ginni 3 bak

see main Virginia

tag Gini, she is hub networker esp CNP hub

see clarence clerks staffer mafia ct stacking

see new org TC Third Century ginni4

see groundswell

clint bolick

directly involved was ginni in fake elector slate see cleta

1/6 hearing 6/21 tues cleta said she commissioned Eastman coup memo a day or 2 after (or before) election loss?

open lte usual suspect?

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/5703586-Letter-to-Tim-Scott-defending-Thomas-Farr

We support Tom Farr and we are asking you to do likewise. Thank you. Sincerely,

The Honorable Edwin Meese III United States Attorney General (1985-1988)

The Honorable Jim DeMint Member, South Carolina United States Senate (2005-2013)

The Honorable Tim Scott January 29, 2019 The Honorable Tim Moore Speaker, North Carolina House of Representatives

The Honorable Jason Saine Member, North Carolina House of Representatives Senior Chair, NC House Committee on Appropriations Immediate Past National Chairman, American Legislative Exchange Council The Honorable Robin Hayes Chairman, North Carolina Republican Party Member of Congress from North Carolina (1999-2009) Tom Fetzer Mayor of Raleigh, NC (1993-1999) Former Chairman, North Carolina Republican Party Friend of Tom Farr since 1981 Dallas Woodhouse, Executive Director North Carolina Republican Party

Cleta Mitchell Partner, Foley & Lardner, LLP Chairman, Public Interest Legal Foundation Hon. Hans A. von Spakovsky Commissioner, Federal Election Commission (2006-2007) Counsel to the Asst. Attorney General for Civil Rights, U.S. Dept. of Justice (2002-2005) J. Christian Adams President and General Counsel, Public Interest Legal Foundation US Department of Justice, Trial Attorney, Civil Rights Division Ginni Thomas President, Liberty Consulting Chairman, Groundswell Washington, DC

Barbara Ledeen Judicial Nominations expert

Marjorie Dannenfelser, President Susan B. Anthony List

Jenny Beth Martin, Chairman Tea Party Patriots Citizens Fund

Richard Manning, President Americans for Limited Government Phillip L. Jauregui President Judicial Action Group The Honorable Becky Norton Dunlop White House Advisor President Ronald Reagan (1981-1985) The Honorable George K. Rasley, Jr. Managing Editor, ConservativeHQ.com The Honorable J. Kenneth Blackwell, Chairman Constitutional Congress, Inc.

The Honorable George Dunlop Legislative Assistant (and other positions) with Senator Jesse Helms (1972-1993)

The Honorable Joseph A. Morris, Partner Morris & De La Rosa, Chicago Assistant Attorney General of the United States (1986-1988) General Counsel, Office of Personnel Management (1981-1986) Raymond LaJeunesse, Jr. Vice-President & Legal Director National Right to Work Committee

The Honorable T. Kenneth Cribb, Jr. Chief Domestic Advisor President Ronald Reagan (1987-1988) Spartanburg, South Carolina Curt Levey, President Committee for Justice Washington, DC Wilma Hall, Retired Becky Gerritson, Executive Director Eagle Forum of Alabama

Brian Brown, President National Organization for Marriage Susan Carlson, President American Civil Rights Union

Sandy Rios Director of Governmental Affairs, American Family Association Host, Sandy Rios in the Morning on AFR Talk

William R. Davis, Esq. Partner, Foley & Lardner, LLP Member of the Board of Directors Public Interest Legal Foundation

Dr. John C. Eastman Henry Salvatori Professor of Law & Community Service Dale E. Fowler School of Law at Chapman University Orange, CA

https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.org/documents/739889/redacted-groundswell-notes-and-action-items-from.pdf

ginni groundswell working group: jan 2013

NEED WORKING GROUPS for division of labor for 30 front war (Ginni to seek out/discuss); seek volunteer leaders or team-players on various

fronts. Expectation: Teams should connect once a week before Groundswell meeting.

Guns: Michael James Barton, Gayle Trotter, Rick Manning

Messaging: Dan Bongino,Cherylyn Harley LeBon, Alex Cortes,Anita MonCrief

Groundgame: Peter List

Getting on Offense: Anita MonCrief

Alternative to Rove: Sandy Rios

National Security lane - Frank Gaffney

Energy and Environment lane – Myron Ebell

UN lane - Austin Ruse

9.Shadow Govt teams: Tom Fitton, Mike Farris, Heritage?

10. Benghazi– Boykin, Thomas,Fitton

Others needed: Immigration,

https://www.cnn.com/**2022/04/20**/politics/ginni-thomas-mark-meadows-connie-hair-texts-january-6/index.html

cNN) A day before the 2020 presidential election, **Virginia "Ginni" Thomas** mugged for the camera wearing a Trump baseball cap with her friend Connie Hair, chief of staff to GOP Rep. Louie Gohmert of Texas, at an event supporting the then-President in pictures posted on Facebook at the time.

A month later, in her now-infamous texts to Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows, Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, referred to Hair and claims about election fraud while urging Meadows to fight the election result.

Around that same time, Hair's boss, Gohmert, filed or supported two lawsuits challenging the election that eventually landed before the Supreme Court.

Ginni Thomas' years-long relationship with Hair, including social outings that Clarence Thomas attended, as well as her texting with Meadows add another dimension to an ongoing debate over whether her husband should recuse himself from cases related to the 2020 election and the January 6 insurrection, especially when his wife is closely aligned to people who advocated overturning the election.

to be sure, Thomas and Hair were voicing their opinions on the election. At the same time, however, Hair was a top aide to a congressman who would file or sign on to election litigation that landed before the court where Thomas sits.And Hair herself posted on Facebook about the need to fight in court over the election.

"Was on a call with the Trump campaign manager and legal folks for a briefing this morning. WE ARE SEEING THIS THROUGH TO THE END OF THE COURT/COUNT BATTLE," Hair posted on November 7, four days after the election. And on November 21, Hair posted: "Massive amounts of voter fraud in big cities throughout the contested states."

It's rare for the spouse of a Supreme Court justice to be so politically active, and legal ethicists say a line may be crossed when Ginni Thomas' interests collide with her husband's work. Some say the reputation of the Supreme Court is at stake.

"Mrs. Thomas has a First Amendment right to speak publicly and forcefully on issues that might come before the Supreme Court without thereby forcing recusal of her husband," said Stephen Gillers of NYU School of Law. "But in the current situation, her interests are caught up in cases that could come before the court."

Gillers believes that Clarence Thomas should recuse himself from any upcoming cases concerning the Capitol attack. Following the revelation of the Meadows texts, Democratic senators have introduced legislation meant to address questions of recusal and other ethics issues.

Washington is a town where powerful people frequently hobnob, and Ginni Thomas maintains she kept her conservative political activism separate from her marriage.Her husband has not commented publicly on calls for him to recuse -- or even resign -- after his wife's texts to Meadows were revealed.

A friend of the Thomases who is familiar with the situation contends Ginni Thomas and Hair say they did not talk about specific cases that Gohmert was involved in and that Hair did not know about Gohmert's lawsuits before they were filed.

"Hair is a friend of Ginni Thomas," the source said. "They had a general concern about the election."

In the end, the high court took neither Gohmert's lawsuit against then-Vice President Mike Pence, nor a case from Texas that Gohmert supported against states that Donald Trump lost.

Ginni Thomas declined to comment to CNN through a lawyer.

Hair didn't respond to emailed questions about her interactions with the Thomases, nor did Gohmert's office.

Earlier this month, Gohmertof both Ginni and Clarence Thomas on the House floor, saying Ginni Thomas' activism shouldn't put pressure on the justice to recuse from any cases. Thomas returned to the bench in person at the Supreme Court this week, after being hospitalized for an illness around the same time that the news of his wife's communications with the Trump White House about the election broke.

"Now, Justice Thomas is being told he needs to recuse himself because he has a wife who thinks for herself. We can't have that, these liberals say. Yet the hypocrisy rises higher and higher with every comment they make about Justice Thomas and/or his wife," Gohmert said in his speech.

"What happened to the old ideas of liberals being these caring, compassionate people who would never judge one's spouse by the acts or thoughts of the other?" Gohmert added. "Well, those have gone by the wayside, and we see exactly what is at play here."

Ginni Thomas also has a close friendship with Meadows, and a case involving him landed before the Supreme Court in recent months. In that case, the court allowed the releaseof hundreds of documents from the Trump White House to the House select committee investigating January 6. Clarence Thomas was the only oneto publicly dissent.

The documents in that case did not include Meadows' texts with Ginni Thomas that he had voluntarily turned over to the committee. The committee has saidit will seek to interview Ginni Thomas, CNN has reported.

Dinners with friends

The Thomases have kept in contact with Hair for years, according to several photos and messages shared on Facebook by Hair and others and obtained by CNN.

