barbara ledeen
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NO MERRI
CLARENCE GINNI
CLETA
JOK
see kraken powell
LI ENDORSE CARRIE SEVERINO --> BRET BK
Lindsey Graham staffer Barbara Ledeen
ZINKE
FLYNN HUSBAND POW
GRASSLEY
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https://sethabramson.substack.com/p/new-the-coming-collapse-of-donald-50c
no lnx
The McMaster Plot and Barbara Ledeen
Ginni Thomas’s story takes a turn toward possible sedition in 2018, just as Trump and his team were gearing up for the 2020 election by seeking to ally themselves with pro-Kremlin Ukrainians promising manufactured dirt on the man Trump believed would be his November opponent: Joe Biden.
{Note: All of this is covered in exhaustive detail in the nearly 600-page nonfiction book Proof of Corruption, published by Macmillan in 2020, so I won’t unpack it further here.}:
It was in 2018 that, according to the New York Times, Ginni Thomas conspired with one of the most prominent members of Groundswell, Barbara Ledeen, to formulate a conclusive “enemies list” for Trump to use in targeting opponents outside (but even more so, inside) the federal government. Ledeen is married to Michael Ledeen, the co-author of Michael Flynn’s first book, The Field of Fight: How We Can Win the Global War Against Radical Islam and Its Allies(St. Martin’s / Griffin, 2017).
ABOVE: Barbara Ledeen (second from left) in the U.S. Capitol in 2003.]
Flynn—the former highly controversial intel official (at the DIA) and Trump National Security Advisor, a federal indictee, and now an open insurrectionist—is very close to the Ledeens, and has been for years. Indeed, in May of 2021 Proof published the “lost chapter” of Proof of Corruption, entitled “Flynn and the Ledeens”, which detailed how Flynn turned to the Ledeens in 2016 after Trump ordered him to get Hillary Clinton’s “missing” emails, even if doing so meant conspiring with or paying Russian criminals. Barbara Ledeen’s work with Flynn on this clandestine project—which continued after it was universally known that the Kremlin was waging cyberwar on the United States and using “cut-outs” to dump data it had stolen from federal officials—underscored her willingness to skirt the line of legality in trying to help Trump win a presidential election (and Flynn’s equal willingness in this regard). Indeed, Ledeen ultimately made contact with individuals she believed to be Russian hackers on the “dark web”, and—despite America being in a cyberwar with Russia—sent materials transmitted to her by these “Russians” to Erik Prince. Ledeen has since posted on Facebook, “We owe a lot to Erik Prince.”
That the wife of a Supreme Court Justice would have any professional contact with someone like Barbara Ledeen, let alone secretly conspire with her to draft a “list” of the sort held by the the corrupt, nearly-impeached U.S. president Richard Nixon—who avoided impeachment only by resigning from office—is stunning. But in fact Ginni Thomas’s work with Ledeen appears to have gone much deeper than even this.
At a time when she was a “close friend” of Ginni Thomas, per the Times—and had worked with Thomas on at least one secretive plot (the “enemies list”) intended to aid Trump—Barbara Ledeen acted as a “messenger” in a national security–implicating plot to blackmail the nation’s sitting National Security Advisor, H.R. McMaster. The plot mirrored Kremlin intelligence operations, inasmuch as it intended to use a “honey trap” (an attractive woman tasked with seducing the plot’s intended victim) to gain info from McMaster that could be used to extort him into resigning from one of the top national security positions in the U.S. government. Though the criminal plot, as reported by the Times, was run by “a network of conservative activists…[who had] mounted a campaign during the Trump administration to discredit perceived enemies of President Trump inside the government”—precisely the project Ginni Thomas was then working on with the implicated Barbara Ledeen—Ginni Thomas’s name was never brought into reporting on the scheme. This may be for the simple reason that the scheme was never executed; McMaster resigned his job before the unnamed “network of conservative activists” could run their counterintelligence op on him, so that illegal scheme was never the subject of the sprawling federal criminal investigation that would undoubtedly have turned up everyone who was involved in it.
Anyone inclined to think Ginni Thomas was unaware of what “close friend” Barbara Ledeen was doing—as part of a broader gambit (regarding Trump’s enemies) Thomas is now confirmed to have been involved in with Ledeen—would be hard-pressed to maintain that view in light of a second “undercover operation” the Times uncovered, this one also of dubious legality and spearheaded by a Ginni Thomas associate: James O’Keefe. Per the New Yorker, this plot “targeted government employees, including F.B.I. agents, suspected of trying to thwart Trump’s agenda.” The magazine notes that Thomas had given O’Keefe an “Impact Award,” just as she had Mark Meadows.
The Times report notes that the O’Keefe operation was styled as an intelligence plot—a “sting operation” involving “secret surveillance” and “undercover operatives”—which means it mirrors the “warlike” intelligence ops run by the Groundswell group (to which O’Keefe was tied via his association with Ginni Thomas, its chairwoman). Indeed, in a seeming echo of Thomas’s own political obsessions, this second scheme targeted, the Times reports, individuals who likely were on the Thomas-Ledeen-built “enemies list,” as it betrayed the “obsession some of Mr. Trump’s allies had about a shadowy ‘deep state’ trying to blunt his agenda.” There could be no more precise recitation of O’Keefe associate Ginni Thomas’s own post-2016 political obsession.
Anyone who doubts whether it is appropriate to call these operations run by people so close to Ginni Thomas “intelligence” operations must read the New York Times article in full, as it explains (emphasis supplied) that
[c]entral to the effort, according to interviews, was Richard Seddon, a former undercover British spy who was recruited in 2016 by the security contractor Erik Prince to train Project Veritas operatives to infiltrate trade unions, Democratic congressional campaigns and other targets. He ran field operations for Project Veritas until mid-2018.
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Last year, The New York Times reported that Mr. Seddon ran an expansive effort to gain access to the unions and campaigns and led a hiring effort that nearly tripled the number of the group’s operatives, according to interviews and deposition testimony. He trained operatives at the Prince family ranch in Wyoming.
So how high up did these Ledeen- and O’Keefe-involved intelligence operations go? The Times reports that “Ledeen…said she was brought on by someone ‘with access to McMaster’s calendar’”—a telling detail, given the grave national security implications of the minute-by-minute whereabouts of one of the nation’s foremost intelligence officials. The fact that Ledeen has been unwilling to name any of the others who were involved in the plot she participated in raises the real possibility that a top adviser to Trump who ran one of the foremost civilian intelligence-gathering ops in D.C., Ginni Thomas, would have been revealed as at least one of the individuals with knowledge of the operation.
Lest this seem mere inflammatory speculation, consider what the New York Times has to say on who recruited Ledeen to the McMaster operation, as well as Ledeen’s clear unwillingness to reveal that person’s name: “Who initially ordered the operation is unclear. In an interview, Ledeen said ‘someone she trusted’ contacted her to help with the plan. She said she could not remember who.” Ledeen added that her role in the events reported on by the Times was to “pass[ ] [a] message to a man she believed to be a Project Veritas operative during a meeting at the University Club in Washington” (a place it appears Ginni Thomas has frequented).
What sort of meeting in D.C. was it that Ledeen both (a) refused to identify, and (b) saw then–congressional staffers meeting with far-right activists to share intelligence? It’s certainly possible that other groups besides Groundswell answered to this description in 2018, but Ledeen’s involvement in that group, her “close” friendship with its chairwoman, her unwillingness to speak about the provenance of the meeting, and the known activities of Groundswell all suggest that Ginni Thomas’s operation may well have been the original epicenter of the McMaster sting. Much more investigation would be required to confirm this, of course, but it is noteworthy that—consistent with the caution that Ledeen’s Groundswell group displayed in revealing the names of anyone who attended its meetings—Ledeen claimed to the Times (rather improbably) that not only could she not remember who had passed her intelligence about McMaster’s schedule, but that the person she gave that intelligence to had used a “fake name”, so there was no point in repeating it. Would a Project Veritas employee really have used a fake name at a private gathering with friendly congressional staffers like Ledeen? One would be hard-pressed to see why—or, for that matter, why Project Veritas’s founder would’ve been working closely with Groundswell’s longtime chairwoman in 2018 and 2019 but for some reason eschewed her intelligence-gathering operations in 2018—but these too remains unsolved mysteries that no one appears to be looking into at the moment.
We do, however, have some indications about the role Ginni Thomas may have played in the McMaster operation.
In early 2020, the perpetually arch Wonkette attributed McMaster’s ouster to Ginni Thomas and Groundswell, writing that “After Groundswell’s early success [in] getting rid of National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster….[Ginni] Thomas scored a meeting with the president in January 2019, where he ‘listen[ed] quietly as members of the group denounced transgender people and women serving in the military.’” Salon issued a similar verdict, reporting that Groundswell “led a successful effort to oust former national security adviser H.R. McMaster, who [had] replaced [Michael] Flynn.” The unstated implication to be taken from these and other similar reports, in view of reporting on the Project Veritas sting operation against McMaster, is that the operation allegedly intended by Ginni Thomas associate James O’Keefe was “Plan B” to a more conventional lobbying/disinformation action by Thomas and Groundswell.
Additional evidence in this regard comes from reporting by Axios, which dates the beginning of the formalized Ginni Thomas-Barbara Ledeen “hit list” to approximately the middle of 2018, only a matter of weeks after McMaster’s April 9, 2018 resignation (and a matter of days after the last known email regarding the McMaster plot, which the Times reports was inexplicably still a going concern in May, well after its target had left the Trump administration). Times reporting indicates that at that time Ginni Thomas associate James O’Keefe was just beginning what he publicly claimed would be a “series” of undercover operations against “deep state” figures; the list Thomas and Ledeen were then compiling certainly included prime candidates for a project of that sort, and therefore represents a temporal nexus between the two efforts. Just so, Ginni Thomas’s “Crowdsourcers” partnership with O’Keefe reportedly unfolded at some point between mid-2018 and the end of 2019, meaning that it likewise coincided with the “series” of undercover operations against Trump enemies O’Keefe promised.
So was Groundswell’s success in pushing out McMaster one of the inspirations for Ginni Thomas and Barbara Ledeen formalizing their partnership—or even expanding it into new partnerships with associated parties like Project Veritas? Describing the enemies list Groundswell’s leader began producing in 2018, Axios reports (emphasis supplied) that
[b]y the time President Trump instructed [John McEntee], his 29-year-old former body man and new head of presidential personnel to rid his government of anti-Trump officials [in February of 2020], he’d [already] gathered reams of material to support his suspicions.
While Trump’s distrust has only intensified since his [early 2020] impeachment and acquittal, he has long been on the hunt for “bad people” inside the White House and U.S. government, and fresh “pro-Trump” options. Outside advisers have been happy to oblige.
In reporting this story, I have been briefed on, or reviewed, memos and lists the president received since 2018 suggesting whom he should hire and fire. Most of these details have never been published.
A well-connected network of conservative activists with close ties to Trump and top administration officials is quietly helping develop these “Never Trump”/pro-Trump lists, and some sent memos to Trump to shape his views, per sources with direct knowledge. Members of this network include Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and Republican Senate staffer Barbara Ledeen.
The big picture: since Trump’s [February 2020] Senate acquittal, aides say the president has crossed a psychological line regarding what he calls the “Deep State.” He feels his government—from Justice to [the] State [Department] to [the] Defense [Department] to [the Department of] Homeland Security—is filled with “snakes.” He wants them fired and replaced ASAP.
This reporting strongly contradicts any notion—pushed exclusively, to this point, by anonymous White House insiders seeking to (for unknown reasons) distance Trump from Ginni Thomas—that Trump saw Thomas as a “wacko” he listened to only out of concern for her husband’s opinion of him. Rather, it suggests that, as the 2020 Trump presidential campaign churned into high gear in February 2020, both Ledeen and Ginni Thomas were deemed critical Trump advisers who could regularly liaison with the White House—in the person of McEntee or with Trump directly—to advance the then-president’s ongoing “war” on the “Deep State.”
It was this war that Trump would frame as being continued in the “protest” he helped orchestrate on January 6, 2021. As he said in his White House Ellipse speech that day, speaking of government employees around the country, “In every single swing state, local officials, state officials…made illegal and unconstitutional changes to election procedures without the mandated approvals by the state legislatures. These changes paved a way for fraud on a scale never seen before. I think we [have to] go a long way outside of our country [to find fraud on this scale].” He called what “they” were doing a matter of “national security”, adding that he’d committed himself—in an imagined second term in office—to “drain[ing] the Washington swamp…[and] clean[ing] up the corruption in our nation’s capital. We’ve done a big job on it, but you think it’s easy? It’s a dirty business. It’s a dirty business. You have a lot of bad people out there [in Washington].” Not long after Ginni Thomas posted on Facebook her support for the armed mob gathered before Trump at the Ellipse, Trump told that mob that it was an unnamed “group of people” who were then trying to “illegally take over our country.”
All of this may explain why, when major media outlets write about Groundswell even in passing, it is referred to as a “network of conservative activists…[with] close ties to Trump and his senior officials.”
The Fallout From Ginni Thomas’s “Groundswell Purge”
Ginni Thomas and Barbara Ledeen’s influence over Trump’s administration, via John McEntee and direct contact with Trump, had more far-reaching an impact than many realize. By pushing Trump to launch a comprehensive sweep of his administration—which effort the president initiated by first rehiring McEntee (who had previously been let go because he couldn’t pass a national security background check)—Thomas and Ledeen helped usher in a new era of the Trump administration, one that would have profound implications for the post-election period that began in November 2020.
As the New York Times reports, the Groundswell-backed purge led to a “freeze on all political appointments across the government” and a new Trump policy under which “cabinet secretaries [were to be told] that the White House would be choosing their deputies from now on.” This latter policy was be in evidence just nine months later, when Trump installed two young and ill-prepared—but unwaveringly loyal—political operatives, Kash Pateland Ezra Cohen-Watnick, as top deputies inside the Pentagon.
Patel thus became the chief of staff for new Secretary of Defense Chris Miller—who wasn’t permitted to choose his own top aide—with Cohen-Watnick becoming Miller’s acting undersecretary for intelligence and security. Both men were in their roles by January 6, when the Pentagon inexplicably failed to relieve the Capitol for nearly four hours, doing so only after the building had already been cleared of the insurrectionists who had intended to occupy it. It is reasonable to ask, now, whether Patel and Cohen-Watnick would have been in a position to influence the conduct of the United States military on January 6 if Ginni Thomas had not led a clandestine effort to ensure that only unflinchingly loyal Trump acolytes were serving under Trump cabinet members.
As CNN reported at the outset of McEntee’s purge, which extended through Election Day and encompassed the installation of Patel and Cohen-Watnick at the Pentagon,
Trump has told aides he wants fewer people working for him in the White House and only loyalists installed in key administration positions, several people familiar with the matter say. Trump’s allies have provided him lists—not always solicited—of people they’ve identified as disloyal and of names they say would work better toward advancing his agenda. The lists have been generated over the past three years, but some are being dusted off in the post-impeachment purge.
….
[A]fter hearing for three years from acquaintances and confidants about various people deemed disloyal, [Trump’s] efforts seem to have newfound urgency. Trump told people recently he wants to take action on removing some people who he’s been “warned about,” according to one person who’s spoken to him. Some of the conservative activists who have been working on the effort to compose the lists include Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and Senate staffer Barbara Ledeen.
(Emphasis supplied.)
Most tellingly, however—with respect to the connection between the Groundswell-pushed purge and the Patel and Cohen-Watnick appointments—is this reporting from CNN: “McEntee indicated he plans to first focus his efforts on personnel at the State Department and Defense Department.” As Proof has reported, at the very moment Patel and Cohen-Watnick were dithering at the Pentagon on January 6, a militant associated with Donald Trump’s legal team, Joe Oltmann, was in the State Department lobbying loyalist Trump political appointees to seize voting machines.
It may not be too much to say, therefore, that the insurrectionist government Trump headed on January 6—“insurrectionist” as to its leadership cadre—was one that had been orchestrated by Ginni Thomas over a years-long lobbying effort that involved multiple meetings with President Trump himself. Indeed, in a February 2020 NPR interview, Axios reporter Jonathan Swan indicated that Trump had been an active partner of Thomas’s, rather than merely a passive recipient of her work product. According to Swan, who had by then reviewed never-before-seen administration documents to compile his report, “Over the last 18 months [a period of time ranging from the first Thomas-Ledeen ‘enemies list’ to the hiring of McEntee], the president has been asking for names of people within his government who are disloyal, who are, quote-unquote, ‘Never Trump’ or anti-Trump, or, quote-unquote, ‘the bad people.’ He’s told aides that he feels that there are ‘snakes everywhere,’ quote-unquote” (emphasis supplied). Swan added that Trump was specifically targeting DOJ, the Pentagon, and the Department of Homeland Security, but “also…the White House. He has a network outside the White House, which is comprised of very well-connected conservative activists. One of them in particular is Ginni Thomas, who is the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.” Axios even explained that it was a Groundswell memorandum that had first aimed its sights at the then-head of the Presidential Personnel Office, Sean Doocey, whose eventual ouster led to his replacement with none other than John McEntee.
In other words, it now appears that Ginni Thomas didn’t just want to direct Trump’s government-wide purge from outside the government, she wanted to influence who would execute the purge from inside the government. And she was successful in these clandestine efforts.
Swan summarizes his early 2020 findings—issued well under a year before the attack on the Capitol—by observing that “Ginni Thomas has put an extraordinary amount of energy and time into a project of shaping the president’s thinking on the staffing of his government.” Dahlia Lithwick of Slate, one of the most highly respected Court-watchers in U.S. media, would go even farther the following day, writing that Ginni Thomas “is paid to staff up the Trump administration with [her] friends and cronies, even as her husband [Justice Clarence Thomas] sits on cases that involve [Trump] and the agencies she seeks to reshape.”
{Note: As Proof has reported, in addition to the now-infamous Trump plot to install Jeffrey Clark as Attorney General, Oltmann’s lobbying of Trump loyalists in the State Department, and Trump’s installation of Patel and Cohen-Watnick at the Pentagon, the Department of Homeland Security was critical to the insurrectionbecause Trump’s legal team had tasked Christina Bobb—a former DHS employee—with lobbying her former boss to overturn the 2020 presidential election. And so it was that every Trump administration unit targeted by Ginni Thomas for purging, from DOJ to DHS, became part of the administration’s coup plot.}:
Barbara Ledeen and January 6
At the time Barbara Ledeen was involved in the plot against the nation’s National Security Adviser, she was—incredibly—also a federal employee herself. Specifically, she was a staff member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which was then led by Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA). Reports indicate that though Ledeem served the Committee generally, she was deemed to be a staffer for Senator Grassley in particular.
Given that Ginni Thomas’s lobbying of President Trump focused on appointments, and that Ledeen was a regular collaborator with Thomas on secretive Groundswell projects, it is deeply concerning to learn that Ledeen was in the “judicial nominations unit” of Grassley’s office up until 2019, whereafter she continued this work (for the same Senate committee) under Trump golfing partner Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC).
{Note: Just prior to January 6, Ledeen returned to service with Grassley. More on this below.}
One reason Proof calls this coincidence concerning is because when Donald Trump rushed Amy Coney Barrett’s Supreme Court nomination to a vote virtually on the eve of the November 2020 presidential election, he did so, and openly, with an eye toward cases that might come before that Court in the near term—including post-election cases addressing an issue Trump had had with the conduct of the election since before Election Day: mail-in ballots.
None of these interrelationships and power dynamics would matter much to a probe of the January 6 insurrection were it not the case that the recent article on Chuck Grassley at Proof was continually forced to refer to anonymous persons in the Senate office of Chuck Grassleymaking critical decisions about how to respond to reports Grassley may have been involved in the January 6 coup plot in some way. Proof was forced into this position because only the official spokesman to Grassley, Taylor Foy, would speak to the press for attribution on this issue. Other Grassley staffers refused to speak for attribution, even as they repeatedly made claims to the media that turned out to be untrue.
So who was one of the leading staffers in Chuck Grassley’s office in September 2021, when he faced his toughest questioning yet over his actions on Insurrection Eve?
Barbara Ledeen.
Chuck Grassley and Barbara Ledeen: Two Experienced Republican Operatives with a Very Long History
The questions Grassley faced last September focused on one issue in particular: what did his staffers or others tell him about Trump’s coup scheme prior to January 6? What did he know about the plot, and from whom did he hear it, and when? But a second question—one raised by Grassley staffers’ unproven, self-aggrandizing claims that in September 2021 they had sifted through Grassley’s January 2021 correspondence and found no evidence of wrongdoing—was this one: why would reporters take Grassley’s staffers’ word on this point, when some of the people doing the searching may well have been the same operatives who initially briefed Grassley on Trump’s coup plans?
There is, of course, a necessary (and a far more specific) third question, as well: what role did Barbara Ledeen play in either briefing of Grassley prior to Insurrection Day—during which time she was a staffer for Lindsey Graham but still working for the Senate Judiciary Committee (on which Grassley was the senior Republican)—or in aiding Grassley’s ultimately self-exculpating September 2021 search of his files for potentially incriminating documents?
