Heritage event. (Yoo also advised former Vice President Mike Pence that he did not have the authority to reject electoral votes on Jan. 6.) “What do you think is going to happen in the next 10 years when he might have a workable majority of originalists? I think we’re going to see the fruition of the last 30 years in the next 10.”

The founders saw the courts as the guardians of the Constitution. In Federalist No. 78, which laid out the role of American courts, Alexander Hamilton wrote that they “were designed to be an intermediate body between the people and the legislature” and “keep the latter within the limits assigned to their authority.” But at the same time, he wrote, the judiciary would be the weakest of the new government’s three branches. While the executive “holds the sword” and the legislature “commands the purse,” the judiciary “will always be the least dangerous to the political rights of the Constitution; because it will be least in a capacity to annoy or injure them.”

The Supreme Court must rely on public acceptance of its decisions. For decades, the desire to shield the court from charges of partisanship has given rise to institutionalist justices who uphold certain norms. They avoid opinions that get too far out ahead of public opinion or too blithely overturn precedents. Instead they adhere to the doctrine of stare decisis, for the most part treating prior decisions as settled law, and prefer to rule in ways that win broad support. They also steer clear of attending openly partisan events.

But as the court has taken a hard right turn with Trump’s appointments, it is also increasingly seen as composed of clashing ideologues, both liberal and conservative, rather than independent jurists. Even the court’s newest justice, Amy Coney Barrett, is sensitive to the charge. “My goal today is to convince you that this court is not comprised of a bunch of partisan hacks,” she said during a speech last year, accompanying Mitch McConnell at a center named for him at the University of Louisville. And as the court signals an appetite to take up cases that may well overturn settled law, including Roe v. Wade, more Americans view it as increasingly politicized, with a steep decline over the past year to a 40 percent approval rating, a new low in Gallup polling.

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Justice Thomas administering the Constitutional Oath to the newest Supreme Court justice, Amy Coney Barrett, on Oct. 26, 2020, as her husband, Jesse Barrett, and President Trump looked on.

This dynamic has left Chief Justice John Roberts in an increasingly isolated position as the Supreme Court’s leading institutionalist. He refrains from attending partisan legal forums, like those at the Federalist Society. And his wife, Jane, stepped down as a litigator at her law firm after his appointment. Justice Thomas, however, “believes that human beings have free will to chart our own course,” said Helgi Walker, a former Thomas clerk and a partner at Gibson Dunn. “And I have no doubt that applies, perhaps especially so, to his wife.” That said, she added, he “takes direction from no one but the law.”

Thomas has also rejected the institutionalist approach when it comes to the doctrine of stare decisis. “When faced with a demonstrably erroneous precedent, my rule is simple,” he wrote in a 2019 opinion. “We should not follow it.” When he has cited Federalist No. 78, he has underscored Hamilton’s comment that judges “would require an uncommon portion of fortitude” to defend constitutional principles when they are unpopular. “The trait that Hamilton singles out — fortitude — is fundamental to my philosophy of life,” Thomas said in a 2001 speech to the conservative American Enterprise Institute.

He has said the route to safeguarding the Supreme Court is simply through stricter adherence to the Constitution, and he warned at a recent speech at the University of Notre Dame that judges have been exceeding their authority.“There’s always a temptation, I think, to go beyond,” he said, adding that when judges “begin to venture into political, legislative or executive-branch lanes,” they “are asking for trouble.” He laid out the consequences: “I think the court was thought to be the least dangerous branch, and we may have become the most dangerous.”

But more than any other sitting justice, Thomas has stoked concerns of a hyperpartisan court. He has frequently appeared at highly political events hosted by advocates hoping to sway the court. He and his wife sometimes appear together at such events, and their appeal is apparent: He fulfills the hard right’s longing for a judge — and especially a Black judge — oblivious to the howls of the left, while she serves up the red meat the base wants to hear in her speeches. They often portray themselves as standing in the breach amid a crumbling society. “It’s very exciting,” Ginni Thomas said during a 2018 Council for National Policy meeting, “the fact that there’s a resistance on our side to their side.”

Her role became increasingly public in the Trump era, when she started emceeing an annual awards ceremony celebrating some of the best-known Trump allies. The awards are handed out in conjunction with United in Purpose, a group created by Bill Dallas, an evangelical political activist. Some recipients lead organizations that have business before the Supreme Court.

“When the Batphone rings and it’s Commissioner Ginni Gordon, otherwise known as Ginni Thomas, of course you have to show up,” said Dan Bongino, a former Secret Service agent turned popular pro-Trump radio host, after receiving one of Thomas’s Impact Awards in 2017. “I can’t say enough about Ginni,” Bongino told the audience at the event, which included the Fox News pundit Sean Hannity and Ed Meese, a Reagan administration attorney general. “I idolize her husband — he’s an icon to me,” Bongino said, but added that it was Ginni Thomas who connected him with right-wing leaders when he was making several unsuccessful congressional bids. “I think in the long run, when you look at the impact on the conservative movement and the principles we hold dear, I think her and her husband stand toe to toe.”

The federal judicial code of conduct, adopted in 1973, restricts judges from being “a speaker, a guest of honor or featured on the program” at fund-raising events. While the code doesn’t officially apply to the nine justices, Roberts said in a 2011 report that the justices “do in fact consult” it when “assessing their ethical obligations” — a statement reiterated by a spokeswoman for the court when we asked for comment. But according to documents and recordings of such events reviewed by The Times, Justice Thomas has at least twice headlined annual conferences at the Eagle Forum, a conservative grass-roots group opposed to abortion and modern feminism.

The first was in 1996 when he received an Eagle award. “He’s better than Rehnquist, he’s better than Scalia, he’s just wonderful,” Phyllis Schlafly, the founder of the Eagle Forum and one of the most influential conservative activists of her generation, told the audience, according to a cassette recording of the speech. She even recited a poem in his honor, which began: “No high court justice shows such promise/As our favorite, Clarence Thomas/You’re a jurist for the ages/Who sends liberals into rages.”

The couple returned to the Eagle Forum years later, in 2017; this time his wife received the Eagle award.It was the year after Schlafly died, and the organization, which is dependent on member and conference fees, was struggling. They were featured on the event program, and documents show that Ginni Thomas urged attendees to come hear her and “my amazing husband” in a personal letter that was part of the event’s promotional materials, adding, “God can use such an occasion for encouragement and insights!” (Full registration for the group’s annual conference cost $350 as of 2019.) Afterward, the organization tweeted a promotional video aimed at prospective members that included footage of the couple’s appearance.

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The Thomases at an Eagle Forum event in 2017.