In 2016, Hair posted about attending a Colbie Caillat concert, sending her thanks for a "fun" evening to Ginni Thomas. Hair posed for photos with Clarence Thomas and at dinner with him, his wife and others the night of the concert, according to Facebook posts.

Hair has worked in Gohmert's office since 2010, according to congressional staffing records.

In 2017, she took a new round of pictures with Clarence and Ginni Thomas, this time inside the justice's chambers. That day, January 20, 2017, Clarence Thomas had sworn in Pence as vice president. In her Facebook post, Hair calls the Thomases "great friends."

And in 2019, Hair took part in a meeting at the White House with Trump and Ginni Thomas to discuss hiring more Trump loyalists in his administration, according to a senior Trump administration official.

Over the past decade, Ginni Thomas and Hair's photos together and posts tagging each other are numerous.

Then after the 2020 election and January 6 Capitol riot, Hair on her Facebook wall shared coverage of Clarence Thomas dissenting on a Supreme Court election case, writing, "GOD BLESS HIM." The case was a too-late attemptby Pennsylvania Republicans to challenge the state's use of mail-in ballots, and Thomas expressed a fearthat mail-in balloting could allow for fraud in future elections.

And in text messages to Meadows, which CNN obtained last month, Ginni Thomas quotes Hair in November 2020 as she implores the Trump White House to stick with its claims of election fraud.

"This war is psychological. PSYOP. It's what I did in the military. They are using every weapon they have to try to make us quit... It is fake, fraud and if people would take a deep breath and look at things through that filter we will see this through and win," Ginni Thomas texted Meadows on November 14, 2020.

She then cites Hair's name in the text, implying the words came from her friend. The source familiar with the Thomases said Ginni Thomas was cutting and pasting Hair's own words from another text chain, to send to Meadows.

Gohmert headed to SCOTUS

Soon after these texts, Gohmert's office took part in two cases that challenged the election result at the Supreme Court.

First, Texas' attorney general went straight to the high court to sue Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin -- all swing states Joe Biden had won -- claiming they had conducted their elections unconstitutionally.

The case theoretically could have given the Supreme Court the power to throw out the presidential election result. Gohmert was one of 126 Republican members of Congress to sign on to an amicus brief supporting Texas before the high court.

On December 11, just days after the case had been filed, a majority of justices rejected the attempt, saying Texas had not shown it had the legal right to challenge how another state conducts its election.

Clarence Thomas signed on to a two-sentence statement, penned by Justice Samuel Alito, arguing a procedural point that the court should not have dismissed the case outright because it fell under the court's "original jurisdiction." But importantly, Thomas and Alito did note that they would grant no other relief to Texas in the case.

A source close to Thomas believes that the justice's position on that case and others shows he was not swayed by his wife's interests.

Even with that swift loss at the Supreme Court, Gohmert's office wasn't finished aiming election challenges at the high court.

In late December, Gohmert tried with a case of his own. The congressman sued Pence directly. The lawsuit asked the court to force Pence to stop the Electoral College certification of Biden's win.

That prompted Pence's lawyers to speak up in court, asking a federal judge to dismiss Gohmert's case. It was a crucial early moment of the vice president publicly defending his role of presiding over the Senate. Pence has stood by his position that the vice president couldn't overturn the election and courts should not have either.

TheGohmert case eventually made its way to the Supreme Court on January 6, the day of the Electoral College certification.

"Our nation stands at the crossroads of a Constitutional crisis fraught by chaos and turmoil brought into play by a viral plague, anti-democratic interference from domestic and foreign sources, and hastily enacted State voting measures ostensibly placed to protect voters from catching the plague," Gohmert's filing said.

The court denied its request the next day, with no dissents noted.

CNN's Ariane de Vogue, Ryan Nobles, Zachary Cohen and Gabby Orr contributed to this report.

anhttps://www.alternet.org/2022/03/clarence-thomas-2657046647/

no lnx

Clarence Thomas has 'implicated himself in the insurrection': historian

Tom Boggioni and Raw Story March 27, 2022

In an interview with Rolling Stone's Andrew Cohen, historian Jeff Shesol said he has no doubt that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife Ginni Thomas are in "lockstep" when it comes to believing Donald Trump should still be in the White House and claimed they see what they are doing as a "holy war."

With Cohen writing, "You don’t need to be a legal expert to know that one spouse shouldn’t sit in judgment in a case in which the other spouse is a witness — or a suspect. That’s as classic a conflict of interest as one can imagine and by refusing to acknowledge it Justice Thomas has brought great discredit on himself and his colleagues on the Court," he asked the author of “Supreme Power: Franklin Roosevelt vs The Supreme Court,” what he thinks is going on after revelations about Ginni Thomas' texts urging overturning the 2020 presidential election results.

According to Shesol, the biggest immediate problem is the fact that there is no mechanism in place to force Supreme Court justices to recuse themselves in cases where they have a personal stake as well as their freedom to take public political stances without consequences.

"I wrote for the NYT back in 2011 on the 'extrajudicial' activities of Thomas, [Samuel] Alito, and others," he explained. "They’re even more brazen today, if only because they have never faced any consequences (other than the opprobrium of the left and the mainstream media, opprobrium they welcome) for making political statements to politically minded crowds. You and I can write as many mean articles about them as we’d like, but short of impeachment, they’re untouchable and they revel in it."

According to the historian, he can't be sure Ginni Thomas was talking about her husband when she referenced support for election interference from her "best friend" -- but he has his suspicions.

After stating, "In a very real sense, Clarence and Ginni Thomas are answerable only to Clarence and Ginni Thomas. The Trump Administration gave us all a hard lesson in how few actual rules bind the behavior of our national leaders, and how much depends on their good judgment and self-restraint," he added. "Even if she’s not referring to Justice Thomas, the recent New Yorker story, among others, underscores the absurdity of the notion that (as they’ve claimed) Ginni does her thing and Clarence does his, and that they don’t discuss their work. This is a holy war, and, again, they are waging it in lockstep."

According to Shesol, Ginni Thomas is up to her neck in involvement t in the Jan 6th insurrection and there is little reason to believe that her husband didn't know it.

Explaining, "Ginni played an active role (which seems, with every passing revelation, to have been a greater role than previously disclosed or imagined) in trying to subvert the Constitution by overthrowing the results of a presidential election," he maintained that her husband's decision to side with Donald Trump on hiding White House documents, and his current silence, makes him suspect.

"Her husband’s role, apart from his dissent from that unsigned order, is less clear—though it is clear enough that he acted (or would have acted, if the other conservatives had joined him) in shielding his wife’s role in the plot from scrutiny," he stated. "Though his dissent is silent to his true motivations he has thus involved and implicated himself in the insurrection."

You can read more here.

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Leadership Changes Elevate Voter Suppression Advocates

The program for the February meeting offers the first glimpse of the secretive group’s high-level members and leaders since CMDpublished its September 2020 Membership Directory, provided by open source intelligence researcher Brent Allpress.

The group’s Executive Committee is headed by Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton, who has taken over from William Walton as CNP’s president. Judicial Watch’s “Election Integrity Project” has pushed for voter roll purges and promotes the myth that voter fraud is widespread in the U.S.

At the August 2020 CNP meeting, Fitton facilitated two panels on “election integrity,” CMDreported. “We need to stop those [vote-by-mail] ballots from going out, and I want the lawyers here to tell us what to do,” Fitton told meeting attendees, according to videos obtained by The Washington Post.

Another lifelong advocate of voter suppression now serves as CNP’s vice president: J. Kenneth Blackwell, a former secretary of state in Ohio and member of Trump’s failed voter fraud panel, the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity. He currently chairs the Center for Election Integrity at the America First Policy Institute (AFPI), a nonprofit spin-off of the Trump administration.

In May 2021, Blackwell facilitated an “Action Session” at CNP’s 40th anniversary meeting on how to combat the national voting rights effort, featuring U.S. Rep. Byron Donalds (R-FL), who voted against certifying the 2020 presidential electoral college results, and GOP lawyer Cleta Mitchell, who has promoted Trump’s Big Lie and advised him on his infamous call pressuring Georgia’s secretary of state to “find” enough votes for the former president to win the state.

At its February meeting, CNP hosted a screening of the film:{**Capitol Punishment**:(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}: with director Chris Burgard, which promotes the claim that, “Everything that we are being told [about the insurrection] is a lie and Americans are being persecuted to support that lie.” CNP has extensive ties to #StoptheSteal and the violent insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6, CMD reported.

Others joining the CNP executive committee this year include Jerry A. Johnson (treasurer), former president of the National Religious Broadcasters; William G. Boykin, retired Army lieutenant general and executive vice president of theFamily Research Council; Chad Connelly, president of Faith Wins; and Millie Hallow, managing director of executive operations at the National Rifle Association.