In answering these three questions, it’s important to first understand that the “purge” project Ginni Thomas and Barbara Ledeen were leading from outside the White House was being led inside the White House, per reporting from CNN, by top Trump adviser Peter Navarro. Navarro was also one of the authors, with Trump attorney John Eastman, of the “Green Bay Sweep” coup plot that in September 2021 Grassley’s staff—including Ledeen—assured the press Grassley knew nothing about.
With this denial, the suggestion must be, therefore, that either Peter Navarro kept from Ledeen his ambitions for January 6 despite them being the central players (with Ginni Thomas) in a massive, government-wide pro-Trump project to eliminate non-loyalists from Trump’s inner circle, or that Ledeen was briefed by Navarro or Eastman about the “Green Bay Sweep” but decided to hide that information from her boss in the United States Senate. Worth noting here, too, is that only two people (out of more than two dozen) who appear to have attended theTrump International Hotel war room on Insurrection Eve felt the need to lie about that attendance and maintain that lie over time: (1) Peter Navarro, and (2) Barbara Ledeen’s close friend, Michael Flynn. While this could be mere coincidence, it could also indicate that two insurrectionists in Ledeen’s orbit fear with great particularity any inquiry into what they were doing on the day Chuck Grassley attempted to remove Vice President Mike Pence from the January 6 equation.
{Note: In identifying these connections, Ginni Thomas’s orbit cannot be forgotten, either. Thomas appears to have been essential in pushing Mark Meadows into Trump’s inner circle, and it is Mark Meadows who, the New York Times reports, led a “band of loyalists…[who] fought to keep Trump in power….[by] taking on an outsize role in pressuring the Justice Department [over the election results], amplifying conspiracy theories and flooding the courts in an attempt to overturn the 2020 election.” Trump’s man at DOJ, Jeffrey Clark, has already asserted the Fifth Amendment to protect himself from self-incrimination, as has Eastman, who sent his coup outline to Meadows. So in considering how ignorant Ledeen would have to have been of a plot advanced by those in her orbit, we must also consider how ignorant Thomas would have to have been of a plot likewise advanced by those in her orbit.}
For his part, Grassley has vacillated on his own degree of knowledge of the coup plot.
As Proof has reported, when Grassley was pressured, in September 2021, on whether Trumpist partisans “approached” him with the Eastman-Navarro coup plot prior to his declaration that he would be in charge of the January 6 joint session—a claim made in the 2021 book Peril by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa—Grassley’s hedging could only be described as epic. “I [was not] ‘approached’ in the situation as you described it”, he replied cagily (emphasis supplied). By leaving the door open, indeed wide open, to the implication that he had been approached about the coup plot in some way other than the precise one Woodward and Costa had detailed, Grassley allowed the implication that he might have been briefed on the plot by either his own staffers (many of whom were connected to Barbara Ledeen via the Senate Judiciary Committee), Judiciary Committee staffers like Ledeen herself, or outside agitators like Thomas. Grassley’s denial of the reporting in Peril appeared to cover only an approach from Trump’s legal team (e.g., Eastman) or administration advisers (e.g., Navarro). All of which only heightens the scrutiny on those Eastman or Navarro might’ve thought to use as interlocutors with Grassley—a list of people that undoubtedly has Thomas and Ledeen at its top.
Recall, now, that in the days leading up to Grassley’s astonishing declaration that Pence would not be at the Capitol on January 6, Ginni Thomas was in contact with John Eastman—her husband’s former law clerk—via the Thomas Clerk World listserv.
In short, if, as Grassley implies, he caught wind of Trump’s coup plot before he took a public action that clearly aimed to advance it, there are no more obvious suspects in the matter of who briefed him on that plot than Barbara Ledeen and Ginni Thomas—which makes it astonishing that thus far it seems neither have been interviewed by the House January 6 Committee. That public records appear to indicate that Grassley rehired Ledeen on January 3, 2021—the day the post-election Congress was sworn in—underscores that he would have been in contact with her in the days leading up to his Insurrection Eve gambit, and also that it was during this period of time that Ledeen would have been in the position of wanting and needing to underscore to Grassley her utility to his staff. Her ready access to Trump’s inner circle, and intelligence regarding its January 6 designs, would surely have been one of her primary chits in this regard.
As indicated above, Ledeen has a very long history of being interested—much like Ginni Thomas is—in clandestine intelligence-gathering, and in the dissemination of such intelligence. That she would have wanted to pass on Eastman and Navarro’s plans to her new (or, rather, both former and “new”) boss Grassley cannot be doubted, if in fact she had access to those plans. Consider the sort of schemes we have seen from Barbara Ledeen in the past:
ABOVE: Just one example of Barbara Ledeen seeking to position herself as an intelligence intermediary between individuals in positions of power and influence.]
On the other end of Ledeen’s second stint as a Grassley staffer, it must be noted that, as the New York Times has reported, Ledeen “retired” from her position with Grassley almost immediately after Grassley’s staff was forced to answer questions about which of them, if any, had briefed the senator about Trump’s coup plot. Given that Ledeen’s first employment with Grassley lasted for seven years, the fact that her second was cut short after only a matter of months is certainly worthy of some additional investigation.
Telling, as well, is Michael Flynn’s confession to federal investigators that Ledeen acted as a “conduit” between Trump and the late Peter W. Smith in the plot to buy stolen documents from Russian hackers during the 2016 presidential campaign. This mirrors Ledeen’s claim of being a “messenger” in the scheme to blackmail Flynn’s successor, H.R. McMaster. So it is that when, two days after hiring Ledeen, Grassley seemed to quote from the Eastman Memo (see below) only to later be cagey about who had acted as a conduit or messenger to him from Eastman’s ring of coup plotters, it would be understandable if the suspicion of federal criminal investigators were to fall on a repeat interlocutor in several criminal schemes: Barbara Ledeen. This is especially so given that Ledeen’s closest political associate, Ginni Thomas, was in contact with Eastman during the period he was drafting his now-infamous memo.
ABOVE: Step 1 in the Eastman coup plot noted the advantage of having Grassley replace Pence as overseer of the January 6 joint session. Grassley thereafter unilaterally announced that he would indeed take on this role.]
There is, too, the broader context of Ledeen’s career—and her husband’s—to consider.
Much as this publication has often said of Trump lawyer Joe diGenova and his wife Victoria Toensing, Esquire reports that “there scarcely has been a Republican presidential scandal in the past 40 years that Michael Ledeen hasn’t had a hand in.” The same might be said, in the Trump era, of the Ledeens’ good friend Michael Flynn, or the originator of the Stop the Steal “movement,” longtime Trump friend and adviser Roger Stone. It is Stone who, of all the political operators in Washington, is most associated with the word ratfucking (popularly defined as “political sabotage or dirty tricks, particularly pertaining to elections”). In writing of the Ledeens, Esquire notes that “Michael Ledeen’s family has made ratf[u]cking a generational enterprise.”
Statements from Grassley spokesman Taylor Foy have only further confused the issue.
As reported by a popular Iowa politics website, which was itself working off research done by celebrated independent investigative journalist Marcy Wheeler, the origin of Grassley’s knowledge of the coup plot (below referred to as “the PowerPoint”) seems to have remained deliberately murky even through December of 2021:
Foy’s hair-splitting is telling in too many ways to count. But here are a few indications that this topic is one Chuck Grassley’s office feels a need to dissemble in addressing:
While Grassley may not have chaired the Senate Judiciary Committee from early January 2019 to early January 2021, he was on it, and Ledeen was working for its chairman (Senator Graham) as a means of serving the entire committee—so yes, Ledeen was doing work for Grassley “in the [two] years leading up to January 6.”
Prior to working for Grassley indirectly from 2019 to 2021, Ledeen worked for Grassley directly from 2012 to 2019, making Foy’s attempt to suggest that Sen. Grassley was at a distance from Ledeen disingenuous at best.
Grassley did, in fact, rehire Ledeen 72 hours before the insurrection, so Foy clarifying that Ledeen wasn’t rehired to be part of Grassley’s Judiciary Committee staff—but rather was serving him in some other capacity—goes beyond mere disingenuity, as Foy seeks here to leave the impression that Ledeen wasn’t working for Grassley at all during Insurrection Week. In fact, she was.
That Ledeen’s retirement from the Senate came under circumstances worthy of additional investigation is underscored by Foy’s use of that retirement as a sort of rhetorical “get-out-of-jail-free” card in dealing with reporters. Despite the fact that Ledeen leaving the Senate in precipitous fashion makes the incident more rather than less worthy of investigation, Foy attempts to fashion it as a means for Grassley and his team to avoid significant questions about her.
Given that Foy worked alongside Ledeen for a very long time, his efforts to put distance between himself and her border on the comical: “you’d have to ask her”; “I don’t have her contact information”; “I can’t speak to her [knowledge].” In fact, not only would Foy almost certainly have her contact information (given that she only just recently left Grassley’s office), but he should be able to tell media whether Ledeen exhibited any awareness of “the PowerPoint” during the three quarters of a year—at a minimum—that he worked alongside her in Senator Grassley’s employ.
But Foy’s most telling evasion, bordering on pure deceit, is his last one: “She didn’t work for Senator Grassley at the time.” Foy here takes advantage of the fact that Woodward and Costa’s reporting about the Eastman plot covered a several-week period of time, from mid-December 2020 through Insurrection Day. Ledeen did work for Grassley during part of that time, but not for all of it, which Foy here exploits to imply that she didn’t work for Grassley for any of it.
Conclusion
As a former federal criminal investigator, I was trained to consider the relationships between all parties to a given event, the histories of all parties to an event, and the motives that these histories and relationships may disclose. I’m trained to deem past conduct a possible precedent for future conduct; lies as illuminating as truths; and the opportunity for a malfeasor to misbehave as the obvious and necessary precursor to a finding that they did. With all this in mind, and on all of these grounds, there is simply no doubt that Ginni Thomas and Barbara Ledeen are presently the foremost (if not the only) suspects in the matter of who transmitted to key members of Congress the coup plot John Eastman and Peter Navarro had devised with Donald Trump’s knowledge.
Incredibly, the other chief suspects in this are all connected to Ginni Thomas and Barbara Ledeen by various means: Ali Alexander, a participant in Ginni Thomas’s Groundswell group; Erik Prince, the man who helped train Project Veritas (run by Thomas’s partner James O’Keefe) in intelligence-gathering; Michael Ledeen, Barbara Ledeen’s politically well-connected husband, who has been involved in scandals in every Republican administration since Nixon’s; Michael Flynn, a close friend of the Ledeens, and Michael Ledeen’s co-author;
Mark Meadows, whose Trumpist career was advanced in aggressive terms by Ginni Thomas, in part (but only part) by the awarding of an laurel Thomas devised to celebrate and advertise her favored political instruments; Cleta Mitchell, another participant in Groundswell, and one who also participated directly in Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election; John Eastman and Peter Navarro themselves, the former of whom was in contact with Ginni Thomas in the weeks and months before the attack on the Capitol and the latter of whom spearheaded a “purge” effort inside the White House that was masterminded by Ginni Thomas and Barbara Ledeen outside of it; Presidential Personnel Office director and former Trump “body man” John McEntee, who assumed a position for which he was entirely unqualified because of a clandestine disinformation campaign against his predecessor Sean Doocey by—you guessed it—Ginni Thomas and Barbara Ledeen;
Steve Bannon, whose media operation was hopelessly entwined with Thomas and Groundswell and who was himself a privileged guest of Thomas’s secretive group on at least one occasion; and Donald Trump, who met with Thomas on a number of occasions to discuss the very topic at issue here: locating and positioning loyalists in government who would do anything Trump demanded of them. A small number of other tangential figures, like Jeffrey Clark at DOJ, would not have been key liaisons themselves, but were nevertheless somehow located and selected via a murky process run by Trump partisans; Thomas and Ledeen had spent years plucking men like Clark from obscurity for the sake of getting them to do Trump’s bidding, and in the search for those who recruited Clark to participate in a coup plot in December 2020, Thomas and Ledeen would likewise be the prime suspects for any federal criminal investigator.
In short, as the House January 6 Committee seeks to connect three spheres of coup plotting—grassroots activists and political insiders, Congress, and the White House—there is no map of the key players within these spheres in January 2021 that does not have both Ginni Thomas and Barbara Ledeen at or near the center of it. The House January 6 Committee would be wise to subpoena these two women immediately in order to find out what they know as soon as possible. Proof is confident that if such a subpoena is issued, one or both women will take the same tack that their associates already have, either by asserting the Fifth Amendment (like Eastman and Clark), defying their subpoenas (like Meadows and Bannon), fighting document production vociferously (like Flynn and Trump), issuing statements filled with half-truths (like Foy and Navarro), or testifying under circumstances that suggest perjury (Alexander).
It is deeply regrettable that Ginni Thomas’s association with Turning Point USA as an advisory board member led to a false rumor that she directly aided that organization’s leader, Charlie Kirk, in organizing buses to transport Trump voters to Washington on January 6. While Thomas’s indirect involvement at both ends of Kirk’s operation—on the front end she advised it, and on the back end the Turning Point buses were aimed at aiding the efforts of Alexander, a previous participant in her Groundswell group—the fact that Ginni Thomas was not working the phones ordering up buses (a task well below her pay-grade) obscured the fact that she appears to have been involved in January 6 in more complex and troubling ways. It is little wonder that after cheering on the events of January 6 on the morning of Insurrection Day, she thereafter did the bare minimum to justify her conduct, adding a non-apologetic note to her Facebook page before making it invisible to the public, and then sending a private apology to a private listserv regarding private missives none of us have ever seen. There remains no sense that Thomas regrets her role in January 6 or is even willing to speak about it.
All of the foregoing puts in an entirely new light Ginni Thomas’s husband—who, we are assured from those who know them both, she directly lobbies on matters before the Supreme Court—being the only member of the Supreme Court to rule that Donald Trump should be able to keep secret documents related to his contacts with advisers in the run-up to January 6. That Ginni Thomas appears to have been one of Trump’s key advisers in 2019 and 2020, and that during this period she was working hand-in-glove with one of the most notorious election-year “ratfuckers” in the Republican Party, raises the question of whether Clarence Thomas had reason to apprehend (either under his own steam or at his wife’s urging) that Ginni Thomas or her closest associates might well be implicated in January 6 plotting if all of Trump’s presidential records are disclosed to Congress. Unless we assume that Ginni Thomas hid from her husband the nature of her contacts with Trump and her work on Trump’s behalf—which would be impossible, given that Clarence Thomas was present at intimate gatherings with his wife and the former president; it is also not, according to friends of the Thomases, how their marriage has been structured for many decades now—Justice Thomas was aware of his wife’s proximity to coup plotters like John Eastman when the issue of Trump’s records being released to Congress came before the Court.
While the Supreme Court ruling releasing Trump’s records to Congress was an 8-1 decision—meaning that Thomas’s dissent was ultimately immaterial as a practical matter—in the months and years to come other issues touching upon Donald Trump’s ongoing insurrection will come before the Court. One or indeed many more than one may end up as 5-4 decisions favoring the protection of Trump’s borderline seditious conduct. These majority rulings will depend upon the vote of a man who is surely well aware of what his wife did or did not know about the January 6 coup plot in advance.
If House members do not determine what Ginni Thomas knew between now and the presumed Republican takeover of Congress in January 2023, it will be impossible for the case to be made that Clarence Thomas cannot sit on any Supreme Court case that involves Trump or the January 6 insurrection now or in the future. That is how urgent the immediate issuance of federal subpoenas to Barbara Ledeen and Ginni Thomas is.
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wiki 7 22
Groundswell is a coalition of prominent American conservative activists, including Virginia Thomas, who began meeting in 2013 in order to fight progressivism in the United States and the Republican Party (GOP) establishment.[1][2][3] Groundswell went on to be influential in the White House of former presidentDonald Trump, conducting an effort to rid the White House and other government agencies of so-called "deep state" opponents of Trump.[4][5][3] The Groundswell Group played a significant role in attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 Presidential Election.[6]
According to leaked documents in 2013, the group had started staging "a 30 front war seeking to fundamentally transform the nation",[1] by such goals as undermining the power of former GOP strategist and Fox News analyst Karl Rove,[7] along with the 2012 Benghazi attack and the Operation Fast and Furious's gun-running issue,[8] repealing the Affordable Care Act, working behind the scenes to enact voter ID laws, and blocking Obama administration nominees.[1]
In 2021, Barbara Ledeenwas named as a member of Groundswell in connection with her involvement in an undercover campaign by Project Veritas to discredit H. R. McMaster when he served as Trump's national security adviser in 2017 and 2018. Ledeen, longtime staffer for Senator Chuck Grassley on the Senate Judiciary Committee and wife of neoconservative foreign policy analyst Michael Ledeen, said she passed on information about McMaster's social calendar to Project Veritas which then used the information to plan an operation to secretly record McMaster making comments that would cause him to resign or be fired. Ledeen admitted passing on the information but said "I am not part of a plot."[4]
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https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/24/us/politics/trump-purge-ginni-thomas.html
nyt no lnx
Among Those Pressing Trump to Weed Out Disloyalty: Clarence Thomas’s Wife
A group led by Ginni Thomas has targeted officials in the administration, and lobbied for its own preferred choices. As the president’s distrust in those serving him has grown, so has its sway.
Ginni Thomas, the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas, has targeted officials at the National Security Council, the former head of the White House personnel office and other top White House aides for replacement.
By Maggie Haberman
Published Feb. 24, 2020
Updated May 3, 2021
For the past 18 months, Ginni Thomas, the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas, and other conservatives have plied the White House with memos and suggestions about which people to fire — and who should replace them.
President Trump has generally treated Ms. Thomas’s suggestions coolly, passing them off to advisers, according to people familiar with Ms. Thomas’s efforts. But since the end of the Senate impeachment trial, the president has become more distrustful of the people filling the ranks of government and has been giving those recommendations a closer look.
The memos from Ms. Thomas were first reported by Axios.
Among Ms. Thomas’s top targets have been officials at the National Security Council, the former head of the White House personnel office, Sean Doocey, and other top White House aides. Another target was Jessie K. Liu, who recently left her job as the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia for a job in the Treasury Department that was later withdrawn by the White House.
Ms. Thomas, a politically active conservative who for nearly seven years has led a group called Groundswell, also successfully lobbied for a role for Kenneth T. Cuccinelli II, the former attorney general of Virginia who is now the acting deputy secretary of homeland security.
Another conservative, Becky Norton Dunlop, an official at the Heritage Foundation, has also repeatedly passed names of possible appointments to personnel officials, administration officials said.
Mr. Trump recently shook up the personnel office, replacing Mr. Doocey with John McEntee, who was fired from his previous job at the White House, with a mandate to look for “bad” people, according to multiple administration officials.
Some administration aides have long been suspicious that people like Ms. Thomas and Ms. Dunlop are less interested in pro-Trump purity than in appointments for their own networks of friends. White House officials have privately questioned Ms. Thomas’s lobbying on personnel, and have saidMr. Trump — who is facing several decisions before the Supreme Court personally and in terms of administration policy — has made clear he is conscious of whom she is married to.
Still, in the last year, as Mr. Trump has grown more mistrustful of his government, the sway held by Ms. Thomas and her group has increased. Administration officials have routinely sent aides to attend weekly Groundswell meetings held at the offices of Judicial Watch, another conservative group led by a vocal defender of the president, Tom Fitton.
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Jessie K. Liu, who recently left her job as the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia for a job in the Treasury Department that was later withdrawn by the White House, was a target of Ms. Thomas’s.
Mr. Trump was also given a memo about Ms. Liu that officials attributed to a Senate Judiciary Committee staff member named Barbara Ledeen, [// HR McMaster JOK] another member of Groundswell, though it was drafted with input from other conservatives. The memo mentioned the failure to prosecute Andrew G. McCabe, a former F.B.I. official whom Mr. Trump has repeatedly attacked, as a strike against Ms. Liu, as well as her signing the sentencing memo of Michael T. Flynn, a friend of Ms. Ledeen’s.
Ms. Ledeen and Ms. Thomas did not respond to requests for comment.
Ms. Ledeen also raised concerns with the staff of Senator Mike Lee,a Utah Republican, about Ms. Liu when she was nominated for the No. 3 job at the Justice Department in March 2019, according to three people familiar with the discussion. After Mr. Lee and others objected to Ms. Liu’s appointment, the White House withdrew her nomination.
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Ms. Liu became a flash point again when she was nominated to the Treasury Department post. Someone provided Mr. Trump with a fresh copy of the memo attributed to Ms. Ledeen, according to a person familiar with the events.
And another memo Ms. Thomas passed along accused Mr. Doocey of obstruction related to State Department jobs, and claimed that he had surreptitiously switched one appointee for another for a foreign aid agency. That particular claim was demonstrably false, according to three people familiar with the memo.
The New York Times reported in January 2019 that Mr. Trump met that month with Ms. Thomas and a half-dozen of her members at what was at times a contentious meeting in the Roosevelt Room of the White House. At that meeting, Ms. Thomas insisted that White House personnel were blocking appointments of supporters of the president, and handed him a list of suggested appointees.
Since the meeting, Ms. Thomas and her group have been pressing Mr. Trump to replace job holders they did not consider reliably conservative and have complained to White House staff that they were not getting enough attention from the personnel office.