In 2008, Justice Thomas delivered a keynote speech to donors to the Manhattan Institute and spoke at a secretive political retreat hosted by the billionaire Charles Koch. And he has had a long relationship with the Heritage Foundation, which employed his wife as a liaison to the George W. Bush White House. The group once invoked Justice Thomas’s speech at one of its Leadership for America fund-raisers in a direct appeal that it sent to Philip Morris seeking a $50,000 contribution.And in 2020, he objected to an ethics proposal circulated by the policymaking body of the federal court system that would have barred judges from membership in ideological legal groups like the Federalist Society, while he was speaking at the group’s convention.“I think they’re about to silencethe Federalist Society,” he said. “So I guess I can’t come back.”

Perhaps most important in understanding the couple’s far-reaching philosophy and project is their long relationship with the Council for National Policy,aspects of which have not been previously reported. Justice Thomas headlined an event for the group in 2002, and in 2008 he attended one of its meetings and was photographed with a gavel behind a lectern bearing the group’s name.

Justice Thomas at a Council for National Policy meeting in 2008.

Just over a decade later, Ginni Thomas would join the board of the council’s action arm. During a presentation in 2019, she warned that “conservatives and Republicans are tired of being the oppressed minority,” adding that they were being “falsely vilified, slandered and defamed as extremists and bigots and haters.” The left, she said, was “making it justifiable and normalized to fight us, to hurt us, to kill us even.” For her, this was a fight decades in the making.

Before introducing Justice Thomas at the Eagle Forum in 1996, Schlafly spoke about his mother-in-law. “Now, first I want to present the wife of our distinguished speaker, Ginni Thomas, and I want to tell you that she is, I’m very proud to say, a second-generation Eagle,” she said. “It was back in 1973 that a little group in Omaha, Nebraska, decided that they wouldrescind Nebraska’s ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment, and it was just about half a dozen of them, but Ginni’s mother was in that group,” she added, calling it “a real turning point in our long battle” against the amendment, which the forum said would not “celebrate womanhood” but “erase it.”

“And then later on,” Schlafly continued, “after the feminists moved on to another goal, after we beat them on E.R.A., they took up the goal of comparable worth” — a reference to a largely unsuccessful movement in the 1980s to require equal pay for men and women, which Schlafly called “an effort to give us wage and price control.”

“Ginni was then with the Chamber of Commerce, and she was a great help in that, and now she is a major assistant for our good friend Dick Armey,” Schlafly said, referring to the Republican congressman from Texas who was then the House majority leader. “So, Ginni, stand up. We appreciate your being with us tonight.”

Virginia Thomas is the daughter of a president of a Nebraska architecture firm; the well-to-do family had two houses, one in Omaha and one in a nearby lakeside development called Ginger Cove that her father built. Ginni Lamp, as she was known then, was on a cheer squad for taller girls known as the Squires, brandishing a sword and a shield before football games. “She would march in front with that; she loved doing that,” said Sue Norby, a classmate. “My other friends were on the pompom squad because they were so short, but Ginni was on a different squad because she was tall, with other tall girls. She was the warrior woman.”

Ginni’s mother, Marjorie Lamp, was an outspoken Republican activist and became a towering figure in her daughter’s life. When Schlafly lost a bid to become president of the National Federation of Republican Women in 1967, Marjorie Lamp withdrew from the organization and called the voting “rigged.” She ran unsuccessfully for the Nebraska Legislature in 1972 and was a 1976 Reagan delegate, railing against Gerald Ford’s lack of leadership; “Reagan people are more hard-core,” she once said. She warned in a local paper thatif Jimmy Carter was elected, “we’d be heading toward socialism.” Democrats, she wrote in a 1983 letter to The Lincoln Journal Star, “almost brought our great country to its knees with their wild spending policies.”

Ginni Thomas has underscored her parents’ resolve in her own remarks. “Our family didn’t believe Nixon did anything wrong in Watergate until way after he admitted guilt,” she once said. “We believed any Republican until all the evidence was in, and then a little more.” She joined her high school’s Republican club in 1974, the year it started, and she and her mother attended the 1976 Republican National Convention together. It was her mother, she would later say, who “modeled conservative political feminism for her daughters.” She attended Creighton University in Omaha and earned her law degree there while working for a Nebraska congressman, Hal Daub, the first of a string of political jobs that took her far from Omaha.

Clarence Thomas’s journey to Washington was far different. He grew up in poverty, first in Pin Point, Ga., a tiny enclave, now part of Savannah, that was established by formerly enslaved Black people after the Civil War. He and his mother and brother then moved to Savannah itself — his father left the family when he was 2 — and he was largely raised by an exceedingly strict and temperamental grandfather.

For the future justice, conservatism was part of an ideological journey, much of it forged at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass., where he was among a small group of Black men that did the difficult work of integrating the institution in the late 1960s and early 1970s. He and other students, including the prominent defense attorney Ted Wells, started a Black Student Union, and for a time Thomas protested the Vietnam War. A pivotal moment came after a demonstration in Cambridge, Mass., turned into “a full-scale riot,” he wrote in his memoir. “Horrified,” he rejected what he saw as a posture of anger and resentment and threw himself into his studies.

“Just about every evening, a few minutes after 11, there Clarence would be coming through the door from the library, every single evening,” recalled Edward P. Jones, the Pulitzer Prize-winning fiction writer known for his work chronicling Black lives in Washington, who lived down the hall from Thomas as a sophomore. “There was a fierce determination I sensed from him, that he was going to get as much as he could and get as far, ultimately, as he could.”

Thomas got his law degree from Yale but stuck a 15-cent cigar sticker to the frame of his diploma after failing to get a big law job — such firms, he would write, attributed his academic pedigree to preferential treatment. Instead, he took the only job offer he received and went to work for Missouri’s Republican attorney general, John Danforth, and discovered the writings of the Black conservative Thomas Sowell, who assailed affirmative action as undercutting self-reliance; Thomas wrote that he “felt like a thirsty man gulping down a glass of cool water” to see his own beliefs articulated. A few years later, after he was appointed by Reagan to head the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, he would complain that Black civil rights leaders “bitch, bitch, bitch, moan and moan, whine and whine.”

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President Ronald Reagan and Clarence Thomas in the Oval Office in 1986.

Thomas venerated his grandfather, Myers Anderson, who was as influential in his life as his wife’s mother was in hers, and titled his memoir “My Grandfather’s Son.” But the relationship was often fractious. Anderson, who donated to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, “wasn’t happy with his grandson’s choices,” Kevin Merida, now the executive editor of The Los Angeles Times, and Michael A. Fletcher wrote in a 2007 biography, “Supreme Discomfort.” The authors quoted Ketanji Brown Jackson, a Black former clerk for Justice Stephen Breyer whom Biden is now considering for the vacancy being created by Breyer’s retirement. She remembered sitting across from Thomas at lunch and thinking: “ ‘I don’t understand you. You sound like my parents. You sound like people I grew up with.’ But the lessons he tended to draw from the experiences of the segregated South seemed to be different than those of everybody I know.”