Blackwell is also listed as president of the board of directors for CNP Action, and Fitton is a new director of the affiliate.

The Gold Circle Members list is largely similar to the September 2020 directory, with many of the new additions representing shifts from lower membership tiers. Notable new members include Ashland University President Carlos Campo; Lynn Friess, widow of GOP megadonor Foster Friess;and Ryan Helfenbein, executive director of the Standing for Freedom Center and a vice president at Liberty University.

Politicizing Covid

“The pandemic led to unprecedented government mandates, the erosion of civil liberties, and an outright assault on freedom,” CNP’s agenda booklet argues. “Americans have seen and experienced what unchecked government power can do, and they have had enough.”

CNP has been instrumental in the relentless push from the right to ignore public health guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) during the deadly Covid-19 pandemic. It played a leading role in the anti-lockdown coalition known as “Save Our Country,” with members making up half of its leadership counciland organizing weekly conference calls to coordinate response tactics.

In May 2020, CMD also revealed that CNP Action, CNP’s 501(c)(4) affiliate, organized a call to discuss a plan for recruiting “extremely pro-Trump” doctors to campaign against Covid public health restrictions.

CNP’s February meeting featured a general session on the state of the pandemic in the U.S. led byDr. Jay Bhattacharya, a leading advocate for herd immunity who has advised Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) on his controversial anti-mask policies.

Focus on Elections

Despite being a tax-exempt organization barred from engaging in electoral politics, CNP is focusing heavily on elections this year, according to the agenda for its February meeting.

Dave Bossie, president of Citizens United, led things off at the Gold Circle Dinner with a presentation on “the most pressing political battles in DC and their impact on the Conservative Movement.”

A general session titled “Virginia 2021: Lessons Learned” featured Chad Connelly, founder and president of Faith Wins; Mark Campbell, campaign manager for Glenn Youngkin, the Republican who won the 2021 governor’s race in Virginia; Victoria Cobb, president of The Family Foundation of Virginia; and Chris Wilson, CEO of WPA Intelligence sharing “their analyses of the Virginia race” and “what it means for 2022.”

After not winning a statewide race in more than a decade, in 2021 Republicans in Virginia won the offices of governor, lieutenant governor, and attorney general, while also recapturing the majority in the state House.

Former Virginia Secretary of Natural Resources Becky Norton Dunlop, a past president of CNP, joined the four “Lessons Learned” panelists for a CNP Action session “to chart the course to success nationwide in November.”

In his capacity as CNP Action chairman, Blackwell also hosted “Candidate Introductions” for attendees. While candidates were not listed on the program, CMD obtained a flier for Drew Montez Clark, a Republican candidate for Florida’s 25th district seat in the U.S. House, that was circulated at the meeting.

Clarkreportedly co-organized two buses carrying 100 Floridians to the Jan. 6 rally in DC that led to the violent insurrection at the Capitol. He also spoke at a far-right “America First” rally in April 2021 headlined by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA).

Supreme Court Takes Center Stage

“This term of the Supreme Court could be one of the most consequential ever, and CNP Members have been central to some of the landmark cases being decided,” the CNP’s February meeting program notes. Speakers at a general session on the subject included Alan Sears, founder of the Christian right litigation powerhouse Alliance Defending Freedom; Susan B. Anthony List President Marjorie Dannenfelser; and First Liberty President Kelly Shackelford.

“CNP has been strategizing to dominate the Supreme Court for decades,” CNP expert Anne Nelson told the Associated Press in Oct 2020. “They have worked through the Federalist Society, the Heritage Foundation, and the National Rifle Association, all run by members of the CNP.”

Dannenfelserwas among 14 other CNP members to attend the Sept. 26, 2020, Rose Garden ceremony at the White House where Amy Coney Barrett accepted the nomination for the Supreme Court, solidifying the far-right’s hold on the nation’s highest court.

The agenda notes that Dannenfelser “will provide an update on the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization case that could result in completely gutting or overturning Roe v. Wade,” the 1973 Supreme Court decision guaranteeing women in America the constitutional right to an abortion.

Mississippi’s Speaker of the House Phillip Gunn (R-Miss.), the 2020 chair of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), touted the Dobbs v. Jacksoncase and its prospects for leading to a decision to overturn Roe v. Wade during a panel at the CNP meeting last May, CMD reported.

“We think that’s going to be a landmark case. All of us know that the United States Supreme Court composition has changed… in a way that is more pro-life,” Gunn told meeting attendees last spring. “They say that Amy Coney Barrett is one of the most active, pro-life people in America, so we believe that she brings a new dynamic to that court. We think our case, our law that we passed in 2018, will be transformative in the arena in abortion. We’re proud of that.”

Dannenfelser then led a CNP Action panel “on how the Conservative Movement can be best equipped for the impending Supreme Court decision on Dobbs” and to “strategize on messaging, state legislation, and more with attendees.”

One of the panelists,Mike Thompson, is a senior vice president with CRC Advisors. Leonard Leo,who played an integral role in Trump’s effort to pack the federal judiciary with right-wing judges, founded CRC Advisors in 2020 with Greg Mueller to “funnel big money and expertise across the conservative movement.” As of September 2020, Leo was aBoard of Governors member of CNP....

Pushing Back Against China, the Left, and a “Woke” Military

Placing China “at the heart of the greatest challenges facing the United States in recent years”—from Covid to currency manipulation, climate policies, and “undue influence over American corporations”—Economic War Room host Kevin Freeman led a discussion titled “The 21st: An American or Chinese Century?”

Freeman was joined in the panel by Beau Brunson, Consumers’ Research Director of Policy and Regulatory Affairs. Consumers’ Research has committed millions in dark money to fight environmental, social, and corporate governance concerns (ESG) and “woke” capitalism, where BlackRock has emerged as a top target of its campaign for its “hypocritical” investments in China.

CMD recently exposed Consumers’ Research as one of the largest sponsors of the State Financial Officers Foundation, a group of Republican treasurers, auditors, and staff from 16 states, which has also prioritized fighting the ESG movement and “woke” capitalism.

Also on the panel were Pete Hoekstra, former ambassador to the Netherlands under Trump, and Steve Milloy, a FoxNews contributor and paid advocate for Phillip Morris, ExxonMobil, and other corporations.

The three also participated in a CNP Action panel on “Countering China,” where they collectively worked “on ways to combat the increasing and pervasive threat China poses to the United States and American life.”

Leading an CNP Action panel discussion on “Defunding the Left,”**Buckeye Institute** President and CEO Robert Alt facilitated a tutorial on how to cut off contributions to “left-wing causes” by targeting public employee unions, trial lawyers, and investment management firms. O.H. Skinner, executive director of Alliance for Consumers, and Bridgett Wagner, vice president of policy promotion at the Heritage Foundation, joined the discussion.

New CNP Executive Member Boykin led a panel discussion focused on the question: “Can a Woke Military Address Future Threats?” with Mike Berry, First Liberty’s general counsel, and Keith Kellogg, retired Army lieutenant general and co-chair of AFPI’s Center for American Security. The three talked about “extreme policies [that] have been implemented through the Department of Defense” and “how woke ideologies have influenced our armed services.”

Two other CNP meetings are scheduled for this year, May 18–20 in McLean, VA, and September 15–17 in Frisco, TX.

an 3 22

When Ronald Reagan was president during the 1980s, part of his big-tent view of conservatism was what he called “the 11th Commandment” — which was “never speak ill of any fellow Republican.” But Donald Trump, as president, had a totally different approach: insult, belittle, bully and threaten any Republican who dared to disagree with him about anything. And according to Daily Beast reporters Asawin Suebsaeng and Adam Rawnsley, one of Trump’s worst enablers during his four years in the White House was far-right GOP activist and conspiracy theorist Ginni Thomas — who is married to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

In contrast to Reagan’s view that there was room for a variety of Republicans in his 1980s coalition — from Goldwater Republicans to Rockefeller Republicans, from secular libertarians to theocratic Christian fundamentalists — Trump demanded unquestioning loyalty from fellow Republicans. Ginni Thomas, Suebsaeng and Rawnsley emphasize in an article published by the Beast on April 1, encouraged that type of behavior and offered lists of people she recommended hiring or firing.

The Beast reporters explain, “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…. Ever since she became a welcome guest at Trump’s residences, Thomas — an influential and long-time 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.”

Suebsaeng and Rawnsley continue, “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."[TWT]

During his years in the White House, Trump fired a long list of right-wing Republicans who he decided weren’t MAGA enough — from former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to former Attorney General Jeff Sessions to former National Security Adviser John Bolton. And eventually, he even turned against former Vice President Mike Pence and former Attorney General William Barr when they refused to go along with his efforts to steal the 2020 presidential election. Ginni Thomas, according to the Washington Post and CBS News, aggressively promoted the Big Lie, urging former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows to pursue efforts tooverturn the 2020 election results.