Privately, officials in that office told associates that Ms. Thomas’s suggested hires could never survive proper vetting, including possibilities such as David A. Clarke, the former sheriff of Milwaukee County for a homeland security role, or theFox News guest Dan Bongino [GROUNDSWELL]for a counterterrorism post.
Despite her own history of supporting Senator Ted Cruz of Texas for the Republican presidential nomination and of trying to stop Mr. Trump at the 2016 Republican National Convention, Ms. Thomas has presented herself to the White House as a barometer of who is sufficiently conservative and supportive of the Trump agenda, according to current and former administration officials.
Mr. Trump has alternately listened to and been dismissive of Ms. Thomas’s entreaties, according to people familiar with his thinking. But the White House has frequently sent administration officials to meet with members of Groundswell.
A person close to Ms. Thomas said she did not intend for Groundswell to be her alter ego, and that she merely saw herself as a launching point for conservative input at the White House.
One concern among White House officials has been that outsiders like Ms. Thomas and her allies do not understand how the personnel office functions.
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In its previous iteration under Mr. Doocey, the office tried to serve as a buffer, getting input and at times pushback about possible hires from the White House Counsel’s Office, the Office of Political Affairs and cabinet secretaries. Mr. Doocey, who had told associates that his goal was to always try to shield the president from problematic appointments, reported directly to the chief of staff.
Mr. Trump would sometimes tell conservative activists such as Ms. Thomas that he could not fulfill their wishes because his aides were stopping him. He has said such things even when he agreed that certain recommendations did not make sense, essentially faulting aides for his own choices to avoid confrontation,according to people familiar with the discussions.
Mr. McEntee will report directly to Mr. Trump, giving Mr. McEntee more leeway but also denying the president that buffer when it comes to dealing with people who try to lobby him on personnel matters.
But it is unclear how much ideological purity Mr. Trump can achieve in his appointments, given how few Republicans supported his candidacy from its inception, the rivalries within his administration, and the stream of aides, consultants, advisers or friends who at some point have whispered in his ear that someone was trying to undermine him.
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origin of IWF [trump, kavanaugh?] --> killed Roe
Confirmation Bias
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How “Women for Judge Thomas” turned into a conservative powerhouse.}:
By Barbara Spindel
clarence thomas anita hill.
Anita Hill’s televised testimony that Clarence Thomas sexually harassed her is credited for ushering in the Year of the Woman. But it also has another, less visible legacy.
Right on the heels of FX’s The People v. O.J. Simpson, the HBO film Confirmation offers another opportunity to relive a depressing ’90s spectacle—in this case, Clarence Thomas’Supreme Court hearings. Anita Hill’s televised testimony that Thomas sexually harassed her, and her poor treatment at the hands of the all-male Senate Judiciary Committee, are often credited with raising awareness of the issue of workplace sexual harassment and ushering in the so-called Year of the Woman, the 1992 election of four women to the Senate. (Confirmation premieres April 16 and stars Scandal’s Kerry Washington as Hill and The Wire’s Wendell Pierce as Thomas.)
But the Thomas hearings have another, less visible legacy. A small group of prominent Washington women rallied around the nominee; they were headed by the lateRicky Silberman, a friend of Thomas’ who, like Hill, had worked with him at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Calling themselves Women for Judge Thomas, they pointedly demonstrated that not all women, simply by virtue of their sex, were ready to don an “I Believe Anita Hill” pin.This ad-hoc bunch—which included Anita Blair, Barbara Ledeen, and the late Barbara Olson—went on to form the Independent Women’s Forum, a D.C. nonprofit devoted to waging war on mainstream feminism.
Back in the 1970s, Phyllis Schlafly and her allies had whipped up fears of unisex public bathrooms and female military conscription in order to help kill the Equal Rights Amendment. After that, groups such as Schlafly’s Eagle Forum and Beverly LaHaye’s Concerned Women for America railed against reproductive rights and gay rights and championed traditional gender roles. But among conservative women’s groups, the IWF was something new. If you squinted, its members—enterprising, educated professionals—looked like they could belong to the National Organization for Women. Instead, they had an extreme loathing for the feminist movement.
The IWF argued that second-wave feminism had solved the problem of sex discrimination. In a 1997 interview with now-defunct conservative magazine Insight, Blair, who was by then IWF president, said that current feminists were “playing out their own Freudian drama on the policy stage, saying, ‘Well, my first husband walked out on me, or I never had dates in high school, so all men are bad.’ ” A 1997 IWF press release called National Pay Inequity Awareness Day “a cruel hoax … designed to brainwash girls and young women into believing that they are victims.”
The IWF’s Elizabeth Larson, in the organization’s Women’s Quarterly magazine, called sexual harassment an issue drummed up by “a growing number of women, many spurred on by Anita Hill’s example … [who] find it more profitable to litigate than to work.”After the 1994 passage of the Violence Against Women Act—spearheaded by then-Sen. Joe Biden in what was widely seen as atonement for his mishandling of the Thomas hearings—the IWF argued that the legislation should be repealed or receive zero funding; IWF spokeswoman (and ’90s right-wing It Girl) Laura Ingraham referred to VAWA as feminist “pork” with a “tear-jerker” title. The group also took on affirmative action, headlining a Women’s Quarterly article on the topic “That’s No White Male, That’s My Husband”—a phrase that revealed a lot about IWF constituents’ racial identities and loyalties. (“You can’t have whiteguys saying you don’t need affirmative action,” Ledeen told the Washington Post when asked why the anti-feminist IWF had organized as women in the first place.)
[Laura Ingraham appears with Sen. George Allen at a fundraiser on Oct. 7, 2006, in Maidens, Virginia.
In 1995, NOW President Patricia Ireland, in a considerable understatement, called it “a little startling” that the new and tiny conservative upstart IWF, with fewer than 2,000 members, was garnering media coverage to rival that of Ireland’s mass-membership organization. It surely helped that stalwart right-wing donors including Richard Scaife and the Koch brothers were funding the IWF, and that its well-connected roster included former National Endowment for the Humanities chairwoman (and wife of Dick Cheney) Lynne Cheney,Who Stole Feminism? authorChristina Hoff Sommers, neoconservative writer (and wife of Norman Podhoretz) Midge Decter, and Wendy Lee Gramm and Mary Ellen Bork, married, respectively, to Texas Sen. Phil Gramm and rejected Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork.
Hill was often dismissed as overreacting to a joke about a pubic hair on a Coke can.
While much of the IWF’s campaign against feminism was waged in the media, the group also took the fight to Capitol Hill; the IWF testified before Congress against the Violence Against Women Act and affirmative action, and filed amicus briefs opposing the enforcement of Title IX and the coeducation of the Virginia Military Institute.
After the election of George W. Bush, the IWF’s clout grew as its members received posts within the new administration, among them Elaine Chao as labor secretary, Diana Furchtgott-Roth as chief of staff of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, and Blair as deputy assistant secretary of the Navy. Most absurdly, twoIWF members, then-president Nancy Pfotenhauerand board member Margot Hill, were appointed to the administration’s National Advisory Committee on Violence Against Women.
Despite engaging in serious business, the IWF’s spokeswomen never appeared to take themselves too seriously; they loved to bait feminists but always with a smile. Blair said, “There’s a telltale way to find a liberal feminist: It’s the nasty wrinkles around her mouth that she gets from frowning. You’ll probably find my side with laugh lines.” “We have no angry agenda,” Grace Paine Terzian, then publisher of Women’s Quarterly, told a journalist in 1995. When Wendy Kaminer wrote on right-wing challenges to feminism in the American Prospect the following year, the IWF’s Elizabeth Lurie responded in a letter to the editor that she had found the piece “howlingly funny.” All of this forced cheer was intended to highlight the contrast between the IWF’s anti-feminism and its caricatured version of feminism, which, according toHoff Sommers in a 1996 60 Minutes profile of the IWF, had come to mean “that you’re chronically offended, that you’re looking for oppression and bias under every tree.”
Plenty of people still see Hill as fitting this description, even 25 years after the Thomas hearings. Although she accused Thomas of repeated graphic descriptions of pornographic films, including scenes of rape and bestiality, and of detailed boasts about his own sexual prowess, Hill was and is often dismissed as overreacting to a joke about a pubic hair on a Coke can. Indeed, IWF managing director Carrie Lukas recently described Hill’s allegations against Thomas as “rather PG-rated.”
Of course, the IWF exists not because its founders thought Hill was overreacting but because, as friends of Thomas, they thought she was lying. In the years since—when downplaying the existence and impact of sex discrimination and of gender-based crimes such as harassment, rape, and domestic violence—the IWF doesn’t suggest that all women are lying. The group has frequently suggested, however, that women who speak out about these issues are whining, and should stop playing the victim, and ought to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. In that sense the IWF, whose current mission is to “improve the lives of Americans byincreasing the number of women who value free markets and personal liberty,” has ties to Thomas that are not merely personal but philosophical as well.
The women of the IWF continue to stand by Clarence Thomas, and he by them. After Silberman’s 2007 death, Thomas sat down with the group’s Michelle Bernard and Charlotte Hays to talk about his friend for the IWF newsletter. “Sometimes at IWF we are accused of being anti-women and anti-feminist, because our mantra is that all issues are women’s issues,” his interviewers noted. “I wouldn’t worry about that too much,” Thomas responded, proceeding to describe his own experiences being called “traitor” and “Uncle Tom.” “When I am criticized, I take it as a compliment,” he said. “If I weren’t relevant, they wouldn’t talk about me. Don’t worry about it. You just wish them good health and do it with a smile.”
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https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-had-a-bizarre-meeting-with-right-wing-activist-ginni-thomas-report**_**n_5c4cb264e4b06ba6d3bd97b4
huffpo jan 2019
ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, has long been involved in far-right activism but a recent White House meeting with President Donald Trump, reported by the New York Times, is raising eyebrows.
Trump listened “quietly” while Thomas and a group of ultra-conservative activists criticized transgender people, women in the military and Republican leadership last week, according to the paper. The group convened for about an hour in the Roosevelt Room, where Trump sat “saying little but appearing taken aback,” the Times reported citing three unnamed sources familiar with the matter. they began with a prayer, the paper’s sources said. Attendees also prayed at various times throughout the session.
Thomas, who operates a one-woman political consultancy, has been criticized in recent months for pushing more obviously partisan messages than some deem appropriate for the spouse of a justice of the Supreme Court, an institution that has recently seen its impartiality questioned.
Over Facebook, she regularly posts unvarnished praise for Trump and slams Democratic leadership. This week, she shared a racist meme about immigrants. (Not her first.) Thomas once called the Parkland, Florida, school shooting survivors “dangerous to the survival of our nation” because of their battle for stronger gun control policy.
Others at the meeting were Connie Hair, chief of staff to Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas); Frank Gaffney, an anti-Muslim conspiracy theorist; and Rosemary Jenks, who works for the anti-immigration group NumbersUSA ― along with around six White House aides, the Times reported.
thomas and Hair were particularly hung up on certain administrative appointments they wanted Trump to make, accusing White House aides of blocking them, according to the report.
One woman present reportedly argued that all women should be barred from military service due to their physical differences from men.
Someone also told the president that Republican congressional leaders should be “tarred and feathered” over the partial government shutdown, although the attendees apparently did not say what the leaders should have been doing. While news of the meeting comes just after the White House agreed to temporarily reopen the federal government, at the time the shutdown would have seemed indefinite.
At one point, Trump pulled his daughter Ivanka Trump, who is also a White House aide, into the meeting, “saying she would be beloved if she were serving a liberal president, instead of getting negative news coverage.”
The unusual meeting reportedly came to be after the president and first lady dined with the justice and his wife but had been delayed for months, the Times said.
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https://www.salon.com/**2020/02**/24/ginni-thomas-reportedly-leading-purge-of-disloyal-trump-aides/
igor salon
no lnx many
a group led by Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, is driving a White House effort to purge government officials seen as "disloyal" to President Donald Trump and replace them with vocal supporters who regularly appear on Fox News, according to Axios.
Trump recently rehired Johnny McEntee, a 29-year-old personal aide to Trump who was abruptly fired in 2018 amid an investigation over "serious financial crimes," to lead the presidential personnel office and purge officials believed to be "anti-Trump," Axios reported last week.
This effort has apparently been in the works since at least 2018, when Thomas' group Groundswell submitted a number of memos urging the firing of so-called "Never Trump" and "Deep State" officials as aides complained that the government was filled with "snakes," according to the report.
Thomas has spent a "significant amount of time and energy" urging White House officials to pursue the purge, the outlet reported.
Trump recently abruptly withdrew the nomination of Jessie Liu, the former U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, to a top Treasury Department role after a memo from Thomas' group alleged that she was "unfit for the job." The memo argued that Liu should be removed because she did not act on "criminal referrals of some of Justice Brett Kavanaugh's accusers," had signed a sentencing memo recommending prison time for former national security adviser Michael Flynn, and had not sought to indict former acting FBI director Andrew McCabe.
The memo was authored by Barbara Ledeen, a longtime Republican Senate staffer and close friend of Flynn. Ledeen was involved in the Trump campaign's efforts to obtain stolen Hillary Clinton emails and was named extensively throughout former special counsel Bob Mueller's report.
Another memo urged the firing of numerous State Department officials accused of undermining Trump, including top U.S. diplomat David Hale, who later testified in the impeachment inquiry.
The group also previously led a successful effort to oust former national security adviser H.R. McMaster, who replaced Flynn.
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A third memo obtained by Axios showed that the group recommended the administration hire a number of Trump loyalists, including many who had touted his supposed accomplishments in appearances on Fox News.
The memo recommended former Milwaukee sheriff David Clarke, a frequent guest on the network, for a senior Department of Homeland Security position and suggested Fox News regular Dan Bongino, a former Secret Service agent who has repeatedly run for office without success, for a post as counterterrorism adviser or in Homeland Security.
The memo also urged the White House to add Derek Harvey, a longtime aide to Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., who was reportedly involved in efforts to discredit the Russia investigation, Trump's pressure campaign on Ukrainian officials and attempts to leak the Ukraine whistleblower's name, to the National Security Council. Indeed, Harvey briefly held a position there before he was ousted by McMaster. Groundswell also recommended Ben Weingarten, a Trump supporter who writes for the far-right Federalist, for the National Security Council.
Chris Plante, a right-wing radio host who has attacked women who have accused Trump of rape and sexual assault on Fox News, should be the White House press secretary,the memo argued.
The memos were written after conservative activists "funneled names" to Thomas during meetings at the offices of Judicial Watch, a conservative legal activist group headed by frequent Fox News guest Tom Fitton.
The group's meetings with Trump were first reported by The New York Times in January 2019, when the group complained that officials were blocking Trump supporters from jobs in the administration. Though the administration acted on some of the group's recommendations, efforts to purge the executive branch of officials seen as disloyal have apparently gained steam since Trump's acquittal in the Senate impeachment trial.
McEntee will report directly to the president and has already ordered a freeze on all political appointments while he identifies officials he feels should be removed. He also informed Cabinet secretaries that the White House would select all their deputies moving forward, according to the Times.
These moves come as Trump ousted the acting director of national intelligence, Joseph Maguire, over a dispute about an intelligence briefing warning that Russia would try to help Trump in the 2020 election. The ouster came after Trump purged dozens of experts from the National Security Council staff, including Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, who testified against Trump during the impeachment inquiry. Vindman was ousted on the same day as EU ambassador Gordon Sondland, who also testified in the probe. Other officials involved in the impeachment inquiry have similarly been ousted.
This purge comes in an administration which has already seen 82% more turnover in its first three years than any of the previous five presidents in their full first terms,according to data by the Brookings Institution's Kathryn Dunn Tenpas. With countless positions filled in an "acting" capacity, Trump is already on his third chief of staff, his fourth national security adviser and defense secretary, his fifth Homeland Security secretary, and his seventh communications director. Nearly 40% of senior administration positions have seen two or more replacements, according to the data.
"Trump appears to be launching the biggest assault on the nation's civil service system since the 1883 Pendleton Act ended the spoils system," New York University professor Paul Light told the Times.
"Many key departments and White House entities have been hollowed out," added Tenpas. "He seems completely unbothered. He claims that 'actings' give him flexibility, but fails to see that temporary leaders cannot advance his policies nearly as well as a Senate-confirmed appointee who has the stature and all the powers to do so."
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some lnx
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trump recently abruptly withdrew the nomination of Jessie Liu, the former U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, to a top Treasury Department role after a memo from Thomas' group alleged that she was "unfit for the job." The memo argued that Liu should be removed because she did not act on "criminal referrals of some of Justice Brett Kavanaugh's accusers," had signed a sentencing memo recommending prison time for former national security adviser Michael Flynn, and had not sought to indict former acting FBI director Andrew McCabe.
The memo was authored by Barbara Ledeen, a longtime Republican Senate staffer and close friend of Flynn.Ledeen was involved in the Trump campaign's efforts to obtain stolen Hillary Clinton emails and was named extensively throughout former special counsel Bob Mueller's report.
https://www.openmuellerreport.org/person/barbara-ledeen
Another memo urged the firing of numerous State Department officials accused of undermining Trump, including top U.S. diplomat David Hale, who later testified in the impeachment inquiry.
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https://www.openmuellerreport.org/person/barbara-ledeen
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Barbara Ledeen in the Mueller Report - 7 Mentions
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“ Barbara Ledeen and Peter Smith were among the people contacted by Flynn.
Ledeen, a long-time Senate staffer Who had previously sought the Clinton emails, provided updates to
active in Republican politics, also attempted to locate and obtain the deleted Clinton emails.267 Ledeen
17 302, at 7-8. 267 Flynn 11/29/17 302, at 7. “ 2“ Szobocsan 3/29/17 302, at 1. 269 12/3/15 Email, Ledeen
to Smith. 27° 12/3/15 Email, Ledeen to Smith (attachment). 62
Page 71 of 448
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Page 71:
wrote, “we can discuss to whom it should be referred.”271 On December 16, 2015, Smith informed Ledeen
Page 72 of 448
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Page 72:
In September 2016, Smith and Ledeen got back in touch with each other about their respective efforts.
Ledeen wrote to Smith, “wondering if you had some more detailed reports or memos or other data you could
marry it against the new data we have found and then could share it back to you ‘your eyes only.”’232 Ledeen
:{
}:
Ledeen wanted to authenticate the emails and solicited Contributions to fund that effort.
Email, Smith to Flynn et al.; 8/28/16 Email, Smith to Smith (bcc: Clovis et al.). 232 9/16/16 Email, Ledeen
Page 73 of 448
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.287 The investigation did not establish that Smith was in contact with Russian hackers or that Smith, Ledeen
Page 142 of 448
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Page 178 of 448
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Page 178:
about the sanctions until he had heard from the team at MaraLago.1241 He first spoke with Michael Ledeen
° SF000001 (12/29/16 Text Message, Flynn to Flaherty). 12‘” Flynn 11/20/17 302, at 3. 1242 Michael Ledeen
is married to Barbara Ledeen, the Senate staffer whose 2016 efforts to locate Hillary Clinton’s missing
described in Volume 1, Section III.D.2, supra. 1243 Flynn 11/17/17 302, at 3; Call Records of Michael Ledeen
Page 406 of 448
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Krickovic, Andrej Krylova, Aleksandra Kushner, Jared Kuznetsov, Sergey Landrum, Pete Lavrov, Sergey Ledeen
, Barbara Ledeen, Michael Ledgett, Richard Lewandowski, Corey Luff, Sandra Lyovochkin, Serhiy Magnitsky
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===
dad born 1941, phd VN chickenhawk
CPA massive fail (literally threw out the plan]
2004
...Now if you will permit me one last personal note. Krugman engages in egregious character assassination in the article of Simone Ledeen, Michael’s daughter. This is the kind of personal attack I believe to be endemic to Krugman’s form of partisanship and should not have been allowed by The New York Times. Krugman implied that Ms. Ledeen benefited from nepotism and was not qualified to serve in Iraq. This could not be further from the truth. Simone Ledeen, who did accounting for the CPA, was a fully qualified MBA and exactly the kind of young person you would want to see serving in Iraq (not a simple thing to find, obviously, for a dangerous war zone). I met her for the first time last week, having dinner with her twice. I listened to her detailed analyses of what was going on over there that were in many ways as critical as Krugman’s, but far more subtle and educated because she had spent over half a year in Iraq, visiting many parts of the country, working with and training Iraqis with whom she became friends. I know nothing of the quotes that Krugman cherry-picked for his article or of their context, but can assure you and him that this young woman is no warmonger. The kind of reactionary (word chosen very specifically) character assassination he has engaged in is despicable.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/29/opinion/29KRUG.html
Opinion
Who Lost Iraq?
By Paul Krugman
June 29, 2004
The formal occupation of Iraq came to an ignominious end yesterday with a furtive ceremony, held two days early to foil insurgent attacks, and a swift airborne exit for the chief administrator. In reality, the occupation will continue under another name, most likely until a hostile Iraqi populace demands that we leave. But it's already worth asking why things went so wrong.
The Iraq venture may have been doomed from the start — but we’ll never know for sure because the Bush administration made such a mess of the occupation. Future historians will view it as a case study of how not to run a country.