Clarence and Ginni met in 1986 at a conference on affirmative action, which they both opposed. After a stint at the civil rights office of the Education Department, he was running the E.E.O.C.; she was an attorney at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and mused that year to Good Housekeeping about someday running for Congress. She had extracted herself from a New Age-y self-help group called Lifespring, which she would denounce as a cult,but was still attending meetings held by a cult-deprogramming organization, and she took him along to one. He would describe her as a “gift from God,” and they married in 1987 at a Methodist church in Omaha; it was her first marriage, his second. “There’s no other way to politely say this, but the fact she married a Black man must’ve caused an uproar in that family, I can’t even imagine,” said Scott Bange, who dated Ginni in high school. In 1991, one of Ginni Thomas’s aunts told The Washington Post that the future justice “was so nice, we forgot he was Black,” adding, “He treated her so well, all of his other qualities made up for his being Black.”

Thomas had custody of a teenage son, Jamal, from his previous marriage to Kathy Ambush, his college girlfriend. For several years, the couple also raised his great-nephew, Mark Martin. Jamal Thomas, who did not return requests for comment, has spoken warmly, if rarely, of his father on Facebook, writing in a 2015 Father’s Day post: “Dad showed me that you can enjoy all sorts of music. His album collection is legendary. Country, R&B, Classical, Blues, Gospel, Jazz, and yes, even Culture Club. But I kind of compare that to his ability to relate and connect with anyone.”

Together, the Thomases considered themselves happy warriors. If he was estranged in some ways from his own upbringing, he embraced her world, and even became an ardent fan of the Nebraska Cornhuskers. “They have this happy-kindness, Nebraska thing going on,” one longtime friend of the couple’s said. “Ginni can be annoying and obnoxious with the happy talk, but when you’re with her one on one, she can be very kind. And with Clarence too, there’s a kindness too; it’s not just the manipulative happy talk. But there’s an underbelly of pain, and they turn it against other people.”

Clarence Thomas has always maintained that he had to be talked into accepting an appointment to the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit when he was nominated as a federal judge in 1989. “I was minding my business,” he said, recounting the story in his remarks at the Heritage celebration. He was championed by Danforth, by then a senator, who said on the Senate floor: “I hope that people would not attack Clarence Thomas because of some stereotype of what they think a Black lawyer should believe.”

Thurgood Marshall announced his retirement from the Supreme Court in 1991, and President George H.W. Bush turned to Thomas.His confirmation hearings, presided over by Joe Biden, then the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, began with an attempt to determine his views on Roe v. Wade. Then, after an F.B.I. report was leaked, Anita Hill, a law professor who worked under Thomas at the Department of Education and the E.E.O.C., testified that he made numerous unwelcome advances, persisted in workplace conversations about his “sexual prowess,” described graphic pornography and said he found a pubic hair on a cola can and asked who had put it there. The future justice flatly rejected the allegations, calling the public inquiry “a high-tech lynching for uppity Blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves, to have different ideas.”

Asked during the hearing whether he wanted to withdraw, he said, “I’d rather die.” He did not watch Hill’s testimony. “I was the one that tried to watch what was going on for as long as I could,” Ginni Thomas said in a 2020 documentary on Justice Thomas’s life and legal philosophy, “Created Equal,” made with the Thomases’ participation and funded by the far-right Charles Koch and Bradley Foundations. “It was all so wrong,” she continued. “It was so untrue.” When Biden informed Thomas in a phone call that he would vote against him, he tried to reassure him about the process. As she listened in, Ginni Thomas took a spoon from a kitchen drawer and pretended to gag herself, her husband later recounted. (Biden was also criticized for excluding testimony favorable to Hill and, much later, expressed regret.) Friends and associates said that the couple’s rage over the confirmation battle came to both define and unify them.

“He was in a state of shock,” said Armstrong Williams, a Black conservative pundit and longtime friend of Justice Thomas’s, who worked for him at the E.E.O.C. and served as an adviser during the hearings. “Everything that he ever worked so hard for, everything that his grandparents and his mother were proud of him for, was reduced to sexual innuendos. And no one knew anything about his career except for those innuendos. The first time people were hearing about him were these salacious allegations.” And so, Williams said, “he threw himself into the court and becoming the best justice he could be, and that still remains his refuge.”

Thomas’s early years on the court were distinguished by vigorous dissents and iconoclastic opinions. While some justices seek a narrow enough argument to garner five votes, he often staked out a lonelier, more oppositional role as a dissenter. In a 1997 Second Amendment case, he opened the door for future challenges to local gun laws. In a 2000 Nebraska abortion case, he assailed Roe v. Wade, which he called “grievously wrong.”

“He was tilling the ground,” said Leonard Leo,a former executive vice president of the Federalist Society, a Council for National Policy member and a close family friend of the couple’s. “In other words, the field’s not ready for things to blossom or flourish, but he’s doing what he can to prepare it. And that’s what he’s been doing.”

Leo, a Catholic like the justice, first met him when he was clerking on the District of Columbia Circuit. Thomas, then a judge on that court, became a mentor. The justice has spent time at Leo’s New England vacation home, is godfather to one of his children and has supported him through hardships, including the death of his 14-year-old daughter from spina bifida. The two men often discussed religion — Thomas once recommended he read “A History of Christianity” by Paul Johnson — and Leo says Justice Thomas saw parallels between how the church grew and how to build a body of conservative jurisprudence.

“It’s very similar to what happened with the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages,” he said of the justice’s approach, adding that the church and its institutions “did their work during that time, laying the foundations for future Catholic thinking and Catholic thought to sort of grow the church and preserve its traditions. It happened quietly; it did not happen in the grand chambers of the Vatican, but it happened.”

Thomas has described his judicial philosophy as one of natural law, in which liberty and equality are endowed by God. In the Thomas view, slavery and Jim Crow segregation were betrayals of the ideals enshrined in the nation’s founding documents — and so are progressive programs like affirmative action: He is equally opposed to government imposing obstacles or providing special protections. “Whether deemed inferior by the crudest bigots or considered a victim by the most educated elites, being dismissed as anything other than inherently equal is still, at bottom, a reduction of our human worth,” he said in a recent speech. In an essay called “Clarence X?” Stephen F. Smith, a Notre Dame professor and former Thomas clerk who is also Black, argues that his former boss “frequently (if not invariably) seeks to demonstrate that his conservative positions on matters of race are beneficial for Black Americans, as well as legally required.”