// PUTIN UKRAINE FAIL] One of the reasons Trump was a failure as president was the fact that he wanted to be surrounded by yes-men, and according to the Beast’s article, Ginni Thomas did everything she could to encourage him.

A former senior Trump Administration official, presumably interviewed on condition of anonymity, told the Beast, “We all knew that within minutes after Ginni left her meeting with the president, he would start yelling about firing people for being disloyal. When Ginni Thomas showed up, you knew your day was wrecked.”

Trump wasn’t shy about hiring extremists if he thought they would be loyalists, and Thomas had plenty of recommendations. According to Suebsaeng and Rawnsley, her recommendations included “Fox News personality Dan Bongino, and the Trump-adulating Sheriff David Clarke” as well as Frank Gaffney — the former Pentagon official and conspiracy theorist who “accused conservative anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist of being a secret agent for the Muslim Brotherhood.”

A former Trump White House official told the Beast, “These fucking lists were so insane and unworkable. A lot of them were dripping with paranoia and read like they were written by a disturbed person.”

The Beast also interviewed former White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham, who recalled, “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). 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.”

ref db

no lnx

TRUMPLAND

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

Senior Researcher

Published Apr. 01, 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 reason 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 Brotherhood and believes that American adversaries are working on secret electrical device-frying “electromagnetic pulse” weapons to zap America back to the pre-industrial age.

[Dems Are Livid at Thomas but Have No Idea What to Do

STRONGLY WORDED LETTERS]

“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.

[Ginni Thomas’ Election Fraud Guru Claims He Arrested Pope

TOO HOT FOR INFOWARS

Will Sommer]

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.

db https://www.thedailybeast.com/trumps-jan-6-phone-logs-7-hour-gap-might-have-a-stupid-explanation

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There Might Be a Stupid Explanation for the 7-Hour Gap in Trump’s Phone Logs

THE NEW ABNORMAL

That, plus: Why Colorado’s secretary of state is being forced to take an opponent indicted for compromising voting equipment seriously. (Hint: It has to do with the MyPillow guy.)

The Daily Beast

Published Apr. 01, 2022

The New Abnormal really made it 201 episodes without anyone on the team asking, “Do we need to slap a content warning label on this?” But then Madison Cawthorn had to go and start flapping his gums about orgies.

The freshman Republican congressman has earned the ire of his colleagues after letting slip that he’s borne witness to their sexual bacchanalia, complete with—and why not—“key bumps of cocaine.” That key feature (pun noted) is exactly why New Abnormal co-host Andy Levy takes umbrage with co-host Molly Jong-Fast’s preferred term for the whole debacle: “Orgygate.” Levy simply will not stand for this erasure of the copious amounts of drugs allegedly consumed by the nation’s leaders!

Somebody else probably thinking too hard about this nightmare affair is GOP House leader Kevin McCarthy. As Levy puts it, “This is ‘unacceptable’ to Kevin McCarthy because he’s afraid that people in his district are going to be going around saying, ‘Is Kevin McCarthy participating in orgies and doing key bumps?’ So this directly has the possibility of affecting him—and that’s all he cares about.”

Jong-Fast, meanwhile, is doing her damnedest not to picture the possibility of a raunchy Louie Gohmert getting it on with a debauched Newt Gingrich.

Thankfully, relief descends upon the pod in the form of George Conway, a lawyer and Washington Post contributor. What he offers up is one potential explanation for the suspicious 7-hour-37-minute-sized hole in former President Donald J. Trump’s phone logs: that it wasn’t so much a document destruction conspiracy as it was good old-fashioned incompetence.

“I don’t defend Donald Trump,” Conway says—always a good start. “But I think people may be getting a little ahead of themselves about this story… I think there’s a lot of suggestion out there that there was essentially an erasure or alteration of records. I would not make that accusation at this point. We simply don’t know. And not that Donald Trump would have any moral compunction about it. It’s just that these people were not sufficiently organized or competent to conduct a cover-up that would require that level of concentration and competence.”

Instead, Conway posits, what he thinks Jan. 6 investigators will find is that Trump was sitting in a room, “transfixed,” watching the riot at the Capitol. “He’s sitting there, watching an insurrection. He’s president of the United States and he fomented the insurrection, and he’s sitting there watching gleefully, too busy to talk on the phone using the switchboard at the White House to create a record,” the lawyer theorizes. If the then-president was making calls in a way that didn’t leave a paper trail, it wasn’t deliberate.

“He’s malicious and insidious,” Conway says, “but he’s not that competent.”

[Trump Asked Kid Rock About North Korea & There Is No Bottom]

Later in the episode, the co-hosts call up Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold, who kindly outlines what it is a secretary of state does all day. (Oversee elections for states, as it turns out.) But that’s not all. Though Griswold has been leading a vanguard to strengthen election security in Colorado, the threat of voter fraud remains terrifyingly real—all the more so because the call is coming from inside the house.

One of Griswold’s more unusual opponents for the secretary of state seat this election cycle is a Mesa County clerk named Tina Peters, who was recently indicted for an election-tampering scheme aided by none other than the MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell. Why is someone who’s been indicted allowed to run for government office? That’s just the Colorado way, Griswold says. “Colorado is the nation’s gold standard for election access and security,” she explains, “but we’ve also become ground zero for these insider threats and conspiracies.”

To fight that, Griswold is working to tighten election infrastructure. Her first legislative priority, prohibiting open-carry within 100 feet of an election site, was signed into law earlier this week. Now the focus is on a landmark bill to disincentivize bad actors like Peters from compromising or illegally accessing voting equipment. If you do, Griswold says, “you’re going to go to jail. It’s going to be a felony.”

But despite all the optimism, there’s still room for a healthy dose of concern. “I think we’re seeing the groundwork so that the next time an extreme elected official or candidate does not want to accept the results of a free and fair election, it will be easier for them to try to take their seats, no matter the results,” Griswold says, “which is very frightening for the future of this country. And it underscores the need to make sure that election-deniers do not become secretaries of state, in that we continue to have free and fair elections for all Republican, independent, and Democratic voters in this country.”

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Ginni Thomas’ election conspiracy theories offer a ‘window into' a 'very distorted, very disturbed world’: conservative

Ginni Thomas speaking at the 2017 Conservative Political Action Conference in National Harbor, Maryland, Gage Skidmore]

Alex Henderson March 30, 2022

CBS News and the Washington Post recently reported that far-right Republican activist Ginni Thomas, who is married to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, exchanged 29 text messages with former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows following the 2020 presidential election — texts in which she promoted the Big Lie and encouraged Meadows to aggressively pursue efforts to overturn the election results.Never Trump conservative Peter Wehner, in an article published by The Atlantic on March 30, warns that those texts speak volumes about the mindset of many MAGA Republicans.

The 61-year-old Wehner has a very right-wing resumé. He served in the administrations of three Republican presidents — Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush — and was a speechwriter for Bill Bennett, former secretary of education in the Reagan Administration. These days, Wehner is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC), a conservative think tank.

But Wehner is a blistering critic of former President Donald Trump, who he believes has been terrible for the conservative movement in the United States. And he cites the Thomas/Meadows texts as a glaring example of Trump’s toxic influence on the Republican Party.

“It was, by any measure, an extraordinary and unsettling set of exchanges,” Wehner writes in his Atlantic article. “President Donald Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, and the right-wing political activist Virginia ‘Ginni’ Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, texted each other at least 29 times in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election. Their purpose was not to lament the result; it was to encourage efforts to overturn it.”

Wehner continues, “That would be worrisome enough, but what makes it doubly so is the arguments invoked, the sources cited, and the mindset revealed in these raw, unfiltered texts. They are a window into a very distorted, very disturbed world — a world of true believers, and a world that has largely influenced and defined the American right during the Trump era.”

The Never Trump conservative describes Ginni Thomas’ texts to Meadows as “fully marinated in QAnon conspiracy theories.”

“Thomas thought that the attorney Sidney Powell — who, at a December (2020) press conference, blamed Cuba, Venezuela, the Clinton Foundation, George Soros, and Antifa for making Trump votes disappear — should be ‘the lead and the face’ of Trump’s legal challenge,” Wehner notes. “Thomas believed that the ‘Biden crime family & ballot fraud co-conspirators’ were being arrested and detained for ballot fraud before being shipped to Guantánamo Bay for military tribunals. And she believed that Joe Biden and the left were ‘attempting the greatest Heist of our History.’”