Up to a point, the numbers in the Brookings Institution’s invaluable Iraq Index tell the tale. Figures on the electricity supply and oil production show a pattern of fitful recovery and frequent reversals; figures on insurgent attacks and civilian casualties show a security situation that got progressively worse, not better; public opinion polls show an occupation that squandered the initial good will.
What the figures don’t describe is the toxic mix of ideological obsession and cronyism that lie behind that dismal performance.
The insurgency took root during the occupation’s first few months, when the Coalition Provisional Authority seemed oddly disengaged from the problems of postwar anarchy. But what was Paul Bremer III, the head of the C.P.A., focused on? According to a Washington Post reporter who shared a flight with him last June, “Bremer discussed the need to privatize government-run factories with such fervor that his voice cut through the din of the cargo hold.”
Plans for privatization were eventually put on hold. But as he prepared to leave Iraq, Mr. Bremer listed reduced tax rates, reduced tariffs and the liberalization of foreign-investment laws as among his major accomplishments. Insurgents are blowing up pipelines and police stations, geysers of sewage are erupting from the streets, and the electricity is off most of the time — but we’ve given Iraq the gift of supply-side economics.
If the occupiers often seemed oblivious to reality, one reason was that many jobs at the C.P.A. went to people whose qualifications seemed to lie mainly in their personal and political connections — people like Simone Ledeen, whose father, Michael Ledeen, a prominent neoconservative, told a forum that “the level of casualties is secondary” because “we are a warlike people” and “we love war.”
Still, given Mr. Bremer’s economic focus, you might at least have expected his top aide for private-sector development to be an expert on privatization and liberalization in such countries as Russia or Argentina. But the job initially went to Thomas Foley, a Connecticut businessman and Republican fund-raiser with no obviously relevant expertise. In March, Michael Fleischer, a New Jersey businessman, took over. Yes, he’s Ari Fleischer’s brother. Mr. Fleischer told The Chicago Tribune that part of his job was educating Iraqi businessmen: “The only paradigm they know is cronyism. We are teaching them that there is an alternative system with built-in checks and built-in review.”
Checks and review? Yesterday a leading British charity, Christian Aid, released a scathing report, “Fueling Suspicion,” on the use of Iraqi oil revenue. It points out that the May 2003 U.N. resolution giving the C.P.A. the right to spend that revenue required the creation of an international oversight board, which would appoint an auditor to ensure that the funds were spent to benefit the Iraqi people.
Instead, the U.S. stalled, and the auditor didn’t begin work until April 2004. Even then, according to an interim report, it faced “resistance from C.P.A. staff.” And now, with the audit still unpublished, the C.P.A. has been dissolved.
Defenders of the administration will no doubt say that Christian Aid and other critics have no proof that the unaccounted-for billions were ill spent. But think of it this way: given the Arab world’s suspicion that we came to steal Iraq’s oil, the occupation authorities had every incentive to expedite an independent audit that would clear Halliburton and other U.S. corporations of charges that they were profiteering at Iraq’s expense. Unless, that is, the charges are true.
Let’s say the obvious. By making Iraq a playground for right-wing economic theorists, an employment agency for friends and family, and a source of lucrative contracts for corporate donors, the administration did terrorist recruiters a very big favor.
===
wiki hubby
Missing Clinton emails
Barbara Ledeen sparked controversy in 2015 when she tried to launch her own investigation into Hillary Clinton's emails, while a staffer for Senator Chuck Grassley on the Senate Judiciary Committee which was looking into Trump's Russia issue.[42] According to FBI notes, she requested the assistance of both a defense contractor and Newt Gingrich who asked Judicial Watch for financial assistance for her efforts.[42] Judicial Watch requested another contractor to access the "deep web and dark web".[42] Matt Tate, a former British intelligence official, was approached by Peter W. Smith, an aid close to Gingrich and who was also working with Michael Flynn who is a confidant of Barbara Ledeen's husband, who Tate said Smith was obtaining Clinton's emails independently of Barbara Ledeen's efforts which Grassley had told her to stop.[42][43][44][b]
Project Veritas
To support Project Veritas in 2017 and 2018 and while she was a staff member on the Chuck Grassley led Senate Judiciary Committee, Barbara Ledeen was tasked to help discredit H.R. McMaster because he had stated that President Trump had the intelligence of a "kindergartner" and was an "idiot."[51] She posted numerous comments on Facebook supporting Project Veritas including "We owe a lot to Erik Prince" because of his efforts to support Project Veritas and many disparaging posts about McMaster.[41] Her involvement in the campaign to discredit McMaster led to Barbara Ledeen being named as a member of the Groundswell group; she admitted passing on information to Project Veritas but said "I am not part of a plot."[41][52]
----
who killed BO? you did, asshole when you gave stinger missles to proto-al queda
September 13, 2001
Day before yesterday there werethree Barbaras, close as sisters, joined by their zest for life, their volcanic passions, their total commitment to their loved ones, their fearless work for freedom. Barbara Olson, Barbara Comstock, Barbara Ledeen. All three chose to fight for their convictions.
All three were singled out by the Left for slanderous attacks, dehumanizing slogans, the usual stereotypes. Had there been a feminist movement worthy of the name, they would have been its heroines; instead, because they rejected the fashionable causes, insisted on traditional virtue, fought limits on real choices, and relentlessly exposed the emptiness of the Leftist slogans, they became the feminists’ targets.
Now there are two. And what a loss we have suffered. Barbara Olson was a life force, a protean woman who lived life as it is supposed to be lived, celebrating the good times to the full, enduring its worst moments with grim resolve, supporting her friends and allies at all times, taking the fight to her enemies with joyful enthusiasm. She had one of the quickest and finest minds in Washington. Married to one of the greatest attorneys of our time, she was the equal of anyone in legal and political debate. But above all, she was our Braveheart, leading us into battle with the cry of “Freeeeeedom,” carrying the flag of proud independence.
Braveheart to the end, fighting to the last. She had the presence of mind and the force of will to call Ted from her doomed aircraft to ask, “What should I tell the pilot to do?” Unwilling to go quiet into the dark night she wanted marching orders, for herself and for the people around her. She would not cow in the rear of the plane and submit to the murderous instructions of her captors; she wanted to go down fighting.
Perhaps she did. A person from the White House told me that there is reason to believe that plane/bomb was intended for the presidential residence, not the Pentagon, and that something happened to make it swerve suddenly. I like to think that at the last, Barbara charged the cabin, survived the knife thrusts of the monsters, and hurled herself at the kamikaze pilot, putting the plane into a loop toward Virginia.
A great woman, a woman of immeasurable valor, who brought a singular light into our lives. To see Ted with her was to understand the power of an enduring love. He was so proud of her, so delighted by her, so totally overcome with her love for him, that he knew he was the luckiest of men.
The death of such a person cannot be accepted, cannot be digested and must be avenged. Her killers are many, from the evil men on the plane to their supporters and Svengalis around the world, to all those among us who dehumanize their political opponents and thereby facilitate the transition from the politics of personal destruction to the physical destruction of their opponents. She was killed by a fraudulent and arrogant establishment that pretended it was capable of providing our people with good security [BUSH WAS GIVEN REPORT?!] and our leaders with good intelligence. Why are they permitted to remain at their posts? And not least of all, she was killed by a corrupt elite that celebrates murder, provided that the killers hold the right views and slaughter those who are political lepers. “No Regrets for a Love of Explosives” babbles the New York Times headline atop a disgraceful puff piece on Weathermen killers that appeared on the day of Barbara Olson’s murder.
My America, the real America, abhors these people, as Barbara did and as the two surviving Barbaras do. And, in the course of our revenge against the physical killers, the state sponsors, the sources of the money, the dance masters in the streets of the Middle East who reveled in our misery, the leaders of the Hate America and Kill the Jews crowd, we must retain our capacity for righteous indignation against those among us who bear a heavy moral responsibility for it.
If she were still here, Barbara would have led that charge. But there are plenty of us left.
Michael A. Ledeen is a resident scholar in the Freedom Chair at AEI.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/in-the-mueller-report-erik-prince-funds-a-covert-effort-to-obtain-clintons-e-mails-from-a-foreign-state
erik Prince, the billionaire founder of Blackwater, a former private-security company embroiled in controversy surrounding its use of lethal force against civilians in Iraq, makes a strange cameo appearance in the redacted version of the Mueller report, which was released on Thursday morning. Prince, who is the brother of Betsy DeVos, the Secretary of Education, is described as having provided some funding for a secretive effort to obtain Hillary Clinton’s private e-mails from shadowy operatives working on the so-called dark Web.
According to the report, Prince “provided funding to hire a tech advisor to ascertain the authenticity” of e-mails that conservative activists had obtained. Prince, who was interviewed by the special counsel’s team, said that the cache of e-mails in question turned out to be fakes.
The report, however, details a strange effort by Trump-campaign associates to hack into Clinton and the Democrats’ e-mail accounts that paralleled the Russian plot. According to Mueller, the effort began as early as December, 2015, and ramped up after Trump publicly declared, on July 27, 2016, that he hoped Russia would “find the thirty thousand e-mails that are missing” from Clinton’s private e-mail server. Mueller and his team never interviewed Trump, but the retired lieutenant generalMichael Flynn, the campaign aide whom Trump later appointed his national-security adviser, told them that Trump repeatedly asked to get Clinton’s e-mails. According to the report, Flynn tried to do this by contacting multiple people who might be able to supply them, including two well-placed conservative operatives, Peter Smith and Barbara Ledeen.
Smith, an investment banker and Republican donor, had helped finance an investigation of Bill Clinton’s sexual relationships in Arkansas, leading to the 1993 Troopergate scandal. Ledeen, a Republican Senate staffer, worked for Chuck Grassley. Grassley was then the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee and one of the fiercest defenders of Trump and critics of the Russia investigation. Barbara Ledeen’s husband, Michael Ledeen, had co-authored a book with Flynn. A spokesman for Grassley’s office described Barbara Ledeen’s efforts as her private pursuit, rather than an official effort undertaken by the senator’s office.
In December, 2015, Ledeen e-mailed Smith a proposal to obtain Clinton’s private e-mails, which, she claimed, “were classified” and had been “purloined by our enemies.”According to Mueller’s report, the proposal claimed that the “Clinton email server was, in all likelihood, breached long ago,’ and that the Chinese, Russian, and Iranian intelligence services could ‘re-assemble the server’s email content.’ ” In an account of Ledeen’s efforts, the *Guardian* cited notes by federal investigators that said her motive was concern for the well-being of her children, who have served in the U.S. military, and whose safety, she suggested, could have been undermined if Clinton’s e-mails had fallen into hostile governments’ hands. But, in her e-mails to Smith, as revealed by the Mueller report, Ledeen appears more focussed on partisan politics. She writes, “if even a single email was recovered and the providence [sic] of the email was a foreign service, it would be catastrophic to the Clinton campaign.”
The report shows that, though Smith declined to participate in the project at first, Ledeen went ahead and obtained a cache of e-mails. After Trump publicly called for help in getting Clinton’s e-mails, Smith initiated his own effort and circulated information about it to members of Trump’s campaign. According to Mueller’s report, in August, 2016, “Smith sent an email from an encrypted account with the subject ‘Sec Clinton’s unsecured private email server’ ” to recipients including the Trump-campaign co-chairman Sam Clovis. Smith reported that he was involved in efforts “to poke and probe on the above,” and that the Clinton’s server had been “hacked with ease by both State-related players and private mercenaries.”
Smith set up an L.L.C. for the project and structured it as an “independent expenditure group” that, under campaign law, could not coördinate with the Trump campaign,yet Smith circulated e-mails saying that his initiative was “in coordination with” the Trump campaign “to the extent permitted” by the law. The New Yorker obtained a document from Smith, from September, 2016, in which he claimed that he was working with the Trump-campaign representatives Steve Bannon, Kellyanne Conway, Sam Clovis, and Michael Flynn, and also with the Republican National Committee, Judicial Watch, Citizens United, and the conservative activist James O’Keefe. There is no evidence that any of these individuals were, in fact, working with Smith. But the Mueller report’s depiction of Smith, Ledeen, Flynn, and Prince’s efforts suggests that Trump and his immediate campaign orbit were deeply intent on obtaining Clinton’s private e-mails during the period when Russia was hacking into them.
In September, 2016, Smith and Ledeen rejoined forces, at which point Prince provided some of the funding for the operation. Mueller’s team obtained files fromSmith’s computer showing that Smith had documents that WikiLeaks had stolen from the computer of the Clinton campaign chairman, John Podesta, though Mueller found no conclusive evidence that Smith had obtained the stolen files prior to WikiLeaks’s public release of them. (Smith died in May, 2017, in what was ruled a suicide.)
In his remarks prior to releasing the report, Attorney General William Barr stressed that it is not criminal to disseminate stolen information, such as the e-mails that the Russians hacked from the Democrats during the 2016 campaign, so long as those spreading the stolen information were not involved in the initial theft. It appears that the Attorney General’s definition of the criminal law was narrow and careful for a reason—many Trump-campaign supporters were involved in tiptoeing right up to the line.
wonkette
let's talk about Senate Judiciary Committee staffer Barbara Ledeen and her unrelenting assault on the rule of law in this country. Axios reported yesterday that Ledeen is part of Ginni Thomas's coven trying to turn the federal government into a year-round CPAC convention. It also claims the conservative activist personally authored a hit-piece on former US Attorney for DC urging the president to fire her for failing to launch un-predicated, political prosecutions of Trump's enemies. And Ledeen did it all from her perch as a congressional staffer, paid by American taxpayers, and given access to classified US intel materials. Neat, huh?
When Barbara Ledeen, an ardent anti-feminism activist, met Michael Ledeen, a warmongering neo-con from way back when that term actually meant something, it was love at first sight. Probably. The couple are longtime allies of former NSA Michael Flynn, and the two men actually wrote a book together in 2016 on the "war" with "radical Islam." As confirmed in the Mueller Report, Barbara Ledeen and Flynn wandered into the Dark Web in 2016 to see if they could get their hands on Hillary Clinton's emails, a field trip underwritten by mercenary merchant Erik Prince. Yep, her Twitter TL is just exactly as batshit as you think it is.
Ledeen was furious when Flynn was indicted, and got caught sending unsolicited emails to Flynn's prior, competent legal team attempting to coordinate his defense with Nunes's Hannity appearances.
Suffice it to say Barbara Ledeen wasnot happywith then-US Attorney Jessie Liu for allowing the Flynn prosecution to proceed after Mueller closed up shop. But two weeks ago, when rumors began to surface that she'd authored a memo for the White House advocating for Liu's dismissal, Ledeen denied it outright, telling the *Washington Post*, "I'm a Senate staffer. I can't lobby either the Senate or the White House. I'm kind of amazed my name came up in this. Somebody likes to throw around my name."
LOL!
It's wildly inappropriate for a Senate staffer to undermine a federal criminal prosecution, and that hardly stopped her. Axios confirms that Ledeen did indeed write the hit memo that appears to have finally gotten Liu fired from the US Attorney's Office and her nomination to a position at the Treasury Department yanked.Among Liu's unforgivable transgressions:
- Not acting on criminal referrals of some of Justice Brett Kavanaugh's accusers.
- Signing "the sentencing filing asking for jail time" for Gen. Michael Flynn (a friend of Ledeen's).
- Holding a leadership role in a women's lawyers networking group that Ledeen criticized as "pro-choice and anti-Alito."
- Not indicting former deputy director of the FBI Andrew McCabe.
- :{Dismissing charges against "violent inauguration protesters who plotted to disrupt the inauguration." [must be j20 2016]
}:
That's right, Liu, a career government attorney, lost her job because some wack-ass Judiciary staffer is still pissed about the Kavanaugh hearings (and the Clarence Thomas hearings, frankly) and can't understand why the DOJ didn't indict Christine Blasey Ford.
If Ledeen is a lawyer, it doesn't appear on her LinkedIn page. Nonetheless, she's absolutely convinced that it was not only legal, but mandatory, that the government do LOCK HER UPS to Andy McCabe and protesters exercising their First Amendment rights on the streets of DC.
That's why Ledeen deserves her own post here today. Because she appears to have engineered the dismissal of a government lawyer who simply refused to break the law and indict Trump's political enemies without evidence. Indeed, Liu tried mightily to get an indictment of McCabe, and it's pretty clear the grand jury refused to do it. And that never happens. The case was weak shit from the jump, Liu dragged it out for two years to mollify the president's bloodlust (and shield documents from discovery and FOIA in McCabe's wrongful termination suit), and then it fell apart because there was nothing there.
As for the inauguration protests, the DC US Attorney's Office only dropped the remaining 129 cases after the first two trials resulted in zero convictions for the ten defendants. It's not clear what Ledeen thinks Liu should have done, short of fabricating evidence against the protesters. And yet, the White House found her logic sufficiently convincing that they fired Liu.
It is inexpressible how dangerous this is. Because, say what you will about Jeff Sessions, but he knew you weren't supposed to use the Justice Department to settle political scores. Even Matthew "Meatball" Whitaker, the interim Attorney General, refused to interfere in the Mueller investigation or to try to screw with individual prosecutions. But now Bill Barr's parked his haunches atop the DOJ, and all bets are off. No reputable attorney general would have ever allowed a Senate staffer to put out a hit on a US Attorney for following the law before. But post-impeachment, the guardrails are off.
Malicious, politically motivated prosecutions violate both the law and legal ethics. But every US Attorney in the country is now on notice that they fail to indict the president's enemies at their own peril.
SO GET YOUR ASS TO THE POLLS WHILE WE STILL HAVE A DEMOCRACY TO DEFEND.
https://www.axios.com/**2020/02/**23/trump-memos-deep-state-white-house
axios
the Trump White House and its allies, over the past 18 months, assembled detailed lists of disloyal government officials to oust — and trusted pro-Trump people to replace them — according to more than a dozen sources familiar with the effort who spoke to Axios.
Driving the news: By the time President Trump instructed his 29-year-old former body man and new head of presidential personnel torid his government of anti-Trump officials, he'd gathered reams of material to support his suspicions.
- While Trump's distrust has only intensified since his impeachment and acquittal, he has long been on the hunt for "bad people" inside the White House and U.S. government, and fresh "pro-Trump" options. Outside advisers have been happy to oblige.
In reporting this story, I have been briefed on, or reviewed, memos and lists the president received since 2018 suggesting whom he should hire and fire. Most of these details have never been published.
- A well-connected network of conservative activists with close ties to Trump and top administration officials is quietly helping develop these "Never Trump"/pro-Trump lists, and some sent memos to Trump to shape his views, per sources with direct knowledge.
- Members of this network include Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and Republican Senate staffer Barbara Ledeen.
The big picture: Since Trump's Senate acquittal, aides say the president has crossed a psychological line regarding what he calls the "Deep State." He feels his government — from Justice to State to Defense to Homeland Security — is filled with "snakes." He wants them fired and replaced ASAP.
- "I think it's a very positive development," said Rich Higgins, who served on Trump's National Security Council in 2017. H.R. McMaster removed Higgins after he wrote a memo speculating that Trump's presidency faced threats from Marxists, the "Deep State," so-called globalists, bankers, Islamists, and establishment Republicans. (This was long before the full scope of the FBI's Russia investigation was known to Trump and his aides.)
- Higgins told me on Sunday he stands by everything he wrote in his memo, but "I would probably remove 'bankers' if I had to do it over and I would play up the intel community role — which I neglected."
Let's get to the memos.
1. The Jessie Liu memo: Shortly before withdrawing the nomination of the former D.C. U.S. attorney for a top Treasury role, the president reviewed a memo on Liu's alleged misdeeds, according to a source with direct knowledge.
- Ledeen wrote the memo, and its findings left a striking impression on Trump, per sources with direct knowledge. Ledeen declined to comment.
- A source with direct knowledge of the memo's contents said itcontained 14 sections building a case for why Liu was unfit for the job for which Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin selected her, including:
- Not acting on criminal referrals of some of Justice Brett Kavanaugh's accusers.
- Signing "the sentencing filing asking for jail time" for Gen. Michael Flynn (a friend of Ledeen's).
- Holding a leadership role in a women's lawyers networking group that Ledeen criticized as "pro-choice and anti-Alito."
- Not indicting former deputy director of the FBI Andrew McCabe.
- Dismissing charges against "violent inauguration protesters who plotted to disrupt the inauguration."
- Neither Liu nor the White House responded to requests for comment.
Between the lines: The Liu memo is not the first such memo to reach the president's desk — and there's a common thread in Groundswell, a conservative activist network that's headed by Thomas and whose members include Ledeen.
- Sources leaked me details of two other memos from people associated with the Groundswell network that also caused a stir inside the White House over the past year.
Thomas has spent a significant amount of time and energy urging Trump administration officials to change the personnel inside his government. This came to a head early last year.
- Members of Groundswell, whose members earlier led the successful campaign toremove McMasteras national security adviser, meet on Wednesdays in the D.C. offices of Judicial Watch, a conservative legal group that has led the fight against the Mueller probe.
- Judicial Watch's president is Tom Fitton. He's a regular on Fox News, and Trump regularly retweets his commentary on the "Deep State."
- Conservative activists who attend Groundswell meetings funneled names to Thomas, and she compiled those recommendations and passed them along to the president, according to a source close to her.