But those positions are often out of step with a majority of Black Americans, and in his autobiography, Thomas laments being “branded a traitor to my race” for “daring to reject the ideological orthodoxy that was prescribed for blacks by liberal whites.” Such rejection of orthodoxy was evident in a 1995 concurring opinion on desegregation, when he questioned why majority-Black schools were necessarily a problem: “It never ceases to amaze me that the courts are so willing to assume that anything that is predominantly black must be inferior,” he wrote.

During these years, the couple were embraced on the right; they even hosted Rush Limbaugh’s third wedding at their Virginia home in 1994, with Justice Thomas officiating. Ginni Thomas was laboring in establishment Republican circles, but an ideological ferocity akin to her mother’s simmered. “I’ve been on a mission for a long time,” she told U.S. News & World Report in 1995. “I wouldn’t be in this town if I wasn’t on a mission.” By the time the Tea Party movement arose in opposition to the Obama presidency, her sense of mission was redoubled. “Over the last 30 years, I have worked and struggled inside this Beltway, waiting for you people to show up,” she told Tea Party activists in a 2010 speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference. “I adore all of the new citizen patriots who are rising up across this country, and I am happy to help show you the ropes in the Washington area, ’cause we need help.”

Newly emboldened, that same year Ginni Thomas called Anita Hill, leaving a voice mail message on a Saturday morning. “I just wanted to reach across the airwaves and the years and ask you to consider something.I would love you to consider an apologysometime and some full explanation of why you did what you did with my husband,” she said. “So give it some thought. And certainly pray about this and hope that one day you will help us understand why you did what you did. OK, have a good day.” (Ginni Thomas characterized the call by saying she was “extending an olive branch.”)

When asked if Justice Thomas agreed with making the call, Armstrong Williams was quick to answer. “Of course not! But he had to deal with it,” he said. “It’s his wife, it’s his best friend, his most trusted confidante, and he loves her unconditionally. He doesn’t agree with everything, but they work it out privately.”

Hill was taken aback and made the call public: “She can’t ask for an apology without suggesting that I did something wrong, and that is offensive.” Hill had not been the only woman to level accusations against Clarence Thomas: At the time of his confirmation hearing, another former E.E.O.C. employee, Angela Wright, who was fired by him, detailed inappropriate sexual comments she said he made, including remarking on her bra size. A third former agency employee said, “If you were young, Black, female and reasonably attractive, you knew full well you were being inspected and auditioned as a female.” Neither was called to testify.

In 2010, shortly after news broke of Ginni Thomas’s call to Hill, Lillian McEwen, a former assistant U.S. attorney who dated Clarence Thomas for several years after his separation from his first wife, spoke out: “He was always actively watching the women he worked with to see if they could be potential partners,” she told The Washington Post in support of Hill’s account. “I have no hostility toward him,” she said. “It is just that he has manufactured a different reality over time.” In 2016, Moira Smith, the general counsel at an Alaska natural-gas company, said she was groped in 1999 by Justice Thomas while she was a 23-year-old Truman Foundation scholar, eight years after he joined the court.

The Thomases have rejected all such allegations. “I think, and I’ve said this only a few times publicly, one of the best things that could have happened to me was to have gone through the kind of confirmation I went through,” he told the conservative activists at the Eagle Forum in 1996. “I am the freest person on the court. I have no illusions, no desires for accolades, no desires for praise. I’m there to do a job. I will do it, and I will go home.”

A few weeks after Mitt Romney lost the 2012 presidential election, Ginni Thomas called Steve Bannon, then the chairman of Breitbart, and they had lunch at the Washington townhouse that was both Bannon’s residence and Breitbart’s headquarters. Romney’s loss presaged a battle for the Republican Party’s direction, and Thomas wanted to start a hard-right round table to serve as an alternative to an establishment meeting run on Wednesdays by Grover Norquist, the anti-tax crusader. “She had the idea, ‘I think we need something to counter Grover’s Wednesday meeting,’” recalled Bannon, who didn’t know her well at the time. “And I said, ‘That’s a brilliant idea.’”

The previous year, Thomas’s activism drew scrutiny of her and her husband, when Common Cause, an advocacy group, reviewed I.R.S. filings and criticized Justice Thomas for failing to disclose his wife’s income — nearly $700,000 over five years from the Heritage Foundation — as required by federal law. He subsequently amended 20 years of filings.

After her stint at Heritage, Ginni Thomas ran a Washington-based constitutional studies center for Michigan’s Hillsdale College,a conservative bastion that her husband has called “a shining city on a hill.” She also briefly ran her own advocacy group called Liberty Central, which campaigned against a planned Islamic community center and mosque in Lower Manhattan near ground zero; that group was funded in large measure by Harlan Crow, a friend of the Thomases’ and board member of the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank whose work Justice Thomas has cited. Crow, a major Republican donor, gave $500,000 to Liberty Central. (Ginni Thomas’s 2010 pay of $120,511 was nearly 13 percent of the organization’s revenue that year, tax records show.) In the wake of the financial disclosures, more than 70 House Democrats asked the justice to recuse himself from deliberations about President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act, which Ginni Thomas lobbied against. He declined.

‘When you look at the impact on the conservative movement and the principles we hold dear, I think her and her husband stand toe to toe.’

Now her new group, Groundswell, took shape, coupling a theatrical cloak-and-dagger sensibility with an inability to keep secrets. Early participants drew from a number of hard-line interest groups, including Frank Gaffney of the Center for Security Policy, Tom Fitton of Judicial Watch and Ken Blackwell of the Family Research Council, as well as Leonard Leo and Allen West, an outspoken former Florida congressman, and a number of right-wing journalists, including Mark Tapscott, then the executive editor of The Washington Examiner. A trove of internal emails was promptly leaked to Mother Jones magazine, highlighting the group’s use of tactical terms like “OpSec” (“operations security”) and its hatred of establishment Republican figures, in particular Karl Rove, whom they reviled as a moderating influence on the party.

Ginni Thomas oversaw the group’s plan for its “30-front war” as Groundswell became a platform for far-right leaders, donors and media figures — the people Bannon called the “honey badgers” of the movement — to exchange and amplify hard-line positions on immigration, abortion and gun control. It was, as Bannon put it, “all the stuff that became the foundational stuff of the Trump movement.”

Voting was an early focus. Among the early Groundswell participants was Russell J.Ramsland Jr., an influential Texas-based backer of evidence-free voting-fraud claims who would make a failed congressional run. So was James O’Keefe, the founder of Project Veritas, a right-wing group that has used deception and hidden cameras to try to buttress claims of voter fraud. Another participant was Catherine Englebrecht, a Texas activist who in 2009 founded True the Vote, a group that says it is battling “groups who subvert our elections to serve their own purposes” and has pushed for voting restrictions.