Ginni Thomas, Wehner adds, expressed her “contempt” for then-Vice President Mike Pence when, in one of her texts to Meadows, she wrote, “Most of us are disgusted with the VP and are in listening mode to see where to fight with our teams. Those who attacked the Capitol are not representative of our great teams of patriots for DJT!!”

Those texts, according to Wehner, underscore a larger problem in the Trumpified GOP.

“To assume that the majority of Republicans hold all the same views that Thomas and Meadows expressed in their texts would be a mistake, but they don’t have to for there to be a problem,” Wehner argues. “Plenty of people on the right, although not as radical as Thomas and Meadows, share their basic attitudes, at least for now…. They disdain Republicans who don’t share their fervor, especially those who have spoken critically of Trump.They fear that America is on the edge of the abyss, and they view our politics as a battle between good and evil. They see themselves, too, as God’s instruments — his foot soldiers — in this great political-spiritual battle.”

Wehner warns that U.S. democracy is in trouble when many Republicans reject facts and live in the same “fearful, angry, imaginary world” as Ginni Thomas and Meadows.

“It’s difficult to sustain a democracy when there aren’t shared truths, when false perceptions become false gods,” Wehner laments. “And what becomes really dangerous is when people with power — of whatever party or ideology — don’t just enter a hall of mirrors, but try to force the rest of us to follow them there.”

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

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

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

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

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

:{The Coalition Formerly Known as Groundswell

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

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

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

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

:{Thomas’ Activism Raises Judicial Ethics Questions

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

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

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

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

===

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

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The Clarence Thomas Effect

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

By Emma Green

JULY 10, 2019

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Olivia Paschal contributed reporting to this article.

Emma Green is a former staff writer at The Atlantic.

an 3 22 tom b raw story

According to a report from Politico, attorney John Eastman -- who was leading the charge to overturn 2020 presidential election results that ousted Donald Trump from the White House -- is receiving new scrutiny over his relationship with Justice Clarence Thomas.

In light of revelations about texts being exchanged between Ginni Thomas and former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, where the wife of the Supreme Court justice was passing on conspiracy theories and urging the Trump's inner circle to do what they could to remain in power, one member of the House select committee investigating the Jan 6th insurrection said he has some questions for Eastman.

As Kyle Cheney reports, "Eastman spent the final weeks of Trump’s presidency driving a strategy to pressure then-Vice President Mike Pence to stop Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s victory, a plan that relied on legal theories so extreme the Jan. 6 select committee says they could amount to criminal conspiracy and fraud," before adding, "The select committee has evidence that when a top Pence aide challenged Eastman’s plan on Jan. 4, 2021, Eastman initially told him he believed two Supreme Court justices would back him up. One of them was Ginni Thomas’ husband, Justice Clarence Thomas."

Politico is reporting that Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) is raising concerns about Eastman and Justice Thomas.

"Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) told POLITICO that the new details raise important questions about whether Eastman had a specific reason to believe Justice Thomas would support his radical gambit, or if he was simply voicing a hunch," Cheney wrote before noting, "Eastman’s attorney Charles Burnham did not respond to questions about whether Eastman maintained ties to the Thomases or communicated with either of them in the aftermath of Trump’s 2020 defeat. There’s no known evidence that Eastman was directly in touch with either of the Thomases during his campaign to pressure Pence to subvert the results."

According to Politico, "Eastman had reason to know Thomas’ views well: He clerked for the George H.W. Bush appointee in the 1990s before becoming a mainstay in deeply conservative legal circles."

The report goes to note that when investigators asked Eastman if he had any reason to believe that the Supreme Court would support his plan to have former vice president Mike Pence refuse to certify the election and throw it back to the states, his response was to plead the 5th Amendment.

What has raised red flags was testimony from Pence lawyer Greg Jacob who told the committee that Eastman had told him that at least two Supreme Court justices might support his plan, with Jacob saying he couldn't recall if Eastman named the other justice.

You can read more here.

https://www.alternet.org/2022/03/clarence-thomas-2657046647/

tom b raw story

In an interview with Rolling Stone's Andrew Cohen, historian Jeff Shesol said he has no doubt thatSupreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife Ginni Thomas are in "lockstep" when it comes to believing Donald Trump should still be in the White House and claimed they see what they are doing as a "holy war."

According to the historian, he can't be sure Ginni Thomas was talking about her husband when she referenced support for election interference from her "best friend" -- but he has his suspicions.

According to Shesol, Ginni Thomas is up to her neck in involvement t in the Jan 6th insurrection and there is little reason to believe that her husband didn't know it.

Youcan read more here.

https://www.alternet.org/2022/03/gop-qanon/

Over the last few years, QAnon has slowly infiltrated the Republican Party, replacing its traditional conservative values with far-right conspiratorial theories that have nothing to do with reality.

Now, NY Mag's Jacob Silverman is explaining how QAnon has practically overtaken the Republican Party. While the radicalized beliefs were previously verbalized among factions of the political party, Silverman notes how those beliefs are progressively becoming more mainstream.

"QAnon’s adherents tend to espouse some selection of bizarre beliefs from the conspiracist’s buffet that includes accusations of pedophile politicians eating children, secret political tribunals in Guantanamo Bay, a great bloodletting, and Donald Trump swooping in to free us from evil. One day. Or maybe the day after. The prophecy is flexible, which is why it has evolved and endured."

Explaining the timeline of the political party's downward spiral, Silverman noted how the actions of Ginni Thomas, wife of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, are an example of the radical shift in Republican values and belief systems.

"The latest exemplar of the GOP’s descent into anything-goes nuttery is Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and a well-connected conservative activist who recently admitted to attending the January 6 Stop the Steal rally in Washington, D.C.," he writes. "Ginni’s right-wing beliefs have long been known, but leaked texts between her and then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows revealed Thomas’ commitment to overturning the election, based on an apparently sincere belief that Joe Biden had stolen the presidency. She encouraged Meadows to help put a stop to Democratic perfidy. 'The majority knows Biden and the Left is attempting the greatest Heist of our History,' went one message to Meadows, encouraging him to stand strong."

Silverman is also highlighting Republican lawmakers' latest actions that signal the party's shift toward more extremist beliefs.

"The signs of the Republican slide towardfull epistemic crackup are all around us," Silverman writes. "One can see it everywhere lately, not only in the 'why do you want to hurt children?'-type questions hurled by Republican senators at Jackson, but also in the revanchist anti-LGBTQ laws being introduced in Texas and Florida and in fearful talk of teachers 'grooming' children on Fox News. The ginned-up moral panic, centered around the child exploitation themes that helped give life to QAnon, is now a regular part of Republican political rhetoric."

MCCARTHY AND SOME HSE SUPPORT

3 22

Ginni Thomas, wife of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, is at the center of controversy amid the discovery of incriminating text messages she sent as part of a scheme to overturn the presidential election.

Per The Daily Beast:

"In her messages, published Thursday by CBS News and the Washington Post, Thomas urged then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows to look into the claims of Steve Pieczenik, a little-known conspiracy theorist whose ideas are often too crazy for even Alex Jones."

Now, details are emerging about Pieczenik, the far-right conspiracy theorist and so-called election fraud "guru" she embraced.

“If you believe what Steve Pieczenik has to say, you have completely lost all touch with reality,” said Jordan Holmes, a comedian who tracks the right-wing site InfoWars and its conservative guests, on his own podcast platform, Knowledge Fight.

Pieczenik reportedly has a long history of circulating false claims and often references his career working in the national security bureaucracy, including, The Beast reports "in classified positions, all of which makes it difficult to discern what’s true about his identity."

Although Pieczenik was known for his work back in the 1990s, his perspective appeared to have shifted drastically when he began making guest appearances on the conspiracy-driven InfoWars platform. Holmes explained the extent of Pieczenik's rhetoric and how far he tends to veer from reality.

“Pieczenik goes on to hit the ball out of the fences every single time, which means he goes too far sometimes,” Holmes said. “And when that happens, he winds up getting put on the backburner for a little while."

The Beast political reporter Will Sommer noted: "His stories were so wild they even became too much for Jones. After he claimed the 2017 Las Vegas mass shooting that killed 60 people was fake, for example, Jones appeared to temporarily block him from appearing on the outlet. All that has given him a reputation as a loose cannon even by the already outré standards of the InfoWars green room."

But despite his wild claims, this is the individual Thomas reportedly referenced when expressing her concerns about the outcome of the presidential election.

john s edit bd 3 22

It’s not clear to me yet why Virginia “Ginni” Thomas admitted to being at the gathering that came before the J6 insurrection. But I’m sure the spouse of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has her reasons.

Ginni Thomas told the Washington Free BeaconMonday that she attended the rally organized by the former president to “stop the steal.” She said she left before Donald Trump ordered a throng of insurgents, some armed, to sack and loot the seat of government.