- She handed a memo of names directly to the president in early 2019. (The New York Times reported on her group's meeting with Trump at the time.)
2. The Groundswell memo: The presidential personnel office reviewed Thomas' memo and determined that some names she passed along for jobs were not appropriate candidates. Trump may revisit some given his current mood.
Potential hires she offered to Trump, per sources with direct knowledge:
:{
- Sheriff David Clarke for a senior Homeland Security role.
- Fox News regular and former Secret Service agent Dan Bongino for a Homeland Security or counterterrorism adviser role.
- Devin Nunes aide Derek Harvey for the National Security Council (where he served before McMaster pushed him out).
- Radio talk show host Chris Plante for press secretary.
- Federalist contributor Ben Weingarten for the National Security Council.
What we're hearing: These memos created tension inside the White House, as people close to the president constantly told him his own staff, especially those running personnel, were undermining him — and White House staff countered they were being smeared.
3. The State Department memo: In one extraordinary incident last year, President Trump passed along another action memo to histhen-head of presidential personnel, Sean Doocey (since pushed to State and replaced with former body man John McEntee). People familiar with the January 2019 memo say it came from conservatives associated with Groundswell. Though nobody I’ve spoken to has claimed credit for it.
- According to sources briefed on the incident, the memo was, in large part, an attack against Doocey. The memo accused him and a colleague in the State Department of obstructionism and named several State Department officials who needed to be fired.
- This list named former deputy secretary John Sullivan, deputy undersecretary for management Bill Todd, and undersecretary for political affairs David Hale, who later testified in the impeachment hearings. (Todd and Hale are career foreign service officers, serving in positions typically reserved for career officials.) Sullivan is now the U.S. Ambassador to Russia.
- The memo ended with an allegation that Doocey had sneakily changed the name of an appointment Trump had already agreed on, swapping out Mira Ricardel for Sean Cairncross to run the Millennium Challenge Corporation.
- Sources briefed on the matter say this particular charge was false on its face because Cairncross was nominated in January 2018, months before Ricardel was briefly discussed as an alternative, per sources with direct knowledge.
The bottom line: As the New York Times' Peter Baker wrote on Saturday, "in some of the most critical corners of the Trump administration, officials show up for work now never entirely sure who will be there by the end of the evening — themselves included."
- Groundswell is an influential driver of that uncertainty. Its members have been working toward this moment for three years. They have lists. They have memos. And they have the president's ear.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/inside-ginni-thomas-insane-hiring-memos-for-former-president-donald-trump
no lnx Inside Ginni Thomas’ ‘Insane’ Hiring Memos for Trump
‘WRECKED’
Ginni Thomas’ suggested hires included known bigots and at least one suspected foreign spy, sources say.
Asawin Suebsaeng
Senior Political Reporter
Adam Rawnsley
Former Senior Researcher
Updated Apr. 02, 2022
Years before she became one of then-President Donald Trump’s most prominent coup supporters, Ginni Thomas was already notorious in his West Wing for, among other things, ruining staffers’ afternoons by working Trump into fits of vengeful rage.
“We all knew that within minutes after Ginni left her meeting with the president, he would start yelling about firing people for being disloyal,” said a former senior Trump administration official. “When Ginni Thomas showed up, you knew your day was wrecked.”
Ever since she became a welcome guest at Trump’s residences, Thomas—an influential and longtime conservative activist, and wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas—had perfected a proven formula of enthralling and manipulating the president’s emotions and mood. On multiple occasions throughout the Trump era, Thomas would show up in the White House, sometimes for a private meeting or a luncheon with the president. She often came armed with written memos of who she and her allies believed Trump should hire for plum jobs—and who she thought Trump should promptly purge—that she distributed to Trump and other high-ranking government officials.
The fire lists were particularly problematic, as they were frequently based on pure conjecture, rumor, or score-settling, where even steadfastly MAGA aides were targeted for being part of the “Deep State” or some other supposedly anti-Trump coalition, according to people who saw them during the Trump administration. The hire lists were so often filled with infamous bigots and conspiracy theorists, woefully under-qualified names, and obvious close friends of Thomas that several senior Trump aides would laugh at them—that is, until Trump would force his staff to put certain names through the official vetting process, three sources familiar with the matter said.
“These fucking lists were so insane and unworkable.”
— one former Trump White House official
During the Trump years, these memos would astonish various administration officials, including those working in the White House Presidential Personnel Office (PPO). Some of these officials noticed that as the Trump term went on, the Thomas lists would increasingly feature a disproportionate share of names more suited to an OAN guest line-up than any functional government. (To be fair, well before Ginni Thomas became a recurring visitor, Trump would routinely hire people because they had entertained or excited him, via Fox and other cable-news appearances.)
Officials in the PPO regularly annotated the margins of Thomas’ hire lists, usually including a single line for each rejected name, explaining why the prospective hires did not work out. Some failed background checks, or suffered from security-clearance hold-ups. Other annotations noted that a specific individual was offered a job in the Trump administration, but turned it down for whatever reason.
Sometimes, the reasons for the White House’s preemptive rejection, despite Thomas and Trump’s best efforts, were more outlandish. According to a person who reviewed one of the Thomas lists, one annotation for a MAGA job candidate noted that that individual had made too many extreme or offensive jokes on social media that were still visible.
Another of these annotations claimed that one recommendation for a Trump administration position was, in fact, a suspected foreign-intelligence asset, or spy.
Thomas did not respond to requests for comment on this story.
Over the years, some of the specific names that Thomas had compiled and pushed to Trump and his West Wing have trickled out into the press. Among them were Fox News personality Dan Bongino, and the Trump-adulating Sheriff David Clarke.
And according to two sources with knowledge of the matter, Thomas had, unsuccessfully, advised the then-president to hire Frank Gaffney.
Gaffney, a former Pentagon official in the Reagan administration, has spent the past two decades embracing some of the more absurd conspiracy theories circulating in the far right. He has accused conservative anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist of being a secret agent for the Muslim Brotherhoodand believes that American adversaries are working on secret electrical device-frying “electromagnetic pulse” weapons to zap America back to the pre-industrial age.
“These fucking lists were so insane and unworkable,” said one former Trump White House official who had to personally deal with the Thomas-supplied memos and Trump’s fascination with them. “A lot of them were dripping with paranoia and read like they were written by a disturbed person.”
After Thomas departed, he would soon summon a variety of government personnel—West Wing brass, national security aides, lawyers, and other underlings, depending on proximity or the occasion—to inform them he’d just spoken to “Ginni.”
Trump would then identify an official— or, sometimes, he would rattle off a string of names—who he said needed to be sacked “immediately,” according to people familiar with the matter.
When they could get away with it, several of these Trump administration hands would slow-walk these Thomas-inspired firing directives, and wait until Trump invariably forgot about it, cooled off, and moved on to other fixations and gripes. Others would scramble to try to calm Trump down themselves, advising their boss to reconsider, telling him that a firing or a larger purge in the middle of the Trump term would make him look bad or attract negative media attention.
Thomas’ interactions with the Trump administration have taken on a new significance since the January 6th House Select Committee released text messages showing her urging Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows to help overturn the 2020 election. Members of the committee are now seeking to interview Thomas, whose efforts to overturn the 2020 election included attendance at a “Stop the Steal” rally on the National Mall the day of the insurrection.
“Trump loved talking to Ginni so much because he loved hearing about who was a Never Trumper, or allegedly one. He loved people who would flatter him, [as Ginni would do],”said Stephanie Grisham, once a top White House aide to Trump who has since had a very public falling-out with the ex-president. “But also, his obsession with loyalty aside, he just loved to gossip—all the time. That’s something else he got out of his series of meetings at the White House with Ginni Thomas.”
In the text messages released by the committee last month, Thomas defended Sidney Powell, the “Kraken” lawyerwhose election conspiracy theories were so outlandish they earned her a billion-dollar defamation lawsuit, the scorn of rank and file Republican officials, and sanctions from a Michigan court. At the time, a number of Trump aides were trying to distance the president from Powell because of her increasingly outlandish comments about bogus election fraud. Thomas, however, urged Meadows not to yield to mainstream Republicans, according to The New York Times.
In her texts with Trump’s consigliere, Thomas also showed a fondness for Steve Pieczenik, a far-right pundit and onetime Tom Clancy co-author whose conspiracy theories and bogus claims were so far-fetched even InfoWars briefly booted him from appearing on the network. Before he began pushing the fake stories about watermarked fraud-catching ballots that earned Thomas’ endorsement, Pieczenik had pushed QAnon conspiracy theories, claimed to have arrested Pope Francis, and spun bogus stories about prominent mass shootings being false flags.
During the Obama administration, Thomas and Gaffney participated in a conservative messaging effort known as “Groundswell.” The group, an informal network of conservative journalists, pundits, and political operatives, routinely met at the offices of the right-wing activist group Judicial Watch to coordinate talking points opposing the Obama administration’s agenda and plot the ouster of allegedly moderate Republicans like Karl Rove from the broader conservative movement.
The revelation of Thomas’ texts with Meadows prompted the January 6th Committee to seek an interview with her, according to CNN, but that effort falls far short of the more legally compelling option of a subpoena.
In the meantime, Congressional Democrats are divided over how to handle Thomas’ cameo in the Jan. 6 scandal. Some, like Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden, have called for Thomas to recuse himself from Jan. 6-related cases while others like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have called for him to step down or be impeached.
But the lack of a Democratic supermajority in the Senate means neither of the Thomases are likely to have to give up their jobs just yet.
}:
jane m nyer 1 22
...Another organizer of the January 6th uprising who has been subpoenaed by the congressional committee, Ali Alexander, also has long-standing ties to Ginni Thomas. Like Fletcher, Alexander spoke at a rally in Washington the night before the riot, leading a chant of “Victory or death!” A decade ago, Alexander was a participant in Groundswell, a secretive, invitation-only network that, among other things, coördinated with hard-right congressional aides, journalists, and pressure groups to launch attacks against Obama and against less conservative Republicans. As recently as 2019, Ginni Thomas described herself as the chairman of Groundswell, which, according to documents first published by Mother Jones, sees itself as waging “a 30 front war seeking to fundamentally transform the nation.” As Karoli Kuns, of the media watchdog Crooks and Liars, has noted, several Groundswell members—including Steve Bannon and Sebastian Gorka, the fringe foreign-policy analyst—went on to form the far-right flank of the Trump Administration. (Both Bannon and Gorka were eventually pushed out.) According to Ginni Thomas’s biography in the Council for National Policy’s membership book, she remains active in Groundswell. A former participant told me that Thomas chairs weekly meetings.
...Ginni Thomas rarely speaks to mainstream reporters, but she often gives speeches in private forums. The Web site of the watchdog Documented has posted a video of her speaking with striking candor. In October, 2018, she led a panel discussion during a confidential session of the Council for National Policy. At the time, the Senate was caught up in the fight over the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh, who had been accused of sexual assault. “I’m feeling the pain—Clarence is feeling the pain—of going through false charges against a good man,” she said. “I thought it couldn’t get worse than Clarence’s, but it did.” America, she said, “is in a vicious battle for its founding principles,” adding, “The deep state is serious, and it’s resisting President Trump.”She declared twice that her adversaries were trying “to kill people,” and drew applause by saying, “May we all have guns and concealed carry to handle what’s coming!”
This warlike mentality is shared by Groundswell, the political group that Thomas has chaired. In a 2020 session of the Council for National Policy, Rachel Bovard, the senior director of policy at the Conservative Partnership Institute, described meeting weekly with Groundswell members to “vet” officials for disloyalty, saying, “Ginni has been very instrumental in working with the White House. . . . She really is the tip of the spear in these efforts.” Bovard lamented Groundswell’s failure to weed out the whistle-blower Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman before he gave testimony at Trump’s first impeachment trial.“We see what happens when we don’t vet these people,” Bovard said. “That’s how we got Lieutenant Colonel Vindman, O.K.?” Vindman, then the director for European affairs on Trump’s National Security Council, testified that the President had tried to pressure Ukraine’s leaders into producing dirt on Joe Biden’s family. In retaliation, a smear campaign was mounted against Vindman.
He suddenly found himself fending off false claims that he had created a hostile work environment at the N.S.C., and fighting insinuations that, because he was born in Ukraine and had been invited to serve in its government, he had “dual loyalty.” (Vindman had self-reported Ukraine’s offer, which he had rejected.) The Defense Department conducted an internal investigation of the accusations and exonerated him. But, Vindman told me, the attacks “harmed my career.” He went on, “It’s un-American, frankly, that a sitting Justice of the Supreme Court, who is supposed to be apolitical, would have a wife who is part of a political vendetta to retaliate against officials who were dutifully serving the public interest. It’s chilling, and probably has already had an effect on silencing other whistle-blowers.”
Another target of Groundswell members was Trump’s former national-security adviser H. R. McMaster, who was deemed insufficiently supportive of the President. According to the Times, in 2018 Barbara Ledeen, a Republican Senate aide who had reportedly developed Groundswell’s enemies list with Ginni Thomas, participated in a plot to oust McMaster by secretly taping him bad-mouthing Trump. Ledeen, who is a close friend of Ginni Thomas’s, told the Times that she’d merely acted as a messenger in the scheme. The plan was to send an undercover female operative to snare McMaster at a fancy restaurant. But McMaster quit before the sting was executed. The Times also reported that another undercover operation—which targeted government employees, including F.B.I. agents, suspected of trying to thwart Trump’s agenda—involved operatives from Project Veritas, the undercover-video group led by James O’Keefe. Ginni Thomas has given O’Keefe an Impact Award, too.
It’s unclear whether the Crowdsourcers project that Thomas said she was launching withO’Keefe’s help ever got off the ground. There’s little public trace of Crowdsourcers, other than a tax filing from 2019, showing that it was developed under the oversight of theCapital Research Center, a right-wing nonprofit that does opposition research.Project Veritas’s chief legal officer sent The New Yorker a statement saying that O’Keefe’s “schedule does not permit such extracurricular activities” as Crowdsourcers. But, in a PowerPoint presentation on the effort, in 2019, Thomas said that “James O’Keefe wanted to head up” a part of the group aimed at “protecting our heroes.” The purpose of Crowdsourcers, she said, was nothing less than saving America. “Our house is on fire!” she went on. “And we are stomping ants in the driveway. We’re not really focussed on the arsonists who are right around us!”
Last year, Project Veritas asked the Supreme Court to hear its challenge to the Massachusetts ban on surreptitiously taping public officials. The Court turned down Project Veritas’s petition, as it does with most such requests. Nevertheless, David Dinielli, a visiting clinical lecturer at Yale Law School, told me that Ginni Thomas’s proclaimed political partnership with O’Keefe, and her awarding of a prize to him, appeared to be unethical. “That’s what the code of conduct is supposed to control,” he said.
Ginni Thomas has held so many leadership or advisory positions at conservative pressure groups that it’s hard to keep track of them.
emptywl no lnx
SIDNEY POWELL IMPLICATES BARBARA LEDEEN IN HER EFFORT TO UNDERMINE DEMOCRACY
November 17, 2020/42 Comments/in 2016 Presidential Election, 2020 Presidential Election /by emptywheel
Yesterday, GA’s Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger used various means to push back on the Republicans who were trying to cheat to win. In addition to a genuinely useful thread from Erick Erickson debunking one after another conspiracy theory about GA’s vote, he gave an interview to the WaPo detailing how his Republican colleagues have been pressuring him.
He called Doug Collins (who, remember, campaigned with all the Trump felons) a liar.
The normally mild-mannered Raffensperger saved his harshest language for Rep. Douglas A. Collins (R-Ga.), who is leading the president’s efforts in Georgia and whom Raffensperger called a “liar” and a “charlatan.”
Collins has questioned Raffensperger’s handling of the vote and accused him of capitulating to Democrats by not backing allegations of voter fraud more strongly.
[snip]
“I’m an engineer. We look at numbers. We look at hard data,” Raffensperger said. “I can’t help it that a failed candidate like Collins is running around lying to everyone. He’s a liar.”
More alarmingly, Raffensperger described Lindsey Graham suggesting he should throw out entire counties of legally cast votes.
Raffensperger also said he spoke on Friday to Graham, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, who has echoed Trump’s unfounded claims about voting irregularities.
In their conversation, Graham questioned Raffensperger about the state’s signature-matching law and whether political bias could have prompted poll workers to accept ballots with nonmatching signatures, according to Raffensperger. Graham also asked whether Raffensperger had the power to toss all mail ballots in counties found to have higher rates of nonmatching signatures, Raffensperger said.
Raffensperger said he was stunned that Graham appeared to suggest that he find a way to toss legally cast ballots. Absent court intervention, Raffensperger doesn’t have the power to do what Graham suggested because counties administer elections in Georgia.
“It sure looked like he was wanting to go down that road,” Raffensperger said.
As a number of people have pointed out, it’s a crime under GA law to solicit election fraud.
Meanwhile, Sidney Powell continues her effort to drum up support for undermining democracy. In a tweet this morning, she included Lindsey Graham staffer Barbara Ledeen among her co-conspirators.
In addition to working with Mike Flynn to try to reach out to hostile foreign governments in hopes they had hacked Hillary’s emails, Ledeen’s spouse, Michael, was the first person Flynn called when he was trying to figure out how to undermine sanctions on Russia.
Ledeen is, in spite of those glaring conflicts, the key staffer behind Lindsey’s efforts to undermine the Russian investigation. That suggests she’s also a key staffer behind Lindsey’s decision to ignore how DOJ has altered documents in Bill Barr’s effort to undermine the prosecution of Powell’s staffer.
I honestly believe that Lindsey does all this because his mind has rotted and people like Ledeen have told him so many lies he believes it. But now he’s entering a potentially criminal racket.
Tags: Barbara Ledeen, Brad Raffensperger, Doug Collins, Lindsey Graham, Sidney Powell
ggl 7 22
Barbara Ledeen - staff - US Senate | LinkedIn
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Great piece by my good friend Bill Hughes on a pending SEC rulemaking with potentially massive implications for DeFi. https://lnkd.in/dKw5T_6w…
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Happy 96th birthday to my father Gabriel Roth, who wrote “Paying for Roads” and “Paying for Parking” back in the 1960s. With new technology his ideas…
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People are talking about the Center for Tech Diplomacy at Purdue and we're so excited! Follow us here on LinkedIn and on Twitter at @TechDiplomacy!
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https://sethabramson.substack.com/p/breaking-news-new-revelations-indicate?s=r
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january 6
BREAKING NEWS: New Revelations Indicate Ginni Thomas Was a Key Author of Trump’s January 6 Coup Plot
A recent NYT report explosively updates past reporting at PROOF on Ginni Thomas’s involvement in January 6. The new revelations—taken in sum—position Thomas as a chief author of the insurrection.
Seth Abramson
Feb 23
ABOVE: United States Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas (l) with his wife of thirty-five years, Virginia (Ginni) Thomas (r).
{Note: While it is not, strictly speaking, absolutely necessary, Proof recommends that readers of this article be familiar with the first portion of this report before reading the portion below.}
Introduction
The most comprehensive reporting on Ginni Thomas’s involvement in the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol continues to be this exclusive Proof report from January.
However, the New York Times just published a very lengthy feature on the Thomases—Ginni Thomas and her husband, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas—that gave its readers a series of buried ledes about Ginni Thomas and January 6. It’s unclear why the Times did little to highlight these revelations; all are ensconced deep within an article it takes more than an hour and a half to listen to via an audio reading supplied by the newspaper. Whatever the explanation for the odd framing of Ginni Thomas’s role in January 6 by the Times, Proof has decided to update its prior report with a clear summary of the Times feature that focuses only on the elements of the feature that will matter to federal investigators. {Note: The author of this Proof article is a former criminal investigator in the federal criminal justice system in Washington, D.C., and was a longtime criminal defense attorney in Massachusetts and New Hampshire. You can read his bio here.}
These elements, combined with the January Proof report, confirm that Ginni Thomas was one of the chief architects of the events of January 6, 2021.
While it remains unclear whether the House January 6 Committee will now subpoena Ginni Thomas, it is increasingly evident that the Committee is gathering all available data on potential witnesses—including data published in venues like Proof, which the Committee has previously cited in its formal filings. For this reason, the article below may be of assistance to decision-makers wondering if Ginni Thomas has valuable evidence about the January 6 attack on the Capitol to offer both Congress and the FBI.
The short answer: she does. And indeed the evidence curated in the article that follows warrants the immediate issuance of a subpoena to Ginni Thomas for both testimony and documents. It warrants, further, the interrogation of Thomas by agents of the FBI.
Addressing the Elephant in the Room: Clarence Thomas
The New York Times focuses a majority of its article on Ginni Thomas on her husband, Clarence Thomas—a common mistake that Proof warned about at the very beginning of its own feature on Ginni Thomas. While the Times does admirably substantiate long-standing claims that the Thomases don’t segregate their professional careers in anything like the manner they might like observers to think they do, it remains the case that, whatever the framing employed by the Times, Ginni Thomas’s activities are considerably more newsworthy and influential than her husband’s, deserving coverage exclusive from any consideration of Justice Thomas’s arch-conservative jurisprudence.