The activists were particularly inflamed after Obama signed an executive order on March 28, 2013, that created a commission to study elections. “OBAMA TAKES TOTAL CONTROL OF ELECTIONS,” one Groundswell member wrote in an email to the group. Englebrecht warned in response that the commission, which had no authority beyond writing a report and making recommendations, “has the capacity to wipe out fair elections.”

Bongino,another Groundswell member, wrote: “We need to reframe this. The narrative of the Left has already taken hold.” He added, “The words ‘Voter ID’ are already lost & equated with racism.” Thomas weighed in, listing key House staff members working on elections matters, and asked, “Who else are key working group members on ELECTION LAW, ELECTION REFORM and THE LEFT’S NARRATIVES, Groundswell???”

Three months after the email exchange, Justice Thomas provided a critical vote in the court’s 5-to-4 Shelby County v. Holder decision, which effectively stripped the Voting Rights Act of language that protected voters in places that had historically disenfranchised them on the basis of race. The act had required states and counties with a history of discriminatory practices, mostly in the South, to get federal preclearance of such measures. The case was led in part by one of Thomas’s own former clerks, William Consovoy, whose arguments echoed the justice’s views. In fact, Thomas had advanced the argument for Shelby four years earlier, when he raised concerns about the constitutionality of preclearance in a case from Texas, arguing that there was no longer “a systematic campaign to deny black citizens access to the ballot through intimidation and violence.” Four years later, in his concurring opinion in Shelby, he wrote, “Our Nation has changed.”

The ruling was cheered on the right, with The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board calling it “a triumph of racial progress.” Civil rights groups were dismayed. “The Shelby decision is one of the biggest affronts to our democracy in modern history,” said Janai Nelson, associate director of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, arguing that it “unleashed a wave of voter suppression that is like what we witnessed in the Jim Crow era.” The decision freed states to enact restrictive laws, she added, that were “often based on mythical justifications” of supposed voter fraud and “by no coincidence disenfranchise minority voters at alarmingly disproportionate rates.”

That same year, Ginni Thomas turned her attention to internal battles on the right. In 2013, the Republican National Committee came out with areport after Romney’s loss that was known as the “autopsy” of the party’s failures. But its prescriptions — to broaden the base and appeal to minorities and gay people — were roundly rejected by Ginni Thomas and Bannon.“It’s a joke, and it has nothing to do with what happened,” Bannon said in an interview, recalling how he reacted to the report. “We have to have something to counter it.”

Groundswell, in a message circulated among its members after the autopsy, said that “Priebus is sending messages to the party,” referring to Reince Priebus, the R.N.C. chairman at the time. It continued: “If we were all gay illegal aliens, the party likes us. He is preparing the way for a change on social issues by giving a warning, ‘don’t go Old Testament.’”

The Thomases faced other headwinds. In addition to Groundswell, Ginni Thomas had started her own small firm, Liberty Consulting, but was often relegated to symbolic gestures, as when she wrote to the I.R.S. in 2014 protesting that the Obama administration was “attempting to force the disclosure of donors to conservative organizations,” amid criticism from the right that the agency was singling out conservative groups for scrutiny. Justice Thomas, meanwhile, wrote vigorous dissents from what seemed to be a narrowing conservative position; in 2015, he was the only justice to back Abercrombie & Fitch’s dress code, which prevented the hiring of a woman who wore a head scarf. (He said the store was not intentionally discriminating but simply refusing “to create an exception.”)

For their 28th wedding anniversary in May 2015, Justice Thomas bought his wife a charm bracelet. It had knots and ropes and a pixie, because, as she later recounted, he thinks of her as a pixieish troublemaker. But there was another charm too. “I said: ‘Wait, there’s a windmill here. What’s that mean?’” She was, after all, a former attorney for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a bastion of Big Oil, and has fumed aloud that kids are being turned into “robots for climate change.” But her husband had an explanation, she said: “He goes, ‘We both tilt at windmills.’”

The death of Antonin Scalia in February 2016 left a void on the court and for Justice Thomas. He delivered an emotional eulogy for his friend, a longtime ideological ally, even if Scalia had once referred to his own brand of originalism as “fainthearted.” “For this, I feel quite inadequate to the task,” Thomas said, adding that the two had “many buck-each-other-up visits, too many to count.” He recounted gleefully chiding Scalia for excoriating an opinion he came across: “Nino, you wrote it.” For years, Thomas was overshadowed by his more voluble colleague, but a reconsideration followed. “For the first year or two, Justice Thomas was seen as Justice Scalia’s lap dog by some, which was wildly denigrating,” said John Malcolm, vice president of the Heritage Foundation’s Institute for Constitutional Government. “Now, in books and notes that have been released, it seems that Justice Scalia was just as influenced by Justice Thomas as Justice Thomas was by Justice Scalia.”

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Justice Thomas meeting with his clerks at the Supreme Court in 2002.

Thomas has warm relationships with many of his court colleagues; he called Ruth Bader Ginsburg “simply a joy to work with” and was often seen helping her navigate the courtroom’s steps. But after Scalia’s death, it seemed as if he might become even more ideologically isolated. Mitch McConnell made it clear that Scalia’s successor would be left to the next president, even though nearly a year remained in the Obama administration. But with Hillary Clinton leading in the polls, it seemed that the court could soon see its “first liberal majority in nearly 50 years,” USA Today wrote in October 2016.

Ginni Thomas attended the Republican National Convention as a Virginia delegate, this time on behalf of Senator Ted Cruz. There, she backed a convention-floor effort to overturn the will of Republican primary voters by awarding Trump’s delegates to Cruz. After the plot failed,Thomas expressed her disapproval of the party’s nominee in Facebook posts later compiled by Trump aides. “Donald Trump will have to WIN my vote, along with many others in the Cruz movement,” she wrote. “We were devastated at how he treated Ted” (Trump had lobbed insults and insinuations at Cruz’s wife and father), adding that it “does not bode well for a President worthy to lead this nation.”

But like many others on the right who opposed Trump’s candidacy, she would become a believer.Thomas and her colleagues at the Council for National Policy had for years pushed for the appointment of “constitutionalist” judges in her husband’s image, with some even advocating the impeachment of judges who did not meet that definition. Few things were more important to the conservative base than reshaping the closely divided Supreme Court, and Trump did not disappoint. First he replaced Scalia with another conservative, Neil Gorsuch. Then, in July 2018, Trump nominated Brett Kavanaugh, a judge on the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, to succeed Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, the court’s swing vote, who was retiring. The court’s balance of power was poised to shift. It was the moment both Thomases had awaited.