“There are important and legitimate substantive questions about achieving goals like electoral integrity, racial equality and political accountability that a democratic system like ours needs to be able to discuss and debate rationally in the political square. I fear we are losing that ability,” she told the Free Beacon, a rightwing paper.

Thing is, those “important and legitimate substantive questions” had been addressed and settled by one federal judge after another. They had been answered by Republican secretaries of state in states won by the current president. You’d think the wife of a Supreme Court justice would respect court rulings. I suppose that might be too much to ask.

Like I said, it’s not clear to me why she outed herself. It could be she’s aware of a forthcoming story about to come to light, and turned to a sympathetic news outlet to “get ahead of the story,” as elites say. That way she can minimize damage to her and her husband’s public image.

If I were to guess, I’d say Ginni Thomas was aware of Donald Trump’s effort to pressure the former vice president, Mike Pence, into sending certified electoral votes back to states, which would reelect Trump, or otherwise sabotage the situation so the Supreme Court had to decide.

That would be bad. It would mean some people are above the law. Unfortunately, we don’t need a treasonous conspiracy to know that.

Ginni Thomas is untouchable.

She’s a leading figure in right-wing politics. Her activism frequently involves cases Justice Thomas will hear. She is a middleman, as it were, between the GOP’s very obscenely rich donor class and the court’s GOP supermajority, which is eager to give what’s asked of them.

There’s nothing you can do about it.

When the people are powerless, democracy isn’t all that.

Even if Congress were to pass laws regulating the behavior of Supreme Court justices, who would enforce those laws. The US Department of Justice? The FBI? Which among all the federal law enforcement agencies would investigate a justice’s spouse? The Congress? Hardly. It couldn’t remove a president for extortion.

I talk about this and other depressing things with Gabe Roth. He’s the executive director of Fix the Court, a nonprofit dedicated to reforming the federal judiciary, especially the highest court. When no one is above a justice, Gabe said, “you're free to do whatever you want.”

“I think that bulletproof-ness rubbed off on Ginni Thomas.”

With normal people in mind, can you explain whether it’s wrong for the spouse of a Supreme Court justice to be politically active?

It's not wrong for a justice's spouse to be politically active. Justices' spouses can and should have their own lives and their own jobs.

But Ginni Thomas is different from any other Supreme Court spouse in the history of Supreme Court spouses in terms of her brand of activism and how so much of it intersects with the court’s work.

She's been the for the last three decades. WhenBush v. Gore[which decided the 2000 election] was at the court, she was vetting resumes for a potential Bush administration.

As Obamacare reached the court, she was lobbying against the law.

When a case on whether Congress could subpoena certain J6-related records was at the court, she was signing a letter saying Congress was harassing “private citizens who have done nothing wrong."

Supreme Court justices are supposed to recuse themselves from cases in which their "impartiality might reasonably be questioned."

Justice Thomas has often said he and Ginni are one – fused together in the fire of his confirmation. He’s said there’s no daylight between them.

These comments make me — and I think I'm pretty reasonable about this — question his impartiality on several issues before the court.

Has Thomas ever ruled against his wife's interests?

It's hard to quantify since the court has issued more than 2,000 rulings since Thomas joined it in 1991. But in general, the answer is no.

On major cases, the Republican justices rule the way average Republicans would want them to rule. Similarly, the Democratic justices rule the way average Democrats would want them to rule.

The Republican exceptions — Roberts on Obamacare, Kennedy on gay marriage, Gorsuch on tribal sovereignty — don't include Thomas.

How would you characterize Ginni Thomas's brand of politics?

Mean-spirited and misinformed. How can you be a functioning adult and think it's OK to share memes on Facebook related to the Holocaust, saying gun control is the reason 6 million Jews died?

Hoo-boy.

She gives out awards every year to some of the most brazen, shameless and horrible people you can imagine. Covid deniers, election-fraud maker-uppers, anti-Muslim bigots, the works.

With respect to gun control causing 6 million Jews to die, I wonder if perhaps she does know it's not OK, but she’s saying it anyway. From that perspective, we can see the role of bad faith. Someone like that could violate conflicts of interest norms knowing they were.

The truth is there really are no set conflict-of-interest rules if you're a Supreme Court justice. Rules only work if there are consequences. If there's no one above you, if you're never going to be impeached and removed since it's too hard, you're free to do whatever you want.

I think that bulletproof-ness rubbed off on Ginni Thomas.

With that in mind, there's no way of holding a justice’s spouse accountable for her role, however, minimal in J6. Am I correct?

Correct.

I would bet the J6 Committee would be squeamish about subpoenaing Ginni Thomas, though they did subpoena Donald Trump’s former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, with whom Ginni is close.

They don't want to be seen as "political," and I could imagine some of them think that going after a justice's spouse would be seen that way.

So it's possible for the spouse at the Supreme Court justice to be engaged in sedition, a crime that could rise up to the Supreme Court, and the justice in question could rule in favor of his spouse?

Yes.

That’s fucked up.

Ginni Thomas would say she left before the crime happened.

She already said she left in remarks made to the Washington Free Beacon. If she's bulletproof, why bother going to a sympathetic newspaper to explain why she's not guilty of anything?

My guess is enough people saw her at the Ellipse that the story of her being there was going to get out. She wanted to get ahead of it.

So what if the story got out, though?

My guess is that more is coming out – that she was in touch with Meadows or someone on J6 who’s been subpoenaed. She wanted to quash the rumor she paid for buses to get people to DC that day.

So what’s the solution to a laughably corrupt system, as it appears to be? Can Congress put teeth in conflict-of-interest norms?

First, they can require justices to write and adopt a code of conduct that sets expectations for conduct inside and outside the court.

Second, they can require justices to explain when they recuse themselves and make it easier for litigants to ask why they don't recuse in cases in which there's a perceived conflict of interest.

Third, they can amend the federal recusal statute to say that if you as a justice received a benefit from an individual or group — whether a gift, a free trip or personal hospitality — you have to sit out SCOTUS cases brought by that individual or group for a certain number of years

Fourth, they can hold more oversight hearings so judicial ethics issues are in the open, not merely discussed whenever a justice messes up.

I could keep going.

Yes, please.

Fifth, they could require that judges and justices put annual financial disclosure reports online (currently they're placed on thumb drives and the disclosures office always has a multi-year backlog).

Congress could require that every time a judge or justice buys or sells a stock, or other financial instruments, they have to file a contemporaneous transaction report, as members of Congress must.

Sixth, Congress could write a law that would require justices to take senior status after 18 years, so they'd keep life tenure, but after 18 years, they'd have to move to a lower court – or they could fill back in at the Supreme Court in case of an unexpected vacancy.

Seventh, they could require judges and justices to fill out contemporaneous travel reports, as members of Congress must. These show in real-time who's paying who for what (flights, hotels, etc).

These sound good, but rules and laws don't mean much unless they're enforced. Assuming Merrick Garland would never touch a case involving a Supreme Court justice’s spouse, who would enforce these laws and rules even if they were enacted?

That'd be my assumption, yes.

The DOJ wouldn’t bring charges against a Supreme Court spouse.

It'd have to be a bribe to get to that point.

A bribe would be blessedly simple, but what about a spouse of a Supreme Court justice who’s cheerleading sedition?

I don't see how that's enforced, correct.

This is very depressing isn't it?

I guess. I'm used to it.

an 3 22

Ginni Thomas confirmed she was present at Donald Trump's "Stop the Steal" rally that preceded the Jan. 6 insurrection.

The wife of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas told the Washington Free Beacon that she briefly attended the rally but got cold and left before Trump addressed his supporters, some of whom then descended on the U.S. Capitol and stormed inside as Congress certified Joe Biden's election win.

"I was disappointed and frustrated that there was violence that happened following a peaceful gathering of Trump supporters on the Ellipse on Jan. 6," Thomas said. "There are important and legitimate substantive questions about achieving goals like electoral integrity, racial equality, and political accountability that a democratic system like ours needs to be able to discuss and debate rationally in the political square. I fear we are losing that ability."

Thomas said she did not help organize the rally at the White House Ellipse and insisted that her involvement in the event, which has fallen under investigation by the Department of Justice and the House select committee, had no bearing on her husband's service on the Supreme Court.

"Like so many married couples, we share many of the same ideals, principles, and aspirations for America," Thomas said. "But we have our own separate careers, and our own ideas and opinions too. Clarence doesn't discuss his work with me, and I don't involve him in my work."

According to a pair of reports earlier this year in the https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/01/31/is-ginni-thomas-a-threat-to-the-supreme-court New York Times Magazine, Thomas reportedly acted as an intermediary between event organizers Jenny Beth Martin of Tea Party Patriots and Amy Kremer of Women for America First, but she and both other women denied those claims. "I played no role with those who were planning and leading the Jan. 6 events," Thomas said. "There are stories in the press suggesting I paid or arranged for buses. I did not. There are other stories saying I mediated feuding factions of leaders for that day. I did not."