How could the public and private actions of a political activist be “more influential” than those of a Supreme Court Justice? It seems unlikely, and yet Clarence and Ginni Thomas offer us a unique—even unprecedented—case study in this seeming paradox.
When I studied at Harvard Law School in the 2000s, it was commonly understood—even among conservative students self-identifying as constitutional “originalists”—that Clarence Thomas was perhaps U.S. history’s least interesting Supreme Court Justice, as despite his lofty position he simply had no evident governing judicial philosophy for a law student to analyze, let alone internalize. Indeed, Justice Thomas had made clear by the early 2000s that his tenure on the bench was in substantial part an act of revenge: as punishment for his historically bruising confirmation process, he would thwart the advance of anything he deemed a byproduct of American liberalism at every turn and by any means—not merely because doing so was in keeping with his politics, though it was, but because it’d be a stick in the eye of the very politicians and political party that had only narrowly failed to keep him off the Supreme Court (he was confirmed in the United States Senate with only 52 votes; much more on this later on).
Known for years and years for never asking questions of the parties before him during oral argument—one of the few justices in American history to be so melodramatically passive—many court-watchers assumed that one reason for Thomas’s odd practice was that he simply had no difficulty making up his mind about cases. That is, he didn’t need input from practitioners to know which arch-conservative, doctrinaire position he’d take at the conclusion of a case. Unlike his friend and mentor Antonin Scalia, whose occasional bouts with draconian intellectual integrity made him a favorite of the well-heeled, self-styled intellectuals of The Federalist Society, Thomas was seen by many in the American legal community as little more than a far-right foot-soldier with an ax to grind. The notion that this rather uncharitable view wasn’t far from the mark is bolstered by current facts on the ground: while Justice Scalia was a favorite of the Republican Party while it still existed, Thomas is now the favorite of the principle-free MAGA “movement”, which as a matter of temperament and inclination puts ends above means—and indeed values means not at all.
All of this is to say that from the time he was seated on the Supreme Court in the early 1990s, Clarence Thomas’s influence on the court and position on individual issues has been predictable in advance. Thomas is not so much a jurist who is studied as a reliable vote whose presence is appreciated by those with whom he agrees (and vice versa). So he is “influential” when it comes time to tally votes in the Supreme Court’s private chambers almost exclusively because he offers—as many, even countless others might have done in the very same way—one vote for the conservative position on any legal question, and without fail. Just as a Major League Baseball team could find hundreds of players in its own or other teams’ minor leagues to elevate to its starting lineup and reliably hit .240, Justice Thomas, for all his quite evident intelligence and wisdom, in the final accounting merely admirably fulfills the expectations of his political “team.”
By comparison, Ginni Thomas’s role in U.S. politics is not merely unprecedented but has been influential in a way that never could’ve been predicted—and remains wholly unpredictable. And this fact is still, decades on, woefully under-reported in U.S. media.
It’s a decades-long trend that continued with the recent feature by the New York Times.
The New York Times Feature
Beyond the components of the feature that rehash what Proof readers already found in these digital pages many weeks ago—that Ginni Thomas used her husband’s access to President Donald Trump to gain significant access to the sitting president herself; that she has been a significant influence on her husband, even as he has never recused himself from a case or dispute due to her extensive prior involvement with it; and that she has had leadership roles in at least two profoundly influential far-right operations, Groundswell and the Council for National Policy, both which have unscrupulously sought to influence U.S. politics behind the scenes for many years—the Times mostly focuses on Clarence Thomas’s judicial career and the nature of his marriage, despite the feature’s provocative and somewhat misleading headline and sub-headline, “The Long Crusade of Clarence and Ginni Thomas: The Supreme Court Justice and His Wife Battled for Years for a More Conservative America, [and Now] New Reporting Shows How Far She Was Willing to Go After Donald Trump’s 2020 Election Loss.”
In fact, unless you really know what you’re looking for, you’re likely to miss any utility the Times article offers in revealing “how far [Ginni Thomas] was willing to go after Donald Trump’s 2020 election loss.” Proof is concerned that congressional and federal criminal investigators may take the Times report at face value, therefore, and wrongly deem it the best case possible for Ginni Thomas becoming a federal witness over her role in the events leading up to January 6. Unfortunately, the Times report can’t be readily approached in this way. Instead, it must be deconstructed and networked with other reporting to determine its value—which is surprisingly high when approached in this fashion.
Here, then, are the five key revelations we’ve just gotten from the New York Times.
5 New Revelations About Ginni Thomas and January 6
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(1) Ginni Thomas’s 2012 formation of Groundswell, and her role in the controversial Council for National Policy, includes shocking details not previously reported upon—all of which have immediate repercussions for the ongoing January 6 investigation.
It was previously thought that Steve Bannon—then–President Trump’s top adviser on the subject of January 6; a man now being criminally prosecuted by DOJ for refusing to reveal what he knows about that day and the planning for it; and the highest-profile Trump adviser who appeared to have advance knowledge of the violence planned for January 6—was involved in Thomas’s secretive far-right Groundswell cabal only as a sometime speaker. We now know this woefully understates his role in Groundswell.
The Times implies Bannon was quite nearly a co-founder of Groundswell with Thomas, writing that not only did she “found[ ]…Groundswell with the support of Stephen K. Bannon, the hard-line nationalist and former Trump adviser”, but that Bannon was so central to the founding of Groundswell that Ginni Thomas sought an audience with him before she created the group—and apparently did so to get his blessing, support, and endorsement. It is therefore difficult to see the far-right group as anything less than a Bannon co-creation. Here’s what the Times reports on Groundswell’s founding:
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 implications of this tête-à-tête in Bannon’s home-cum-office are extraordinary.
We know that in the weeks before January 6, Steve Bannon was using every means at his disposal to play a “central role” in ensuring January 6 would be the “hell” he publicly predicted it would be—24 hours before the attack on the Capitol. The House January 6 Committee has found that Bannon occupied “multiple roles” relevant to the planning of the events of January 6. So with the news that he was a seminal partner with Thomas in creating Groundswell, and that Groundswell members Cleta Mitchell and Barbara Ledeen were on-the-ground operators in the insurrection effort (see the prior Proof report on this), it can hardly be doubted that Trump was able to reach out to Groundswell, either directly or through Bannon, to weaponize it in service of his political objectives during November and December of 2020.
But we needn’t speculate on this.
The Times has now confirmed this presumption by noting that, as Groundswell’s head, Ginni Thomas served a specific function in the post-election, pre-January 6 Trumpist camp: as the very glue that held it together. Per the Times reporting, “[Thomas’s] role [in the post-election effort to overturn the 2020 election] went deeper, and beyond [the] Council for National Policy[’s] Action [group]. Dustin Stockton, an organizer who worked with Women for America First, which held the permit for the [January 6] 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.’”
It is easy to skim through the notion of a “peacemaking role” as constituting little more than some form of handshake-and-smile diplomacy, and surely sometimes the act of “peacemaking” involves little more than this. Here, though, the Times is writing of warring factions inside a criminal conspiracy. To play the “peacemaker” in the midst of a swirl of criminal conduct is to be a veritable consigliere to that conduct. Indeed, in his interview with the Times, Dustin Stockton—a longtime Bannon acolyte who was at the center of the insurrectionist camp for the entirety of Insurrection Week—makes clear that without Ginni Thomas’s hard work there would have been “division” within the ranks of the coup plotters and their soldiers. In other words, the coup would have been substantially less likely to succeed without Ginni’s repeated, willful interventions.
Here’s how Mr. Stockton put it in speaking to the nation’s paper-of-record: “[Ginni Thomas] united these different [insurrectionist] factions around a singular mission on January 6.” It’s unclear how to interpret Stockton’s words if not as positioning Mrs. Thomas as a leader of the January 6 insurrection. Leaders—literally and by definition—are self-tasked with “uniting” people “around a singular mission.” So when Stockton tells the Times that Thomas was “involved” in January 6, his description of her back-channel involvement can only now be described as a leadership position in the effort.
(2) Ginni Thomas had much more access to Trump in the months before January 6 than we knew—and exploited her access repeatedly and even ruthlessly.
In the last Proof report on Ginni Thomas, readers learned she had access to Trump inside the White House on more than one occasion: at a minimum, one time in the company of her husband (who was the one actually invited to the event in question) and once as part of a sit-down with Trump that her previous—arguably gatecrashing—social appearance at the People’s House had netted her.
The Times now reports that the level of Thomas-Trump contact went well beyond this.
According to the Times, “Trump courted Justice Thomas…[and] Ginni Thomas used that courtship to gain access to the Oval Office.” But it is the details of this courtship that are so shocking. The newspaper recounts a slew of “meetings and conversations” between “the Thomases” and the “White House” that occurred because Clarence Thomas being a Supreme Court Justice had “created an opening for his wife” to get close to then–President Trump. And so she did. In fact, Ginni Thomas became such a regular and forceful presence inside the West Wing—and in conversations amongst the president’s top advisers—that not just one such adviser but “several” of them told the Times that they couldn’t even figure out if Thomas had been given wide-ranging access to Trump as an “activist or a paid consultant.” This seemingly simple question remains unresolved to this day, and given the Thomases’ longstanding caginess in their federal filings (see below), it may be a while before the House of Representatives determines whether or not Ginni Thomas was ever paid by the Trump campaign. In any case, what is clear from members of Trump’s inner circle is that Ginni Thomas’s efforts to insinuate herself into the decision-making process of a sitting President of the United States were so “aggressive” that they prompted White House staff to draw up opposition-research documents about her.
Reading in the Times that Ginni Thomas “positioned herself [within Trump’s inner circle] as a voice of Trump’s grass-roots base” is considerably less important, however, than how she so positioned herself. From her first meeting with President Trump that didn’t involve her husband, she brought “members of Groundswell” into the White House with her—underlining, perhaps, why Trump would later select such members for his “election integrity” team (which was formed the very next year). One Trump aide called the first Ginni Thomas-Groundswell-Trump White House meeting “the craziest meeting I’ve ever been to”, in part because throughout the meeting a contingent of Ginni Thomas’s acolytes were “audibly praying” (in fact, praying so loudly that one Trump aide said it was “hard to hear” anything said in the meeting).
However radical one might deem Trump’s actions in government, the Times reports that Ginni Thomas’s radicalism caught even Trump off-guard. In Groundswell’s first, “crazy” meeting with the president, Trump had to try to “rein it [Groundswell] in” as the meeting became increasingly “chaotic” and Ginni Thomas forcefully demanded a “purge” of the Trump administration’s Personnel Office. Thomas began unfolding far-right conspiracy theories about “closet liberals and Never Trumpers” literally hiding inside the Trump administration—even amongst the corps of political appointees that Trump himself had personally selected. Trump aides have now told the New York Times that at this first meeting, and indeed at a slew of future such meetings, Ginni Thomas was “out of bounds” in her stridency toward President Trump “many times.”
So what was Ginni Thomas’s extraordinarily inappropriate conduct in service of? We now know, thanks to the Times: she was seeking prominent positions of authority for “people [Trump administration job candidates] who couldn’t pass background checks”, “had security-clearance issues”, or “had done a lot of [problematic] business overseas.” In other words, even before the long ramp-up to January 6, Ginni Thomas was identified by members of Trump’s inner circle as the leading lobbyist trying to get Trump to put people in positions of power who even Team Trump didn’t feel belonged in federal service—which, candidly, is saying something.
But the Times also reports that, for all her craziness, aggressiveness, transgressions, and other inappropriate conduct in the White House, Trump indulged her—and even elevated her to special status within his inner circle. After their first meeting, the Times reports, having spoken with “multiple” Trump aides, “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.”
While the existence of “several”—rather than just two—Ginni Thomas-Donald Trump meetings inside the White House in 2019 and 2020 is significant, so too is the notion that Trump repeatedly received “notes” from Thomas establishing her “priorities” for the Trump administration in two critical election years. One wonders if such “notes” were in the materials Trump illegally took with him to Mar-a-Lago; or those materials Clarence Thomas tried to (temporarily or otherwise) block from any public disclosure; or the 11,000 documents the Thomases’ “close friend”, Trump lawyer John Eastman, is now seeking to block from congressional subpoena despite the possibility that his recalcitrance could lead to his incarceration.
Certainly, the Times reporting indicating that in the months before the insurrection Ginni Thomas’s “place in the presidential orbit [was] secure” underscores that we would expect to find substantive content written by Ginni Thomas in tranches of Trump’s most sensitive policy documents. What could having a “secure place” inside a president’s orbit—specifically, in the role of a leading adviser—really mean, otherwise?
Of course, Ginni Thomas didn’t merely have access to Trump because of her husband. As the Times reports, “By 2019, [Ginni Thomas’s] influence in Republican circles was growing” in part because “she took on a leadership role at the Council for National Policy, joining the board of CNP Action, which had become a key cog in the Trump messaging machine.” So apart from her direct preferential access to Trump, she was a leader of a “key cog” in a sprawling, nationwide Trumpist apparatus. How could such a person not be represented in the intimate correspondence of a president she served?
(3) Ginni Thomas (and her husband Clarence) are “close friends” with Trump attorney John Eastman—rather than, as was previously thought, merely acquaintances of his via his past clerkship for Justice Thomas.
Given that it is already universally accepted that John Eastman is a viable witness for Congress and the FBI—not only has Congress subpoenaed him, he’s already invoked his Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination, which surely caught the attention of the Department of Justice and FBI, if Eastman didn’t have it already—a key question in the January 6 investigation has become, “How much contact did Ginni Thomas have, on the subject of January 6, with a man whose written-out plan for that day is now widely deemed documentary evidence of a seditious conspiracy?”
On the answer to this question could hang Ginni Thomas’s own liability for January 6.
Per the Times, the relationship Eastman enjoyed with Ginni Thomas and her husband went well beyond what was previously thought. It had been assumed that, as a former Thomas clerk from decades ago, Eastman enjoyed a cordial relationship with Justice Thomas—much as you would with anyone you worked for many years ago in a way that was not unpleasant to either you or them. It was known, further, that Eastman and Ginni Thomas were “in touch” to the extent any two people who post regularly to a private listserv with approximately 150 members can be said to be “in touch.”
But now the Times has revealed that Eastman and the Thomases are not merely long-time professional acquaintances; they are “close friends.” This changes the calculus considerably for federal investigators wondering how much direct contact Eastman and Ginni Thomas would have had in November 2020, December 2020, and even January 2021 on the topic that was clearly—this much we know for certain—at the top of the agenda for both of them, that being the overturning of a presidential election during the joint session of Congress slated for January 6, 2021.
So while Proof previously reported that Thomas and Eastman were part of “private” conversations on the Thomas Clerk World listserv that were, nevertheless, public in a way—inasmuch as their content could be seen by the 150 or so listserv members—if in fact Thomas and Eastman were “close friends” at all times they were corresponding semi-privately on the listserv and participating in (as Proof reported) forceful debates in that venue (during which they took “the same side” on the matter of the election), there are likely no federal investigators remaining who now doubt that the two “close friends” were also in fully private (off-listserv) contact as well.
This is especially likely given that we now know Ginni Thomas “friend” Cleta Mitchell was then working on Trump’s legal team with Eastman, and another longtime Ginni Thomas friend and associate at Groundswell, Barbara Ledeen, was at the time the “business partner” of Don Berlin, one of the “experts” Trump’s team was then employing in presentations to members of Congress. Another such “expert,” Russell Ramsland Jr., was a longtime member of Ginni Thomas’s Groundswell operation.
{Note: Cleta Mitchell isn’t just Ginni Thomas’s friend, the Times reports—she’s also a member of both of Thomas’s secretive groups: Groundswell and the CNP. Thomas and Mitchell have even convened “joint sessions” at which they speak together under the aegis of these groups.}
(4) Eastman’s backchannel communications with Ginni Thomas and the rest of Thomas Clerk World eventually involved an entreaty—one that he would have been sure Ginni Thomas would read—for those reading him (including Ginni Thomas) to “contact him directly.”
By the late summer of 2020, when John Eastman first joined Trump’s legal team at the urging of Ginni Thomas’s close friend and associate Cleta Mitchell, Thomas’s online biography—written, apparently, by her—crowed that she personally “set agendas with President Trump’s White House for quarterly conservative leader briefings”, which we can take to mean she was one of Donald Trump’s primary liaisons to the #MAGA “grassroots.” It was this same grassroots that Trump would rely upon to illegally delay a joint session of Congress on January 6, 2021.
But by the time Eastman had become heavily involved in Trump’s post-election legal maneuvers—this would be in December of 2020—he was apparently regularly posting on the intimate Thomas Clerk World listserv he well knew his “close friend” Ginni frequented, and he wasn’t merely posting pleasantries but engaging actively in debates over the 2020 presidential election and his own course of advocacy as a Trump lawyer.
All these missives would have been, he well knew, read by Clarence Thomas’s self-declared soulmate.
By mid-January 2021—after the attack on the U.S. Capitol, but while Trump was still president, and far-right hope for an eleventh-hour coup hadn’t diminished—Eastman wasn’t just posting messages; he was serving up open invitations, too. He wrote Ginni Thomas and the 150 or so others on the listserv that “those of you interested in more information” about Team Trump’s post-election strategy should “get in touch” (as the Times summarized it) to discuss the effort to overturn the 2020 election. It is difficult, reading this January 17 invitation, to imagine that Eastman hadn’t sent an identical one to his good friend Ginni Thomas in the days and weeks before January 6.
{Note: The day after Eastman’s entreaty, Ginni Thomas decided that things had deteriorated sufficiently within the group that she needed to issue an apology of sorts to its many members, writing, “I have likely imposed on you my lifetime passions.My passions and beliefs are likely shared with the bulk of you, but certainly not all. And sometimes the smallest matters can divide loved ones for too long. Let’s pledge to not let politics divide THIS family, and learn to speak more gently and knowingly across the divide. I am certainly on the humble side of awareness here” (emphasis in original). While intended as an apologia, Thomas’s mea culpa contained within it an important admission: that the effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election was indeed a key part of her pursuit of her “lifetime passions.”}
Indeed, in the days and weeks immediately preceding January 6, the Times reports, the actions of Trump’s “team, allies, and [GOP] lawmakers”—a cadre that included John Eastman—were “echo[ing]” the “call put out [in November 2020] by [Ginni Thomas’s CNP Action] to challenge swing-state outcomes.” This would seem to confirm that Thomas and her group had launched the very charge that Eastman was simply picking up as he became heavily involved in Donald Trump’s legal gambits in December 2020.
So by the time of his January 17, 2021 invitation to Thomas and others, Eastman had already spent many weeks neck-deep in an effort to woo almost the entirety of Ginni Thomas’s inner circle. On December 10, 2020, for instance, he’d made an appearance on Groundswell co-founder Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast to strongly urge Clarence Thomas and his peers to intervene in the aftermath of the 2020 election. Meanwhile, “behind the scenes”, writes the Times, Eastman was “advising Trump and his campaign on a new proposal to change the outcome of the election” that mirrored Ginni Thomas’s “alternate-electors” plot. And of course Ginni Thomas’s CNP Action peer and friend Cleta Mitchell was working with Eastman on Trump’s legal team, not only appearing on a now-under-criminal-investigation phone call between Trump and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) but authoring documents like the now-infamous “Five States” pre-January 6 report, which argued—just as her friend and peer Ginni Thomas had argued the month before—that “There is historical, legal precedent for Congress to count a slate of electors different from that certified by the Governor of the state.”
In fact, observes the Times, by December 2020 “a number of longtime friends and associates of the Thomases were involved in efforts to overturn the election results or helping plan the January 6 rallies”—a group that went well beyond Eastman, Bannon, and Mitchell. From Turning Point USA (on whose advisory board Ginni Thomas had served) sending buses of insurrectionists into Washington on January 6, to the heavy involvement of the Tea Party Patriots, a far-right group with which Mrs. Thomas “had long ties” that was “headed by Jenny Beth Martin, a fellow Council for National Policy activist [with Thomas]”, Ginni’s political allies seemed to be in all the positions of authority and influence in the days and weeks before the January 6 attack—consistent with the job she’d set for herself starting in early 2019 in the Oval Office, namely ensuring that it was largely people of her selection in Trump’s political orbit.
Caroline Wren, the top aide of top Trump adviser (and then-secret Donald Trump Jr. fiancée) Kimberly Guilfoyle, told Dustin Stockton that Jenny Beth Martin’s group and Women for America First—the latter the insurrectionist outfit behind the January 6 event that incited the attack on the Capitol—were only able to work together because Ginni Thomas, who’d served as an “early Tea Party activist” with Women for America First leader Amy Kremer, had worked diligently to make that cooperation possible.
Without Ginni Thomas, the Times indicates, the “years[-long]…bitter legal dispute” between Kremer and Martin would have made their cooperation impossible—and thus the January 6 White House Ellipse event that launched an insurrection a non-starter.
(5) Ginni Thomas used one of her operations to promote the effort that ultimately came to be known as the “Green Bay Sweep”—the coup plot.
:{While the Times doesn’t reference the Peter Navarro–drafted coup plot by its name, that it was the “Green Bay Sweep” that Ginni Thomas began working on as soon as Trump lost the 2020 election in a popular-vote and electoral-college landslide is clear.