The Kavanaugh nomination, however, was soon imperiled amid unexpected sexual assault and harassment allegations reminiscent of Thomas’s own confirmation hearings.With the nomination in the balance, Ginni Thomas addressed the Council for National Policy’s membership, mentioning her husband no less than four times. Before introducing an off-the-record session at a council conference in October 2018, Jerry Johnson, a member of the executive committee, reminded attendees to turn their cellphones off and “do not record.” (A video of the event later surfaced.)

Ginni Thomas invoked the shooting of Representative Steve Scalise at a charity baseball practice and the Kavanaugh nomination fight to make a larger claim that conservatives were under attack. “May we all have guns and concealed carry to handle what’s coming,” she said. “And what they’ve done to Brett Kavanaugh,” she continued, “I’m feeling the pain, Clarence is feeling the pain of going through false charges against a good man, and what they’re doing is unbelievable. I thought it couldn’t get worse than Clarence’s, but it did.”

Her anger building, she told the audience that there were signs all around them of existential threats.“You see rainbow flags throughout businesses, sending powerful, subtle messages to all the customers that ‘We’re the kind, decent, compassionate, tolerant people, until the Republican evil conservatives show up, and those are all automatically hateful people,’” she said. “I see things in my veterinarian: ‘Spread Kindness,’ ‘Build Community,’ ‘Hate Is Not Welcome Here,’” she continued. “Look how defensive we are, because they have these cultural foundations.” Returning to the battle at hand, the Kavanaugh fight, she said, “Even if he gets in — I believe he’ll get in, I’m hoping he gets in, but they’re not going to leave him alone.” It was clear it was personal: “They’re trying to impeach him. They’re coming for my husband. They’re coming for President Trump!”

The invitation went out in the weeks following Kavanaugh’s confirmation. Would Justice Thomas care to join the president for what one former Trump aide described as a “working lunch”? Kavanaugh’s elevation had created an opening on the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, considered a prime steppingstone to the Supreme Court. The top contender for the post, Neomi Rao, then serving as the administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, had been a Thomas clerk.

Trump had long been intrigued by Justice Thomas. During the transition, in a meeting to discuss the court with Leonard Leo, he expressed an interest in learning more about the justice. “At one point during the conversation, he said to me, ‘You know, when I was out on the campaign trail, you know, when I mentioned Clarence Thomas, his name, sometimes the guy would get more applause than I did,’” Leo recalled. “ ‘What was that all about?’ And I said, ‘Well, you know, he’s a hero to a lot of people.’”

A courting of Thomas followed, prompted as well by rumors that he might retire. His roster of former clerks became a go-to list for Trump judicial picks. (“You did appoint a lot of my kids,” the justice would later thank McGahn, Trump’s first White House counsel, in his Heritage speech.) Early on, there was also a photo-op with Thomas and his clerks, who went to the White House. And later, there was an invitation for the justice, along with his wife, to join the president and first lady for dinner.

The lunch following the Kavanaugh battle, however, was supposed to be a private affair between the justice and the president. But when Thomas arrived, Trump aides said, they were surprised to see that he had brought an uninvited guest — his wife. Trump world was learning, as others have, that the two are a package deal.

The accounts of the Thomases’ meetings and conversations with the White House are based on interviews with nine former Trump aides and advisers, most of whom requested anonymity in order to speak frankly about how the courtship of Thomas created an opening for his wife. (One said he didn’t want “the Ginni prayer warriors coming after me.”) Several said they were never clear as to whether she was there as an activist or a paid consultant. They recounted how she aggressively pushed far-right candidates for various administration jobs and positioned herself as a voice of Trump’s grass-roots base. “Here’s what the peeps think,” she would say, according to one of the aides. “We have to listen to the peeps.”

Shortly after the lunch meeting with her husband, she got a meeting of her own with the president, at her request, arriving in the Roosevelt Room on Jan. 25, 2019, with a delegation that included members of Groundswell in tow. “It was the craziest meeting I’ve ever been to,” said a Trump aide who attended. “She started by leading the prayer.” When others began speaking, the aide remembers talk of “the transsexual agenda” and parents “chopping off their children’s breasts.” He said the president “tried to rein it in — it was hard to hear though,” because throughout the meeting attendees were audibly praying.

It was an event with no precedent, and some of the details of what transpired soon leaked: the wife of a sitting Supreme Court justice lobbying a president when several cases involving transgender rights were making their way through the federal courts. (The following year, Justice Thomas would join a dissent that asserted that the Civil Rights Act did not cover people on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity.) The meeting grew chaotic. Ginni Thomas and other attendees complained to the president that their favored hard-line job candidates were being blocked and that his own personnel office should be purged, depicting some of his aides as closet liberals and Never Trumpers.

Before the meeting, Trump’s aides assembled the research document outlining concerns with Ginni Thomas and some of her preferred job candidates, the contents of which they shared with the president.

The document, obtained by The Times, detailed howCrystal Clanton, a friend of Ginni Thomas’s whose name had been advanced, had been forced out from Turning Point USA, a conservative student group on whose advisory board Ginni Thomas once served, after The New Yorker reported that she wrote in a text: “I HATE BLACK PEOPLE. Like [expletive] them all. … I hate blacks. End of story.” (Ginni Thomas subsequently hired Clanton, and Justice Thomas, who has called the allegations against Clanton unfounded, helped her get a federal clerkship and wrote in a letter of support that he would consider her for a Supreme Court clerkship.) Other names advanced by Ginni Thomas included Bongino,whom she recommended for a counterterrorism position, and David A. Clarke,a Black former Milwaukee County sheriff whose oversight of a local jail was the subject of multiple investigations and lawsuits, whom she supported for a top post at the Department of Homeland Security.

The report reminded the president that Ginni Thomas had once called him “a nonconservative candidate” whose populism was “untethered and dangerous” and whose tactics did “not bode well for a President worthy to lead this nation.”It even included a photo of her at the 2016 Republican National Convention, where she supported the effort to strip Trump of his delegates, holding her delegate badge, which was decorated with a yellow ribbon emblazoned with the words “trouble maker.”

“In the White House, she was out of bounds many times,” one of Trump’s senior aides said. “It was always: ‘We need more MAGA people in government. We’re trying to get these résumés through, and we’re being blocked.’ I appreciated her energy,but a lot of these people couldn’t pass background checks.”Many of the people she pushed, another former Trump aide said, “had legitimate background issues, security-clearance issues or had done a lot of business overseas.”