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

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

:{The Coalition Formerly Known as Groundswell

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

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

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

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

:{Thomas’ Activism Raises Judicial Ethics Questions

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

2 22 an me

A former White House aide for former President Donald Trump has revealed details about what she describes as "the craziest meeting" she'd ever attended.

According to The New York Times, nine former aides and advisors for the Trump administration recalled a meeting they attended that included U.S. Supreme Court Justice, Clarence Thomas and his wife, Ginni. The conservative judge reportedly opened the door for his wife to share her opinions and grievances.

According to the staffers, who spoke under the condition of anonymity, the meeting with Thomas "created a sense of confusion among the staffers."

Ginni Thomas reportedly had a knack for pushing far-right candidates in hopes of replacing "Never Trump" Republicans in the administration. However, it wasn't clear whether she was a paid advisor or merely a far-right advocate.

"Here's what the peeps think," Thomas reportedly said in meetings with other Republicans, per a former aide. "We have to listen to the peeps."

One aide also detailed what transpired in the meeting that followed after lunch that day.

NY Times reporters Danny Hakim and Jo Becker write:

“'It was the craziest meeting I’ve ever been to," said a Trump aide who attended. "She started by leading the prayer." When others began speaking, the aide remembers talk of "the transsexual agenda" and parents "chopping off their children’s breasts." He said the president "tried to rein it in — it was hard to hear though," because throughout the meeting attendees were audibly praying.

Other details from the meeting have also been leaked. Per the report: "In the meeting,Ginni Thomas and other attendees also lamented that several conservative candidates to their liking had been stymied from assuming several roles, while advocating for the Trump administration's personnel office to be swept of 'Never Trump' Republicans."

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Supreme Court rules allow Clarence Thomas to decide for himself if wife’s activism presents a 'conflict of interest': report

Ginni Thomas speaking at the 2017 Conservative Political Action Conference in National Harbor, Maryland, Gage Skidmore

Alex Henderson January 31, 2022

Critics of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his equally far-right wife, GOP activist Ginni Thomas, have recently been using the phrase “conflict of interest” in connection with Justice Thomas — arguing that it is wildly inappropriate for him to have a wife who has been promoting former President Donald Trump’s false claims about the 2020 election and expressed her solidarity with the “Stop the Steal” rally of January 6, 2021. Washington Post reporter Michael Kranish discusses these criticisms in an article published on January 31, stressing that under Supreme Court rules, it’s up to Justice Thomas to decide whether or not his wife’s activism is a conflict of interest.

“Ginni Thomas’s name stood out among the signatories of a December letter from conservative leaders, which blasted the work of the House committee investigating the January 6 insurrection as ‘overtly partisan political persecution,’” Kranish reports. “One month later, her husband, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, took part in a case crucial to the same committee’s work: former President Donald Trump’s request to block the committee from getting White House records that were ordered released by President Biden and two lower courts.”

Kranish continues, “Thomas was the only justice to say he would grant Trump’s request. That vote has reignited fury among Justice Thomas’ critics, who say it illustrates a gaping hole in the Court’s rules: Justices essentially decide for themselves whether they have a conflict of interest, and Thomas has rarely made such a choice in his three decades on the Court.”

The journalist notes that Gabe Roth, executive director ofFix the Court, believes that “absolutely…. Clarence Thomas should have recused from the January 6 case.” But according to Kranish, deciding whether or not to recuse himself from a case is up to Justice Thomas himself.

“While the Supreme Court is supposed to operate under regulations guiding all federal judges, including a requirement that a justice ‘shall disqualify himself in any proceeding in which his impartiality might reasonably be questioned,’ there’s no procedure to enforce that rule,” Kranish explains. “Each justice can decide whether to recuse, and there is no way to appeal a Supreme Court member’s failure to do so. Unlike in lower courts, there is no other judge that can step in — and thus, a recusal by one justice would mean considering the case with only eight justices, increasing the chance it could not be resolved.”

Ginni Thomas’ activism, according to Kranish, has, in some instances, “overlapped with cases that have been decided by Clarence Thomas.”

Kranish notes, “Thomas’ vote in the January 6 case is such a striking conflict of interest, critics say, that some hope it sparks further support for long-sputtering efforts to toughen rules governing the justices — an effort bolstered by a White House commission last month that noted the inherent problem with (the) Court’s recusals.”

Kranish’s article comes several days after the Post published an article by author James D. Robenalt, who took a look at a Supreme Court justice of the 1960s who came under fire because of his wife’s activities: Justice Abe Fortas, a Lyndon B. Johnson nominee. Ginni Thomas, Robenalt stressed, was not the first controversial wife of a High Court justice.

Caroline Fredrickson, a law professor at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., argues that Justice Thomas has no business making decisions on issues that his wife is associated with.

Frederickson told the Post, “In every case that has come up, he has shown no interest in recusal and has, in fact, seemingly been defiant. To be a Supreme Court justice and to be married to a firebrand activist who’s trying to blow things up (is unique)…. It’s so out of bounds that if it weren’t so frightening, it would be comical.”

https://www.alternet.org/2022/01/ginni-thomas-2656468326/

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Clarence Thomas' wife spoke at an event featuring Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes: report

Ginni Thomas speaking at the 2017 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Maryland, Gage Skidmore]

Alex Henderson January 24, 2022

GOP activist/attorney Ginny Thomas, the wife of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, is every bit as far-right as her husband — and according to The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, that includes being part of an event that featured Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes.

Rhodes, who founded the extremist militia group in 2009, is facing federal charges of seditious conspiracy for his connection to the January 6, 2021 insurrection. That day, Ginny Thomas passionately endorsed then-President Donald Trump’s “Stop the Steal” rally in Washington, D.C. and sent out her “love” to the insurrectionists who were trying to overthrow 2020’s presidential election results.

In 2010, Thomas co-hosted the Remember the Ladies Banquet at the 2010 Liberty XPO & Symposium, and the Symposium featured Rhodes.

Mayer, in an article published by The New Yorker on January 21, notes, “Another organizer of the January 6 uprising who has been subpoenaed by the congressional committee, Ali Alexander…. has long-standing ties to Ginni Thomas. …. 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, coordinated 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.’”

Ginni Thomas, according to Mayer, “has held so many leadership or advisory positions at conservative pressure groups that it’s hard to keep track of them — and many, if not all, of these groups have been involved in cases that have come before her husband.”

Mayer interviewed Norman Eisen, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, for her article on Ginni Thomas. Eisen told Mayer, “It is hard to understand how Justice Thomas can be impartial when hearing cases related to the upheaval on January 6, in light of his wife’s documented affiliation with January 6 instigators and Stop the Steal organizers…. Justice Thomas should recuse himself, given his wife’s interests in the outcome of these cases.”

1/22

https://www.alternet.org/2022/01/clarence-thomas

2/24 raw story

Democrats must take action against Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas for flouting judicial ethics as his wife pushes extremist Republican politics.

"In a sane world, Jane Mayer’s excellent piece on Ginni Thomas in The New Yorker would set off a series of events that would lead to her husband Clarence Thomas’s impeachment and removal from the Supreme Court. Ginni is involved with numerous far-right organizations and schemes that take very public positions on Court decisions across a range of social and political issues, such as last week’s 8-1 holding that Donald Trump could not block the release of documents related to the January 6 insurrection," New Republic editor Michael Tomasky wrote. "Thomas was the lone dissenter in that case. His wife sat on the advisory board of a group that sent busloads of insurrectionists to Washington that day. In addition to that, she cheered the insurrection on Facebook."

Tomasky argued that the corruption had been going on for decades.

"They’ve been doing this for years. This first came up back in 2000, in a case Mayer doesn’t even go into, when it was revealed after that election that as a Heritage Foundation staffer,Ginni was screening resumes for the incoming Bush administration while the nation awaited a ruling from the Court on the Florida recount. There was pressure then on Thomas to recuse himself," he wrote.

While the Supreme Court was deciding Obamacare, Ginni Thomas' group Liberty Central was urging the law to be repealed and Clarence Thomas was urged to recuse himself.

"He didn’t do so in either case. And in the first one, he was part of the 5-4 majority in Bush v. Gore, one of the most self-discrediting decisions in the Court’s history," he explained. "So for 20 years, Ginni Thomas has been operating in the white-hot center of far-right activist circles, involved in everything from Obamacare to abortion rights to same-sex marriage to you name it—all issues that have come before her husband. A more honorable man would recuse himself from all such cases, or indeed quietly ask his spouse to find another, less incendiary line of work that has no impact on the appearance of her husband’s ethical standards."