As the Times writes,
The [November 2020] call to action [sent out by Ginni Thomas’s Council for National Policy] was titled “Election Results and Legal Battles: What Now?”….[and] it urged the members of [the] influential if secretive right-wing group to contact legislators in three of the swing states that tipped the balance for Biden—Arizona, Georgia and Pennsylvania. The aim was audacious: Keep President Donald J. Trump in power.
The notion that state GOP legislators in the battleground states Trump lost could overturn the 2020 presidential election and “keep Trump in power” would be taken up, a few weeks later, not only by Navarro but Thomas’s “close friend” John Eastman in his capacity as legal counsel for Donald Trump.
Those who might deem it overstatement to call—as Proof has, above—the Council for National Policy “Ginni Thomas’s” operation should consider this Times reporting:}:
[In November 2020] one of [the Council for National Policy’s] 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 and by 2019 had joined the nine-member board of CNP Action, an arm of the council organized as a 501(c)4 under a provision of the tax code that allows for direct political advocacy. It was CNP. Action that circulated the November “action steps” document, the existence of which has not been previously reported. 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.”
{Emphasis supplied.}
In short, it appears that as one of the nine “leaders” of the CNP inNovember 2020, Ginni Thomas used her license to engage in “direct political advocacy” via an IRS-blessed 501(c)4 institution to push a coup plot identical to Peter Navarro’s, and did so well before Navarro had passed around his own document—and likewise before her good friend John Eastman, who she was at a minimum indirectly in touch with in late 2020, pursued a strategy identical to the course she had already charted. That strategy, now known as the Green Bay Sweep, had five distinct components easily identifiable to federal investigators and provably traceable to Ginni Thomas’s CNP Action efforts.
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The 5 Components of Ginni Thomas’s November 2020 Coup Plot (the “Green Bay Sweep”)
{Note: Proof does not endorse or agree with any of the five core principles enumerated below.}
State GOP legislators are entitled to replace the votes of citizens with their own judgment, and may do so pursuant to their own unilateral understanding of their “Constitutional responsibilities”, whether or not these alleged legal responsibilities have ever been exercised this way before in American history.
Backchannel political lobbying of state GOP legislators to cajole them into viewing their “Constitutional responsibilities” in this way is appropriate, as it falls under the general heading of legitimate “direct political advocacy”—itself an acknowledgment that such lobbying (as well as any of its fruits) are partisan rather than grounded in legal principle or the investigations of duly appointed fact-finding entities.
Legislative challenges of election results, influenced by such direct partisan lobbying, can themselves be partisan—that is, not based in any analysis of the results of an election that has been accepted by any court or fact-finding entity.
State legislators can send alternate slates of electors to Washington whether or not their actions are approved by state elections officials. The purpose of this gambit is to throw a national election to the House of Representatives, where members vote by delegation for President of the United States. In 2020, the GOP controlled more House delegations than the Democratic Party did.
It is acceptable partisan conduct—not seditious conspiracy—for a group of Americans to come to a “meeting of the minds” (element #1 of a criminal conspiracy); develop “action steps” for the said group to take (element #2 of a criminal conspiracy); then execute these steps with illegal purpose (element #3 of a criminal conspiracy). In the case of the so-called “Green Bay Sweep,” the illegal purpose constituted one or more of the federal crimes of Conspiracy to Defraud the United States, Obstruction of An Official Proceeding, Seditious Conspiracy, and Voter Fraud.
Had Ginni Thomas and her two semi-clandestine advocacy groups developed and acted upon the plot outlined above only after developing substantial and credible evidence of voter fraud or election fraud—which evidence of course has still not emerged as of February 2022—an argument could perhaps be made that their final ambition was not to defraud the United States. But the fact that the conspiracy was formed and began taking “action steps” in November 2020, at a time that none of its members had any evidence that the results of the election just past were inaccurate, confirms that their goal was to commit fraud and subvert the will of voters they’d no reasonable basis to suspect had done anything but exercise their most sacred civic duty.
Lest anyone deem it unlikely that a woman so prominent in far-right circles would act not only in ignorance of—but indeed in defiance of—hard evidence in the pursuit of her political aims, here’s the Times reporting on Ginni Thomas’s own recitation of her family’s political ethos: “Our family didn’t believe [former president Richard] Nixon did anything wrong in [the] Watergate [scandal] until way after he admitted guilt. We believed any Republican until all the evidence was in, and then a little more.”
That CNP Action began its approach of state legislators in November of 2020, before even Team Kraken had established fraudulent and false evidence of a “stolen election,” confirms that Ginni Thomas believed GOP state legislators didn’t need to have any basis at all for overturning the results of a democratic election on nakedly partisan grounds.
So What Does It All Mean?
In view of the foregoing, Ginni Thomas can rightly be seen as the “first author of the insurrection”—a title she clearly deserves much more than the men (Peter Navarro and John Eastman) who heretofore have been seen as the key progenitors of Trump’s coup plot. That Eastman may have been acting on marching orders from a close friend who ran a group he’d been associated with for years further burnishes Ginni Thomas’s credentials as a chief architect of January 6.
Perhaps most stunning, however, is that Clarence Thomas may well have been Ginni Thomas’s co-conspirator. Unless it turns out that Mrs. Thomas was hiding her actions from her husband—a possibility it appears every friend of the two who’s ever spoken to American media immediately discounts—Clarence Thomas had some knowledge of the plot his wife put in motion in November 2020. As the Times reports, Clarence Thomas and his wife have for decades now “worked in tandem from the bench and the political trenches to take aim at [progressive policy] targets.” In the post–2020 election period in particular, writes the Times—as “the effort to overturn the 2020 election” was in full swing—“the lines between the couple’s interests” got “blurred.”
:{As for Ginni Thomas’s awareness that her plot would ultimately be put before the judgment of the man married in 1987, here’s what the Times has to say on that score:
[The CNP Action] plan, if carried out successfully, would have almost certainly landed before the Supreme Court—and Ginni Thomas’s husband. In fact, [President] Trump was already calling for that to happen [by December 2020]. In a December 2 [2020] 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.”}:
Did President Trump know that the plot he wanted to see before the Supreme Court had been devised by the spouse of a Supreme Court Justice? On the facts above, it is nearly impossible to imagine how he could have been unaware of this.
Lest anyone doubt that Ginni Thomas was far and away the most important of the nine leaders of CNP Action—given her special access to the President of the United States and her unique access, moreover, to his legal team—any doubt on this score must be erased by the fact that, of the nine CNP Action ringleaders, only Ginni Thomas’s husband was going to be in a position to directly influence whether the course CNP Action had embarked upon would be retroactively blessed by the U.S. Supreme Court. As the Times notes, Justice Thomas is not just the judicial hero of the MAGA movement, he is the accepted leader of the current conservative majority on the Court.
Per the Times, “With Trump’s three [SCOTUS] appointments reshaping the Supreme Court, [Ginni Thomas’s] husband finds himself at the center of a new conservative majority poised to shake the foundations of settled law.”
Unlike Chief Justice John Roberts, in December 2020 Thomas was perfectly placed to influence the newest members of the Court—Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett—into forming, along with him and Justice Samuel Alito, an impenetrable far-right bloc willing to protect Ginni Thomas and her co-conspirators. It is unthinkable that Ginni Thomas would have been anything less than a co-leader of the CNP Action effort on these grounds alone, even if she didn’t have a direct line to the president and his lawyers and a significantly more impressive and voluminous resume as a far-right lobbyist than most of her CNP peers.
And has Clarence Thomas spent the last twenty years staying away from the Council for National Policy, given its evident radicalism? No, reports the New York Times:
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.
{Emphasis supplied.}
While the two intersections noted above may seem rather remote in time and limited in scope, they confirm that in December 2020 the CNP would have had some cause (beyond the inescapable fact of Ginni Thomas’s leadership of it) to see Clarence Thomas as an ally—indeed, an ally willing to publicly connect himself to their cause(s).
Note too that the Thomases’ social circle is very much a CNP social circle. As the Times notes, Leonard Leo, a member of both the CNP and Groundswell, is a “close family friend of the couple’s.” In fact, Clarence Thomas is the godfather of one of Leo’s children. Could there ever have been any doubt, as CNP formed its coup plot, that Justice Thomas would seek to provide its members and leaders—like Leo and his own wife—any cover they might ultimately need? And wouldn’t CNP’s plotters have believed Thomas, the “north star” of the current GOP according to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, could bring along Alito and Trump’s three Supreme Court justices with him? It certainly would have if its leadership held the view held by CNP “stalwart” (and notorious Islamophobe) Brigitte Gabriel, who said in December 2021, per the Times, that Clarence Thomas is the U.S. Supreme Court’s “real chief justice.”
Ginni Thomas’s After-the-Fact Consciousness of Guilt
In criminal investigations, we often look at how various parties acted after a crime was committed. Such actions may indicate what those who traffick in trial evidence term “consciousness of guilt”—an awareness that one has done something illicit (a form of self-awareness often accompanied by an intense desire to make sure no one else sees what one has done). The Times report details the actions of Thomas’s CNP outfit after January 6, and they couldn’t possibly speak louder about how Ginni and her group saw their own conduct:
In the weeks that followed January 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 [CNP] advised. “Amplify the concerns of the protestors and give them legitimacy.”
But the prolonged cover-up effort by Ginni Thomas’s CNP Action didn’t stop there.
Ginni Thomas co-signed a letter in December [2021] calling for House Republicans to expel Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger from their conference for joining the [House] January 6 Committee. Thomas and her co-authors said the [House January 6 Committee] investigation “brings disrespect to our country’s rule of law” and “legal harassment to private citizens who have done nothing wrong”, adding that they [the signatories of the letter] would begin “a nationwide movement to add citizens’ voices to this effort.”
It’s now clear that Ginni Thomas herself was among the “private citizens” she sought to protect with her letter demanding an end to any congressional probe of January 6.
And following January 6, Justice Thomas began acting—even for him—stranger than usual, abandoning his conservative peers on the Supreme Court to take a position (in effect) on Trump’s right to hide the identities of co-conspirators via document-production refusals that not one of his stalwart allies on the Court would condone.
As the Times reports,
[In January 2022], the Supreme Court ruled 8 to 1 to allow the release of records from the Trump White House related to the January 6 attack. Justice Thomas was the sole dissenter.
If congressional and federal criminal investigators ever had cause to wonder whether Ginni Thomas shared her clandestine post-election activities with her husband—as she’s universally said to share everything else with him (one of the Thomases’ closest friends, Armstrong Williams, calls Ginni indisputably Clarence’s “closest confidant”)—perhaps Thomas being so off-the-grid on a historic SCOTUS holding should now remove that doubt. Or one could listen to the words of Mitch McConnell, who calls the supposedly neutral Thomas (per the Times) a “leader” in the era of Trump’s GOP.
The Times even notes that in public speeches Clarence Thomas implicitly alludes to the fact that he and the far-right movement his wife co-leads have a “shared purpose.”
As the Times writes of Clarence and Ginni Thomas,
If Thomas has been laying the groundwork for a conservative revolution, so has his wife, who once worked at [the] Heritage [Foundation] 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 [Steve] Bannon’s 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.”
….
[Clarence Thomas] 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 Gets Worse
Per the reporting of Politico reporter Kyle Cheney,Eastman—the author of a so-called “coup memo” who has refused to send certain subpoenaed documents to Congress and asserted his Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination—“was first recruited to advise [Donald] Trump on election matters on September 3 [2020] by Cleta Mitchell,who he says was tasked by Trump in August [2020] with assembling an ‘election integrity working group’ to prepare for post-election litigation.”
:{
This means that at a time Ginni Thomas was directly advising the president on whom to appoint to key roles in his political operation, Trump selected a person—a person there’s no present evidence to suggest he knew previously—who is a good friend of Ginni Thomas. Ginni’s friend Cleta, having been so selected by her advisee Donald Trump, then chose another “close friend” of hers, John Eastman, to work with her.}:
In the map of interrelationships that launched Donald Trump’s post-election “legal” efforts, Ginni Thomas sits at the very center of the web.
Despite all this—and quite shockingly—when the House January 6 Committee set out to send John Eastman a list of names to search for in his subpoenaed materials, the words “Ginni” and “Thomas” were nowhere to be found. See for yourself, below: [doc list]
The list of individuals the House January 6 Committee expressed an intense interest in—without even once mentioning Ginni Thomas—is stunning in its length and breadth.
It includes Trump, Bannon, Navarro, Vice President Mike Pence, former Attorney General Bill Barr, President Joe Biden, Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ), Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL), Arizona state representative Rusty Bowers (R), former White House Counsel Pat Cipollone, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), Arizona state representative Mark Finchem (R), Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX), Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ), Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), former (now deceased) Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-MS), Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL), Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL), Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA), former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows (R-NC), former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-WY), Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA), former federal judge J. Michael Luttig, former Trump deputy counsel Patrick Philbin, former Pence chief of staff Marc Short, former Trump press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, former Acting Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Division of the Department of Justice Jeffrey Clark, former Trump White House lawyer Eric Herschmann, Pennsylvania state representative Doug Mastriano (R), former North Carolina Supreme Court Chief Justice Mark Martin, and others with names less well-known to domestic U.S. politics-watchers.
All of the names on the Committee’s list are well-deserved selections—and not one of them attaches to a person closer to John Eastman than Ginni Thomas.
Conclusion: The “Cone of Silence”
In what is sure to be one of the less-noticed components of the Times report—perhaps one whose importance even the Times didn’t consider, buried as it is amidst thousands of words of lesser significance—the paper’s journalists offer a tantalizing view of how Ginni Thomas and her jurist husband might have perceived a 2020 presidential victory by Joe Biden over the man Ginni Thomas had advised for years and Clarence Thomas had to thank for finally getting a far-right SCOTUS majority he’d wanted for decades.
Keeping in mind that it was Joe Biden who presided over Justice Clarence Thomas’s historically contentious Supreme Court confirmation hearings in 1991, consider the following sentence from the Times report:
Friends and associates said that the couple’s rage over the [1991] confirmation battle came to both define and unify them.
“Rage”? Indeed, not just rage but a rage that “define[s]” you and actually cements the most important relationship in your life? And a rage of this magnitude that has now lasted decades? And attaches—singularly—to an event that Joe Biden presided over?
In considering the likelihood that Ginni Thomas chose to intimately involve herself in the battle to overturn Joe Biden’s election as president, and then in considering the further likelihood that Ginni Thomas kept her husband apprised of all her activities in this regard, the fact that both husband and wife have for decades been “defined” and “unified” by their “rage” at an event that Joe Biden conducted cannot be overlooked.
Indeed, it is valuable evidence for congressional and criminal investigators of a very common sort: evidence of bias, temperament, and motive.
The Times even goes so far as to note more esoteric reasons the Thomases might have found common cause with Donald Trump: just as Trump has been publicly accused of both sexual harassment and sexual assault, so too, the Times notes, has Mr. Thomas been accused of sexual harassment and sexual assault. Like Trump, Clarence Thomas denies the allegations and has made his denials a part of his public identity and ethos.
And just as Trump has often been deemed an embarrassment to America’s wealthiest citizens—a premise that’s launched a thousand thinkpieces—Clarence Thomas, fairly or otherwise, has faced accusations for decades (accusations, it’s worth noting, that he has spoken about publicly for decades) that he is and should be a pariah in America’s Black community. It is not hard to see why Trump would not only “court” Thomas, as the Times reports he did, but that he would be as successful in doing so as he was. And for the entirety of the Donald Trump-Clarence Thomas courtship, Ginni Thomas was by her husband’s side and—in some cases—even well out in front of him.
Nor can it be said that the Thomases’ have been as open about their allegiances and activities as their supporters would have the American public believe. Per the Times,
[In 2011], [Ginni] Thomas’s activism drew scrutiny of her and her husband, when Common Cause, an advocacy group, reviewed IRS 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 twenty years of filings.
Has any Supreme Court Justice ever hidden two decades of far-right political activism by his spouse in federal filings? Let alone done so under circumstances in which he would have known—as one of America’s leading lawyers—he was effectively hiding hundreds of potential conflicts of interest? Who in the public eye to the degree Justice Thomas is hides $700,000 of marital income, requiring 20 years of amended tax filings? This history, too, must have given Ginni Thomas and Clarence Thomas a sense of déjà vu—and empathy—when tax disclosures became a central component of the public discourse surrounding Donald Trump.
Ginni Thomas, writes the Times, even “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”—an echo of Donald Trump’s own campaign to turn September 11, 2001 into a locus for anti-Muslim hatred (in Trump’s case, by lying repeatedly, and in the most vile fashion imaginable, about U.S. Muslims publicly “celebrating” the deadly attacks on the Twin Towers on that day).
So while Ginni Thomas may have at first supported Ted Cruz for president in 2016, it’s not so hard to understand why she came around on Trump as quickly as she did.
No wonder Steve Bannon now says, of the organization that he helped Ginni Thomas grow, Groundswell, that it represents “all the stuff that became the foundational stuff of the Trump movement.” No wonder the Times notes, in calling “voting…an early focus” of Groundswell, that Ginni Thomas’s outfit quickly attracted the far-right Ramsland—who not only ended up as one of the top election “experts” on Trump’s legal team but was photographed inside Trump’s Insurrection Day “command center” at the Willard Hotel.
Nor is it any wonder that the same year Donald Trump decided to run for president (2013, as established, with detailed sourcing, by the 2018 Simon & Schuster book Proof of Collusion) Ginni Thomas was as obsessed in private as Trump was on Twitter about how elections are won and lost in America. The Times mentions a message Thomas sent to her Groundswell subordinates that year that “list[ed] 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???’” (emphasis in original).
That same year, the Republican Party released an autopsy of the 2012 presidential election—the election that prompted Trump to run for president, according to his longtime aide Sam Nunberg—stating that the GOP needed to broaden its appeal. Ginni Thomas’s reaction was identical to Trump’s and Bannon’s, the Times recounts:
[The autopsy’s] prescriptions—[that the GOP needed] to broaden [its] 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.”
Fortunately, Bannon and Ginni had just co-founded Groundswell a few weeks earlier—and done so with the precise ambition of countering prevailing narratives in the GOP.
As the Times notes, “Groundswell, in a message circulated among its members after the autopsy, said that ‘[RNC chairman Reince] Priebus is sending messages to the party….[suggesting that] if we were all gay illegal aliens, the party [would] like[ ] us. He is preparing the way for a change on social issues by giving a warning: “Don’t go Old Testament.”’” Groundswell’s contrary view was one that Trump—an indifferent Christian who couldn’t correctly name even a single book of the New Testament— would eagerly (and very publicly) adopt.
Even in initially supporting Cruz over Trump in 2016, Ginni Thomas indicated an odd indifference to the fundamentals of voting, “back[ing] a [2016 RNC] convention-floor effort to overturn the will of Republican primary voters by awarding Trump’s delegates to Cruz.” Just 48 months later, Thomas would be advocating again for the overturning of the will of U.S. voters: this time, however, the votes of every American were at stake.
And yet it was by 2018—well before 2020—that Ginni Thomas had already become such a Trump fanatic that she could seamlessly entwine Trump, her husband, and Trump’s second pick to be a new Supreme Court colleague for her husband, Brett Kavanaugh. At an event that was supposed to be kept secret (recording devices were prohibited), she thundered, “Even if [Kavanaugh] gets in [to the Supreme Court]—I believe he’ll get in, I’m hoping he gets in—they’re not going to leave him alone. They’re trying to impeach him [already]! They’re coming for my husband! They’re coming for President Trump!” The Thomases’ cause had become Trump’s, and vice versa; the purported suffering of the men Ginni Thomas had put in Trump’s path as ideal federal appointments had synchronized itself with the Thomases’ own history of (as they saw it) suffering at the hands of their enemies. The Times recounts that it was the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings that first brought the Thomases and Trumps into one another’s social orbits—an unsurprising concurrence, given that contentious Court confirmation hearings “define” the Thomases’ decades-long history of “rage.”
And yet, none of this evidence is needed to make Ginni Thomas a prime suspect in the planning of Trump’s coup plot. While there is no evidence excluding Mrs. Thomas from suspicion, there is a mountain of evidence placing her at the scene of the crime. Her January 6 Facebook messages ardently supporting the rally at which Mr. Trump incited an insurrection via enraged partisans who later attacked the U.S. Capitol seem quaint by comparison to the hard evidence of her relevant involvements with Trump, Mitchell, Ledeen, Eastman, Meadows, Bannon, Kremer, Martin, Rich Higgins, and indeed almost every coup plotter at the heart of Donald Trump’s insurrection scheme. As Proof has reported, even Ali Alexander has been a Groundswell “participant.”
So the question remains: what is the House January 6 Committee waiting for? Why is Ginni Thomas sacrosanct in a way no other witness is? Certainly it is not that she is a woman, nor even that she’s associated with a key figure in American public life; many of the Committee’s subpoenas have been sent to women, and some to men or women even more powerful and well-connected than Ginni Thomas (though the list of those answering to this description is short indeed).