The president continued to allow Ginni Thomas access, telling aides that if she were in the White House visiting with other officials, she was welcome to drop by to see him. And she did on several occasions, while also passing notes on her priorities through intermediaries, multiple aides said. With her husband, she also attended a state dinner for the Australian prime minister, and she went to the White House when her husband administered the Constitutional Oath to Amy Coney Barrett, Trump’s third appointment to the Supreme Court, as guests including Laura Ingraham, the Fox News host and former Thomas clerk, celebrated.

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The Thomases at the White House in 2019 for a state dinner honoring Prime Minister Scott Morrison of Australia.

With her place in the presidential orbit secure, Thomas became even more outspoken. 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. 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. “Hey, are you aware you married a black man?” one commenter wrote, to which she replied: “news tip, whitey, all blacks don’t think alike!”

By 2019, her influence in Republican circles was growing. She took on a leadership role at the Council for National Policy, joining the board of C.N.P. Action, which had become a key cog in the Trump messaging machine. (The council declined to comment.) The board holds breakout sessions on “pressing issues,” then publishes “action steps” for members. That year, she and her friend Cleta Mitchell, a council member and Republican elections lawyer, conducted a joint session at which Mitchell discussed harnessing charitable dollars for political purposesand Thomas spoke on the culture war. Thomas told her listeners that societal forces were arrayed against them, while flashing a slide depicting the left as black snakes coiled around cultural institutions. “Our house is on fire,” she declared, “and we are stomping ants in the driveway.”

During Trump’s presidency, documents obtained by The Times show, the council and its affiliates routinely took on issues that were likely to go before the Supreme Court.Ginni Thomas personally co-moderated a panel called “The Pro-Life Movement on Offense” that laid out strategies to energize “low turnout pro-life voters” and “persuadable Democrats and Hispanics” by talking to them “about late-term abortion, taxpayer funding of abortion, and the Supreme Court,” one of the slides in the presentation read.Amid the pandemic and legal challenges to lockdown restrictions, the organization urged members to “pray for our churches to rise up.” The scope of potential conflicts has little precedent beyond narrower episodes on lower federal courts, as when the wife of Judge Stephen Reinhardt was an A.C.L.U. executive but he did not always recuse himself from cases in which the A.C.L.U. had an interest. But unlike the Supreme Court, litigants there had the right to appeal.

As the 2020 election neared, C.N.P. Action meetings and documents targeted Democratic strategies that make it easier to vote, including the practice of civic groups’ gathering ballot applications, derided by many on the right as “ballot harvesting.” Months later, the Supreme Court upheld an Arizona ban on the practice, with Thomas in the 6-to-3 majority. C.N.P. Action also pressed for mandatory voter-identification laws and even floated the idea of using former Navy SEALs to monitor polls.

Thomas was also busy with displays of devotion: She boasted in an online biography that she “set agendas with President Trump’s White House for quarterly conservative leader briefings” and started a group of Trump supporters called the Northern Virginia Deplorables. But it was after Trump’s November loss that she wouldprove her loyalty beyond doubt,when she and her group urged on efforts to overturn the election.

In the weeks after Trump’s loss, court challenges began to pile up from his team, his allies and even Republican lawmakers. They echoed the call put out by C.N.P. Action to challenge swing-state outcomes, with one Republican congressman, Mike Kelly of Pennsylvania, filing a lawsuit against his own state to try to stop the certification of its votes. On Dec. 8, the Supreme Court refused a request to hear that case before the certification date in a one-sentence statement. It remains unknown whether the justices were unanimous in their decision.

By then, the network around the Thomases was lighting up. On Dec. 10, a former Thomas clerk and close friend of the couple’s, John C. Eastman, went on “War Room,” a podcast and radio show hosted by Bannon. Eastman argued that the country was already at the point of a constitutional crisis — and he urged the Supreme Court to intervene. Bannon eagerly agreed.Behind the scenes, Eastman was advising Trump and his campaign on a new proposal to change the outcome of the election: Vice President Mike Pence, he asserted, could refuse to accept swing-state votes and send them back to the state legislatures when he presided over the certification of the election in a joint session of Congress on Jan. 6.

As the Trump court challenges to the election multiplied, C.N.P. Action took up the charge once more, training its sights on the Jan. 6 certification. In December, it circulated a newsletter that included a report titled “Five States and the Election Irregularities and Issues,” targeting five swing states where Trump and his allies were already pressing litigation. But time was running out for the courts to “declare the elections null and void,” the report warned. The newsletter advised: “There is historical, legal precedent for Congress to count a slate of electors different from that certified by the Governor of the state.”One co-author of the “Five States” report was Cleta Mitchell, who by that time was among the lawyers advising Trump.

Soon a number of longtime friends and associates of the Thomases were involved in efforts to overturn the election results, or helping plan the Jan. 6 rallies. Besides Eastman and Bannon, there was Mitchell, who took part in Trump’s Jan. 2 call in which he exhorted Georgia’s secretary of state to “find” the votes he needed to claim a victory. Turning Point USA, on whose advisory board Ginni Thomas had served, was a sponsor of the Jan. 6 event and provided buses for attendees. (An early rumor suggesting that she paid for the buses was debunked.)

Other sponsors included two more groups with which Ginni Thomas had long ties. One was the Tea Party Patriots, headed by Jenny Beth Martin, a fellow Council for National Policy activist. The other was Women for America First, which held the permit for the rally at the Ellipse and was run by Amy Kremer. The two women, and Ginni Thomas, had all been early Tea Party activists, though Kremer and Martin had been engaged for years in a bitter legal dispute. “That’s why it was interesting when I learned that they’d been working together on the January 6 coordination,” Dustin Stockton said, adding thathe had been told by another organizer, Caroline Wren, on Jan. 5 that it was Ginni Thomas who worked to bring unity ahead of the rally. (Asked about Thomas’s mediating role, Kremer’s daughter Kylie Jane Kremer, the executive director of Women for America First, did not answer that question, instead painting Stockton as someone who makes “inaccurate and attention-seeking statements.” Martin similarly avoided the question, issuing a statement that condemned the violence at the Capitol. Wren disputed Stockton’s account but declined to elaborate.)

The spectacle of a Supreme Court justice’s spouse taking to Facebook to champion the attempt of a defeated president to stay in power, as Ginni Thomas did on the morning of Jan. 6, crossed a line for several people in the Thomases’ circle who talked to The Times. “That’s what she does — it has nothing to do with him,” said Armstrong Williams, Justice Thomas’s longtime friend. “Should she use better judgment? Yes. You can quote me on that.”

Ginni Thomas posted a disclaimer after the protests devolved into an insurrection — “[Note: written before violence in US Capitol]” — but she had also lamented Trump’s loss in a message to “Thomas Clerk World,” a private email group used by Ginni Thomas and former clerks and their spouses that is typically reserved for more anodyne pleasantries. Her use of the forum prompted a bitter debate among the former clerks that soon leaked. It started on Jan. 17, when Smith, the Notre Dame professor, shared an article from Christianity Today denouncing the Jan. 6 violence. Among those who weighed in was Eastman, who was a speaker at the rally. “Rest assured that those of us involved in this are working diligently to ascertain the truth,” he wrote.

Eastman then used the Thomas email group to invite “those of you interested in more information” to get in touch, prompting Smith to reply that he hoped everyone agreed “that the search for truth doesn’t in any way justify insurrection, trying to kidnap and assassinate elected officials, attacking police officers, or making common cause with racists and anti-Semites” because “such things are flatly contrary to authentic Christian faith.” (Details of Eastman’s role continue to emerge, including a message he sent to Pence’s top lawyer during the Capitol attack blaming the vice president for refusing to overturn the election; he repeatedly cited the Fifth Amendment in refusing to answer questions from the Jan. 6 committee.)

By Jan. 18, Ginni Thomas felt compelled to issue a semi-apology on the forum, which also leaked. “I have likely imposed on you my lifetime passions,” she wrote. “My passions and beliefs are likely shared with the bulk of you, but certainly not all. And sometimes the smallest matters can divide loved ones for too long. Let’s pledge to not let politics divide THIS family, and learn to speak more gently and knowingly across the divide,” adding, “I am certainly on the humble side of awareness here. ”

In the year that has passed, Ginni Thomas has deleted one of her two Facebook accounts and has taken a lower profile. But she remains active. Last year, she invited Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida to join a Groundswell call, describing her group as a “cone-of-silence coalition” in an email to his staff that was obtained by American Oversight, a nonpartisan watchdog group. She invoked her husband, telling DeSantis’s aides that the justice had been in contact with the governor “on various things of late.” (DeSantis, who did not respond to requests for comment, was in the midst of a number of high-profile federal court battles at the time.)

The battle over the election did not land before the court as Bush v. Gore did in 2000. But in February 2021, as Trump and his associates continued pressing for state lawmakers to audit — and reverse — the 2020 election,Justice Thomas sharply dissented when a 6-to-3 majority rejected the case brought by Pennsylvania Republicans that the court had refused to take up in December. Echoing the arguments advanced by C.N.P. Action, he wrote that legislatures have the constitutional authority to determine how federal elections are held, yet in 2020, “nonlegislative officials in various States took it upon themselves to set the rules instead.”

He called the refusal by his colleagues to hear the case “inexplicable,” arguing that “allegations of systemic maladministration, voter suppression, or fraud” go “to the heart of public confidence in election results. That is obviously problematic for allegations backed by substantial evidence. But the same is true where allegations are incorrect.” In other words, election disputes and claims of fraud carried as much weight — and should lead to court hearings, just as Trump and his supporters had wished — whether they were true or not. “By doing nothing,” Thomas continued, “we invite further confusion and erosion of voter confidence.” He did concede in a footnote that the 2020 presidential election had been “free from strong evidence of systemic fraud.”

Though the battle for the presidency is over, the Thomases are winning in the war for the courts — and, some would argue, the country. Some of the most important issues Ginni Thomas has worked for are now barreling toward a Supreme Court redefined by Trump, where her husband is ascendant. Landmark cases loom.

One major test will be elections, particularly after Biden’s Justice Department sued Georgia over a new voting law that the department said discriminates against people of color. The Supreme Court has already agreed to review race-conscious admissions programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina, setting the stage for a dramatic reversal on affirmative action, as Justice Thomas has long sought. And Roe v. Wade appears likely to be hollowed out, if not overturned:The court, with Thomas as the lone dissenter, recently allowed abortion providers the right to challenge a Texas anti-abortion law, though a conservative majority, joined by Thomas, declined to block the law’s enforcement in the meantime. And oral arguments in another recent case suggest that there may be enough votes to uphold a Mississippi law banning abortion after 15 weeks. Justice Thomas seemingly used his questions to press for a full reversal of Roe v. Wade, demanding: “If I were to ask you what constitutional right protects the right to abortion, is it privacy? Is it autonomy? What would it be?”

Such performances have made him a hero to many on the right. Brigitte Gabriel, a Council for National Policy stalwart who once said that “every practicing Muslim is a radical Muslim”— and whose activism Ginni Thomas once praised in a glowing Daily Caller column — called Justice Thomas “the real chief justice” during December oral arguments and tweeted a doctored photo in which every justice had his face with the caption: “This would be a Supreme Court with Courage.”

“I love calling it the Thomas court,” said Helgi Walker, the former Thomas clerk. “He didn’t change. That’s why it’s been wonderful to watch this arc. The influence he exerts comes from the power of his ideas,” she continued. “That’s what his legacy is built on.”

In September, Justice Thomas stood before the audience at the University of Notre Dame. Asked what he thought was the biggest misconception the public has about the Supreme Court, he said: “I think that they think that we make policy. I think the media makes it sounds as though you are just always going right to your personal preference. So if they think you’re anti-abortion or something personally, they think that that’s the way you always will come out. They think you’re for this or for that. They think you become like a politician. And I think that’s a problem.”

He told his audience that when he talked to his clerks about the real meaning of their work, “why we do what we do,” he insisted that “it’s not about us. It’s not about winning and losing at the court. It is about the entire country and the idea of this country.”

Last summer, the Thomases took a road trip in their 40-foot Prevost bus, repeating visits to R.V. parks and Walmart parking lots that they have made to 42 states over more than two decades. The couple find such journeys restorative, a way to travel semi-anonymously in places where they feel more politically at home. (“It’s the best of America,” Ginni Thomas once said.) Justice Thomas lamented at Notre Dame that “a notable pessimism about the state of our country” had taken hold, with some Americans believing that “America is a racist and irredeemable nation” and seeking to “cancel our founders.”

There are still people who have faith in the country and what it stands for, but it was on the road and beyond the East Coast elites that the couple found those Americans, at least in Justice Thomas’s telling. “My bride and I, Virginia, we were R.V.ing in the mountains of North Carolina and Tennessee. And we noticed something there,” he said. “The large number of flags of people who still believe in the ideal of this country, in an environment when there’s so much criticism, antagonism, and actually people with disdain for the very same. It was very interesting to be with regular people for three weeks.” Here, far from Washington, far from the news media, far from “the interest groups,” far from anyone who recognized him at all, was where he — where they — were at home.

“There are many more of us, I think,” he told his listeners, “who feel that America is not so broken as it is adrift at sea.”