In 1995, the Times recounts, Ginni Thomas told a U.S. News & World Report journalist, “I wouldn’t be in [Washington] if I wasn’t on a mission.” Does the Committee—or anyone in America, including Ginni Thomas’s most ardent friends, advocates, and supporters—believe she would abandon her “mission” just as it came to a head after Trump’s landslide election defeat at both the polls and in the Electoral College? We must not forget, here, that Ginni Thomas has always spoken in the language of radical revolution, confirming that the events of January 6 would indeed have been the apex of her political career. In 2010, during that period she was co-founding the far-right Tea Party movement, she told a crowd of activists at the 2010 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) that “I adore all of the new citizen patriots who are rising up across this country, and I’m happy to help show you the ropes in the Washington area, ’cause we need help.” Those words— “patriots”; “rising up”—echo the rhetoric that would ring across The Mall and in the halls of the Capitol just over a decade later.
In a 2021 email Ginni Thomas never thought would become public, she assured agents of the man most likely to be the 2024 GOP presidential nominee if Trump doesn’t (or can’t) run for the White House again—Florida governor Ron DeSantis—that her long-standing Groundswell outfit offered all those within its ambit a “cone of silence.” Thomas’s assurance to DeSantis’s people that Groundswell not only regularly acts with secrecy but apparently engages in the sort of activities one must regularly hide was accompanied by what—in retrospect—serves as a sort of “proof of concept”: that is, Thomas’s acknowledgment, in her email to to DeSantis’s camp, that her husband Clarence “had been in contact with the governor ‘on various things of late.’” Though we can’t know for certain, this may have been Ginni Thomas’s way of assuring the governor’s aides that—because her emails (and Groundswell’s emails) would never be seen by the public—she could make such bold, even tawdry admissions within them that would, in any subsequent public reading of them, be quickly deemed scandalous.
And this—this precisely—is what is now at stake in the continued refusal of the FBI or Congress to publicly acknowledge that Ginni Thomas was one of the key architects of the January 6 insurrection. These investigative entities are ensuring for Ginni Thomas precisely the cone of silence and cloak of secrecy she (and for that matter her husband) have enjoyed for decades, within which cone and under which cloak it now appears they both have done things that’d make any American blanch. As the Times notes, at the time of Ginni Thomas’s wink-wink nudge-nudge email to DeSantis about secret contacts between him and her husband, “DeSantis was in the midst of a number of high-profile federal court battles.”
No person who believes they can be held accountable for their actions sends an email like the Thomas-DeSantis email. The most charitable reading of such communications is that Ginni Thomas is certain that nothing she does will influence her husband, and that she feels this certainty for the simple reason that the two think so alike that she can be sure of how he’ll rule in a given case without ever speaking to him about it. As the Times reports, in one February 2021 lawsuit involving the Trump campaign’s legal team, Clarence 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”, in doing so “echoing the arguments advanced by [Ginni’s] CNP Action.”
In the case in question, Thomas took the view, as had his wife beginning in November 2020, that during the 2020 presidential election “non-legislative officials in various States took it upon themselves to set the rules [for the election].” Thomas even went so far as to say that it didn’t really matter whether the claims of “fraud” being made by Trump partisans—his wife, he didn’t say, chief among them—were true or not, as they should automatically be heard by the Supreme Court even if they facially lacked merit.
CNP Action and Ginni Thomas, if ever they’d doubted that Justice Thomas would’ve looked favorably on their coup plot in November and December of 2020 (not that there is any indication they feared this), must have been enormously heartened by Thomas’s extraordinary statements about baseless allegations of a “stolen election.” Even when Thomas, in an easily missed footnote, acknowledged the weakness of Donald Trump’s post-election litigation, he would say only that the 2020 election had been “free from strong evidence of systemic fraud” (emphasis supplied). That there might have been some evidence of systemic fraud—as his wife was then loudly claiming—went implied but unwritten.
While the focus of the recent New York Times feature on the Thomases takes a long-range view of their ambitions, Congress cannot now afford—nor can America—such bespectacled tunnel vision. The evidence that Ginni Thomas was at the heart of the planning of the events of January 6 is now overwhelming; the evidence that she kept clear of the pinnacle moment of her life’s “mission” is non-existent. Her apparent lifetime of arrogant, “out of bounds” political advocacy has left her open to the ambit of responsible congressional and federal criminal investigations—if only Congress and the FBI will lift the “cone of silence” the Thomases have so carefully constructed.
empty wheel
"**Oversight:” Mike Flynn Lied to Protect Barbara Ledeen,** Who Then Fed Disinformation to Sara CarterMay 11, 2021/60 Comments/in 2016 Presidential Election, emptywheel, Mueller Probe /by emptywheel
In a footnote to an October 2019 filing, prosecutors in the Mike Flynn case suggested that Sidney Powell was misrepresenting Flynn’s “cooperation and candor” in his first interviews with Robert Mueller’s team, a claim that is consistent with Flynn’s own description of his lawyers’ unhappy review of it. The 302s liberated by BuzzFeed earlier this year show just how ridiculous some of the lies Flynn told in his November 16, 2017 meeting with Mueller’s prosecutors.
For example, in addition to repeating his lies about his conversations with Sergey Kislyak and claiming that he “did not specifically recall conversations regarding Wikileaks” during the campaign, Flynn also claimed that he never had conversations about how to get Hillary’s missing emails.
FLYNN did not recall discussions about a concerted effort to locate [Hillary’s] missing emails.
[snip]
FLYNN never had any conversations about how to get CLINTON’s missing emails. FLYNN did not remember hearing anyone else on the campaign discuss this either. The consensus was that they hoped the emails would be found all of a sudden.
Flynn would go on to unforget all three topics in the weeks and months ahead.
On the topic of searching for Hillary’s emails, however, Flynn was still shading the truth in his final interview before pleading guilty on November 29, 2017. Flynn described that he had met Peter Smith regarding business development in 2015, and described that Smith had emailed during the campaign. But, “FLYNN lost interest in what SMITH sent him because he ‘did not see any there, there’,” per the interview report. As to others who might be involved in the effort, Flynn described that “possibly Barbara LEDEEN” had been a recipient of some of the emails from Smith, though suggested Sam Clovis was a more important player.
It would be six months later, in an interview on May 4, 2018, before prosecutors returned to Flynn’s role in hunting down Hillary’s emails in depth. It appears that, at first, they asked Flynn generally about the Peter Smith effort, and this time, he remembered that “LEDEEN’s role” in the effort “was as a conduit.” Flynn explained that he gave “time and attention” to the effort “out of respect for his friendship with LEDEEN.” It was in that context that Flynn remembered that someone “sent files to FLYNN on one or two occasions,” though even then, he couldn’t remember whether the files were about Benghazi or the missing emails.
The prosecutors started asking Flynn about the actual emails — many of which were liberated in the documents liberated by BuzzFeed.
Prosecutors first asked about an email that the FBI Agent who wrote up the 302 described as a May 24, 2016 email from Ledeen to Flynn. But it’s actually an email Ledeen sent one of the chief purveyors of disinformation about the Flynn case, Catherine Herridge, promising “evidence” (though there are notations on it that may reflect Flynn got a hard copy).
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Prosecutors then showed an email Flynn sent to Ledeen on June 16, 2016, in response to Ledeen’s question, “You got the Signal email.”
Flynn’s response reflects him having downloaded and read the report on the effort to obtain the emails. “amazing!” Flynn responded. “I’ll speak more off line with you about it this evening or tomorrow.”
On September 10, 2016, Ledeen wrote Flynn a “TIME SENSITIVE” email, explaining that “we are at the point of rubber hitting the road re the project you know I have been working on.”
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In response to Ledeen’s request, the interview suggests, Flynn spoke with someone who had been an early campaign advisor, but he told Mueller’s team that “he did not really remember the details of the conversation.”
He claimed to remember nothing of the October 29, 2016 Hushmail promising a Phase II of the report, however.
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“You’ve got me on this one,” Mike Flynn claimed, then described asking Barbara Ledeen, “Can’t you just tell me?” and imagining that, “he became frustrated trying to open the message.”
There was another HushMail on November 3, which Flynn suggested might pertain to Sidney Blumenthal.
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But he suggested that “The servers may have been a second set of email messages to FLYNN,” and explained it was all “secret squirrel stuff.”
Flynn’s interview then proceeded to talk about an in-person meeting that Ledeen had set up, apparently with this same person, to discuss microtargeting; the pitch appeared to combine Sidney Blumenthal, servers in Eastern Europe, and microtargeting. It was in this context that, six months after claiming that he never spoke to anyone about getting Hillary’s missing emails, he admitted he actually talked about pursuing the Hillary emails “to anyone he was with on the Trump plane,” including Trump.
FLYNN conveyed to people that people were looking for the missing emails and were confident they would eventually find them. FLYNN would have said this to anyone he was with on the TRUMP plane. FLYNN does not know if specifically said he knew people but he could have. People on the plane include TRUMP. FLYNN did not believe he conveyed to the team information about the servers in the Ukraine or Eastern Europe. FLYNN was not ruling it out but does not recall exactly what he said.
Barbara Ledeen, still a key Senate Judiciary Committee staffer to Senators who have led the effort to undermine the Russian investigation, was right in the thick of all this during the 2016 election: Secret servers in Ukraine, missing emails, and microtargeting. That’s the woman overseeing the investigation into the investigation.
Which makes the other emails liberated in the BuzzFeed release implicating Ledeen all the more important.
It turns out that, before prosecutors asked about all this, they may have been alerted to a text Ledeen sent on May 1, 2018, inquiring about the status of Flynn’s case. Mueller’s team raised the text two weeks after the Peter Smith and microtargeting discussion, on May 17, 2018, when prosecutors focused on Ledeen’s extensive effort to monitor the Russian investigation (starting well before Mueller was appointed).
The backup liberated by Buzzfeed shows that Michael Ledeen inquired about whether he “and Sara” could say that Flynn was getting an immunity for testimony deal on March 31, 2017 (the same way Ledeen’s co-conspirators in Iran-Contra escaped accountability), establishing that the Ledeens funneled stories to Sara Carter. A year later, Flynn conceded, he may have still been a source for Sara Carter stories via the Ledeens, in this case for a story about Flynn getting discovery.
BARBARA reached out FLYNN but he did not respond to her with anything specific. FLYNN may have told her they received discovery and were reviewing the documents.
FLYNN had many conversations around the time of this article but was never asked if the information could be shared with CARTER, nor did he direct anyone to share it with her.
Prosecutors asked about several other Carter stories, and Flynn’s long-suffering attorney, Rob Kelner, admitted that Carter had reached out several times before the plea deal and that he (Kelner) may have been the source for the detail that Andrew McCabe reached out to Flynn about an interview on short notice.
More interesting, however, are the emails between those Carter stories, which show Michael Ledeen (who, remember, was one of the first people Flynn called before secretly undermining sanctions with Sergey Kislyak in December 2016) reached out on April 17, 2017, telling Flynn, “it’s time…”
Then Michael Ledeen reached out the next day (apparently to a different Flynn email address) to arrange a pastrami dinner with extra pickles, Dr. Brown’s diet soda, and “a message for you.”
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The meeting would have been on Monday April 24, 2017. Some of Carter’s scoops have been solid, albeit hyped. Others have been garbage. Her regurgitation of Sidney Powell’s false claims was pure propaganda. But she was also responsible, with John Solomon, for one of the most important unsubstantiated stories of the entire investigation, one that claimed Andrew McCabe had said they were going to “fuck Flynn” in a meeting after Flynn’s interview, an allegation that came up in Flynn’s last interview with Mueller (at a time when Mueller would replicate the two investigations that had been done on this allegation in the past).
The same interview reveals that Barbara Ledeen was responsible for another false claim that never died, that there was some original 302 that said something different from the one that recorded Flynn’s lies.
“Barbara tends to have a ‘big mouth,'” Flynn complained on May 17, 2018, as part of these discussions. But he still did what, according to the same interview report, she kept nagging him to do: withdraw his guilty plea. For a long time, it looked like she was simply protecting her husband Michael’s close friend. But with the backup materials, it seems just as likely that Ledeen’s efforts to undermine the Russian investigation are as much about her own complicity as Flynn’s himself.
A person who had a key role Senate Judiciary Committee oversight of the Russian investigation was sending Hushmail and Signal communications looking for secret servers in Ukraine during the events in question.
Update: Here’s my summary of what each of the 302s included from when they were released in January).
Update: In January, Flynn thought that the April message that Ledeen was passing on may have been from Trump.
Tags: Barbara Ledeen, Chuck Grassley, Lindsey Graham, Michael Ledeen, Mike Flynn, Sara Carter
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Lindsey Graham Provides Yet More Proof that Peter Strzok Didn't Have It ...
Jul 17, 2020Lindsey Graham just released two more documents that don't show what [his personally implicated staffer Barbara Ledeen] claims they show. The more important is the Electronic Communication memorializing FBI's 3-day interview with Christopher Steele's primary subsource for the dossier.
Mike Flynn Collaborator Barbara Ledeen's Past Role in Producing "New ...
As noted, Barbara Ledeen is a staffer on the Senate Judiciary Committee, meaning she worked for Chuck Grassley and now works for Lindsey Graham. She's almost certainly the mastermind of their efforts to declassify every little thing that might undermine the Mueller investigation.
Sidney Powell Implicates Barbara Ledeen in Her Effort to ... - emptywheel
Nov 17, 2020Ledeen is, in spite of those glaring conflicts, the key staffer behind Lindsey's efforts to undermine the Russian investigation. That suggests she's also a key staffer behind Lindsey's decision to ignore how DOJ has altered documents in Bill Barr's effort to undermine the prosecution of Powell's staffer.
"Oversight:" Mike Flynn Lied to Protect Barbara Ledeen, Who Then Fed ...
May 11, 2021Barbara Ledeen, still a key Senate Judiciary Committee staffer to Senators who have led the effort to undermine the Russian investigation, was right in the thick of all this during the 2016 election: Secret servers in Ukraine, missing emails, and microtargeting. That's the woman overseeing the investigation into the investigation.
Sidney Powell Implicates Barbara Ledeen in Her Effort to Undermine ...
Nov 17, 2020In a tweet this morning, she included Lindsey Graham staffer Barbara Ledeen among her co-conspirators. In addition to working with Mike Flynn to try to reach out to hostile foreign governments in hopes they had hacked Hillary's emails, Ledeen's spouse, Michael, was the first person Flynn called when he was trying to figure out how to ...
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Barbara Ledeen - Staff - United States Senate | ZoomInfo.com
View Barbara Ledeen's business profile as Staff at United States Senate. Find contact's direct phone number, email address, work history, and more. Leads by Industry . Top Companies . ... Barbara Ledeen. Staff at United States Senate. Barbara Ledeen is a Staff at United States Senate based in Washington, D.C., District of Columbia. Read More.
Bleeding Heartland
Barbara Ledeen is a staffer on the Senate Judiciary Committee, meaning she worked for Chuck Grassley and now works for Lindsey Graham. She's almost certainly the mastermind of their efforts to declassify every little thing that might undermine the Mueller investigation. [...]
Rachel Maddow Has Some Questions for GOP Staffer ... - Alternet.org
Both the House and Senate Intelligence Committees have asked for the documents Smith gathered. The interesting part of the story goes to a conservative activist named Barbara Ledeen "who works for...
HHS whistleblower, denialism and the crisis of US capitalism
On February 12, 2020, Trump withdrew the nomination following the circulation of a memo written by Senate Republican staffer Barbara Ledeen and signed by, among others, Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court (in)Justice Clarence Thomas. The memo itself is the work of a group of some 30 far right activists called Groundswell.
Congress versus the Constitution: Merrick Garland's Second ...
Feb 26, 2021for example, numerous members (especially lindsey graham and chuck grassley, whose shared staffer barbara ledeen and her spouse were implicated in the russian investigation) demanded that garland promise to keep john durham on, citing barr's promise to keep mueller on during his confirmation hearing, at a point when barr had already made public …
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Barbara Ledeen - Previously held position: Senate Judiciary ...
https://www.legistorm.com › person › bio › Barbara_J_Le...
See more about Barbara Ledeen including contact information, congressional salary, employment history, education, family relationships and other ...
Barbara Ledeen | C-SPAN.org
https://www.c-span.org › person
On the C-SPAN Networks: Barbara Ledeen is an Executive Director for the Independent Women's Forum with seven videos in the C-SPAN Video Library; the first ...
Barbara Ledeen - Add Relationship - LittleSis
https://littlesis.org › person › 284735-Barbara_Ledeen
Barbara Comstock Former US Representative from Virgina (2015-2019). • 2 contributions · 600 USD (May 27 '14→Sep 30 '14) · Michael Steele Former Chairman, ...
Jason Leopold on Twitter: "Here's an email from Barbara ...
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Here's an email from Barbara Ledeen addressed to "Ms Herridge" about a big story: “material we have found on the deep and dark web regarding stories you have ...
Uncovered: Israeli Angle to 'Deep State' Plot - WhoWhatWhy
https://whowhatwhy.org › politics › government-integrity
May 25, 2021 — Those mentioned also include Barbara Ledeen, identified as a former GOP Senate Judiciary Committee staffer. To the newspaper, Ledeen admitted a ...
Barbara Ledeen - Bleeding Heartland
https://www.bleedingheartland.com › tag › barbara-lede...
Dec 13, 2021 — U.S. Senator Chuck Grassley was not among the Republican senators who were reportedly shown a PowerPoint presentation on January 4 that laid out ...
Michael Ledeen - Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Michael_Ledeen
Michael Arthur Ledeen is an American historian, and neoconservative foreign policy analyst. ... Barbara Ledeen sparked controversy in 2015 when she tried to launch her ...
Barbara Ledeen | The World from PRX
https://theworld.org › person › barbara-ledeen
Barbara Ledeen. US President Donald Trump walks to board Air Force One as he travesl to Florida for. Mueller Report: Did Trump commit conspiracy? No.
"Oversight:" Mike Flynn Lied to Protect Barbara Ledeen ...
https://www.emptywheel.net › 2021/05/11 › oversight-...
barbara ledeen from www.emptywheel.net
May 11, 2021 — Barbara Ledeen, still a key Senate Judiciary Committee staffer to Senators who have led the effort to undermine the Russian investigation, ...
Barbara Ledeen - staff - US Senate | LinkedIn
View Barbara Ledeen's profile on LinkedIn, the world's largest professional community. Barbara has 2 jobs listed on their profile. See the complete profile on LinkedIn and discover Barbara's ...
"Oversight:" Mike Flynn Lied to Protect Barbara Ledeen ...
Barbara Ledeen, still a key Senate Judiciary Committee staffer to Senators who have led the effort to undermine the Russian investigation, was right in the thick of all this during the 2016 election: Secret servers in Ukraine, missing emails, and microtargeting. That's the woman overseeing the investigation into the investigation.
Campaign Said to Have Targeted Trump 'Enemies' in ...
May 13, 2021 Barbara Ledeen, one of the participants in the operation against Mr. McMaster, in 2003. She said she recently retired as an aide to the Senate Judiciary Committee. Scott J. Ferrell/Congressional...
There really is a vast right wing conspiracy, part the ...
Barbara Ledeen works for Chuck Grassley on the Senate Judiciary Committee, which gives her access to classified information. She also started a private investigation into Hillary's email and got...
Did Mike Flynn's Pal Barbara Ledeen Get A Prosecutor Fired ...
February 24, 2020 03:35 PM Let's talk about Senate Judiciary Committee staffer Barbara Ledeen and her unrelenting assault on the rule of law in this country. Axios reported yesterday that Ledeen is part of Ginni Thomas's coven trying to turn the federal government into a year-round CPAC convention.
Barbara Ledeen (J) - Chevy Chase, MD Public Reputation ...
Currently, Barbara lives in Chevy Chase, MD. Barbara also answers to Bargara J Ledeen and Barbara J Ledeen, and perhaps a couple of other names. Barbara's ethnicity is Caucasian, whose political affiliation is unknown; and religious views are listed as Christian. Barbara's relationship status is married.
Barbara J Ledeen: Address 7312 Western Ave Apt 7, Chevy ...
A: Barbara Ledeen is 73 years old. Q: What are other names Barbara Ledeen uses? A: Barbara Ledeen is also known as barbara j ledeen Q: What is Barbara Ledeen's current address? A: Barbara Ledeen's current address is 7312 Western Ave Apt 7, Chevy Chase, MD, 20815 Q: Where has Barbara Ledeen lived? A: Barbara Ledeen lives or has lived in MD, DC
:{Why is Barbara Ledeen still working for the Senate ..:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:.
Barbara Ledeen is a conservative political operative with, according to The Forward, "ties to right-wing pro-Israel circles" (10/27/06). In the 1980's and 1990's she worked as a Defense department...
Michael Ledeen - Wikipedia
Michael Arthur Ledeen (/ l ə ˈ d iː n /; born August 1, 1941) is an American historian, and neoconservative foreign policy analyst. He is a former consultant to the United States National Security Council, the United States Department of State, and the United States Department of Defense.He held the Freedom Scholar chair at the American Enterprise Institute where he was a scholar for twenty ...
:{Sidney Powell Implicates Barbara Ledeen in Her Effort to :(style="background-color:#ff9900;"):}:...
Ledeen is, in spite of those glaring conflicts, the key staffer behind Lindsey's efforts to undermine the Russian investigation. That suggests she's also a key staffer behind Lindsey's decision to ignore how DOJ has altered documents in Bill Barr's effort to undermine the prosecution of Powell's staffer.