Thomasky wrote that if there were a liberal justice acting in a similar manner, Republicans in Congress would raise the issue and Fox News would turn it "into a symbol of liberal corruption." He suggested the GOP would hold hearings and ultimately impeach the justice.

He urged Democrats to pursue the issue.

"The House Judiciary Committee could hold hearings into Ginni’s organization and associations. The select committee on January 6 could ask her to testify and, once she refuses, subpoena her, which would require her husband to recuse himself on all January 6–related matters," he explained. "That would be hugely controversial, so they probably won’t do it. But why not? Here’s a question for you. If the Republicans retake the House this November, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee is going to be Jim Jordan. He’s probably going to lead an impeachment of Joe Biden. Think he’ll be cowed because it’s hugely controversial?"

Tomasky concluded that for Democrats, "it’s long past time to make an issue of [Clarence Thomas] and his wife."

Read the full column.

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The political activism of a Supreme Court spouse is the focus of a New York Times exposé titled “The Long Crusade of Clarence and Ginni Thomas.”

The newspaper noted her work for theCouncil for National Policy, which it said “brings together old-school Republican luminaries, Christian conservatives, Tea Party activists and MAGA operatives, with more than 400 members who include leaders of organizations like the Federalist Society, the National Rifle Association and the Family Research Council.”

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

The report noted how Ginni Thomas gained access to the Oval Office during the Trump administration.

“This article draws on hours of recordings and internal documents from groups affiliated with the Thomases; dozens of interviews with the Thomases’ classmates, friends, colleagues and critics, as well as more than a dozen Trump White House aides and supporters and some of Justice Thomas’s former clerks; and an archive of Council for National Policy videos and internal documents provided by an academic researcher in Australia, Brent Allpress,” the newspaper reported. “The reporting uncovered new details on the Thomases’ ascent: how Trump courted Justice Thomas; how Ginni Thomas used that courtship to gain access to the Oval Office, where her insistent policy and personnel suggestions so aggravated aides that one called her a “wrecking ball” while others put together an opposition-research-style report on her that was obtained by The Times; and the extent to which Justice Thomas flouted judicial-ethics guidance by participating in events hosted by conservative organizations with matters before the court.”

Read the full report.

an recap

bombshell exposé by an award-winning investigative journalist takes a deep look into lobbyist and far right wing activist and conspiracy theorist **Ginni Thomas**, and the ties she has to people, groups – and money – that have or may have business before the U.S. Supreme Court, on which her conservative husband sits.

“Is Ginni Thomas a Threat to the Supreme Court?” The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer asks point-blank. “Behind closed doors, Justice Clarence Thomas’s wife is working with many groups directly involved in controversial cases before the Court.”

Mayer writes that “Ginni Thomas has declared that America is in existential danger because of the ‘deep state’ and the ‘fascist left,’ which includes ‘transsexual fascists.'”

But that’s just a small piece of her massive reporting.

“Ginni Thomas’s political activism has caused controversy for years. For the most part, it has been dismissed as the harmless action of an independent spouse. But now the Court appears likely to secure victories for her allies in a number of highly polarizing cases—on abortion, affirmative action, and gun rights,” Mayer reveals.

How bad and how close are these ties? Thomas, unbeknownst to almost anyone, was “an undisclosed paid consultant at the conservative pressure group the Center for Security Policy, when its founder, Frank Gaffney, submitted an amicus brief to the Court supporting Trump’s Muslim travel ban.”

Did Justice Clarence Thomas know? Did the couple discuss the case, or her financial and political ties? No one knows.

And that’s just one example. Mayer notes that Ginni Thomas “has held leadership positions at conservative pressure groups that have either been involved in cases before the [Supreme] Court or have had members engaged in such cases.”

“In 2019, she announced a political project called Crowdsourcers, and said that one of her four partners would be the founder of Project Veritas, James O’Keefe. Project Veritas tries to embarrass progressives by making secret videos of them, and last year petitioned the Court to enjoin Massachusetts from enforcing a state law that bans the surreptitious taping of public officials.Another partner in Crowdsourcers, Ginni Thomas said in her announcement, was Cleta Mitchell, the chairman of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, a conservative election-law nonprofit. It, too, has had business before the Court, filing amicus briefs in cases centering on the democratic process. Thomas also currently serves on the advisory board of the National Association of Scholars, a group promoting conservative values in academia, which has filed an amicus brief before the Court in a potentially groundbreaking affirmative-action lawsuit against Harvard.”

Should Americans be concerned? Should Justice Thomas? Should Chief Justice John Roberts?

“If Ginni Thomas is intimately involved—financially or ideologically tied to the litigant—that strikes me as slicing the baloney a little thin,” David Luban, a professor of law and philosophy at Georgetown, who specializes in legal ethics, tells Mayer.

Surely Justice Thomas has the ability to separate his work and home life, right?

“Even before” Clarence Thomas’ controversial and contentious confirmation hearing, which included the accusations – labeled “credible” by many – from Anita Hill, “a friend told the Washington Post, the couple was so bonded that‘the one person [Clarence] really listens to is Virginia.'”

In 2019 then-Congressman Mark Meadows, who because White House Chief of Staff to President Donald Trump and now appears to have been intimately involved in aspects of the January 6 insurrection, told members of a “nonprofit that mobilizes conservative evangelical voters” that “Ginni was talking about how we ‘team up,’ and we actually have teamed up. And I’m going to give you something you won’t hear anywhere else—we worked through the first five days of the impeachment hearings.”

Mayer adds, “Ginni Thomas has her own links to the January 6th insurrection.”

The nearly 7000 word deep dive can be read here.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/01/31/is-ginni-thomas-a-threat-to-the-supreme-court

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is Ginni Thomas a Threat to the Supreme Court?

Behind closed doors, Justice Clarence Thomas’s wife is working with many groups directly involved in controversial cases before the Court.

By Jane Mayer

January 21, 2022

Ginni Thomas has declared that America is in existential danger because of the “deep state” and the “fascist left,” which includes “transsexual fascists.”

In December, Chief Justice John Roberts released his year-end report on the federal judiciary. According to a recent Gallup poll, the Supreme Court has its lowest public-approval rating in history—in part because it is viewed as being overly politicized. President Joe Biden recently established a bipartisan commission to consider reforms to the Court, and members of Congress have introduced legislation that would require Justices to adhere to the same types of ethics standards as other judges. Roberts’s report, however, defiantly warned everyone to back off. “The Judiciary’s power to manage its internal affairs insulates courts from inappropriate political influence,” he wrote. His statement followed a series of defensive speeches from members of the Court’s conservative wing, which now holds a super-majority of 6–3. Last fall, Justice Clarence Thomas, in an address at Notre Dame, accused the media of spreading the false notion that the Justices are merely politicians in robes. Such criticism, he said, “makes it sound as though you are just always going right to your personal preference,” adding, “They think you become like a politician!”

The claim that the Justices’ opinions are politically neutral is becoming increasingly hard to accept, especially from Thomas, whose wife, Virginia (Ginni) Thomas, is a vocal right-wing activist. She has declared that America is in existential danger because of the “deep state” and the “fascist left,” which includes “transsexual fascists.” Thomas, a lawyer who runs a small political-lobbying firm, Liberty Consulting, has become a prominent member of various hard-line groups. Her political activism has caused controversy for years. For the most part, it has been dismissed as the harmless action of an independent spouse. But now the Court appears likely to secure victories for her allies in a number of highly polarizing cases—on abortion, affirmative action, and gun rights.

Many Americans first became aware of Ginni Thomas’s activism on January 6, 2021. That morning, before the Stop the Steal rally in Washington, D.C., turned into an assault on the Capitol resulting in the deaths of at least five people, she cheered on the supporters of President Donald Trump who had gathered to overturn Biden’s election. In a Facebook post that went viral, she linked to a news item about the protest, writing, “love maga people!!!!” Shortly afterward, she posted about Ronald Reagan’s famous “A Time for Choosing” speech. Her next status update said, “god bless each of you standing up or praying.” Two days after the insurrection, she added a disclaimer to her feed, noting that she’d written the posts “before violence in US Capitol.” (The posts are no longer public.)

Later that January, the Washington Post revealed that she had also been agitating about Trump’s loss on a private Listserv, Thomas Clerk World, which includes former law clerks of Justice Thomas’s. The online discussion had been contentious. John Eastman, a former Thomas clerk and a key instigator of the lie that Trump actually won in 2020, was on the same side as Ginni Thomas, and he drew rebukes. According to the Post, Thomas eventually apologized to the group for causing internal rancor. Artemus Ward, a political scientist at Northern Illinois University and a co-author of “Sorcerers’ Apprentices,” a history of Supreme Court clerks, believes that the incident confirmed her outsized role. “Virginia Thomas has direct access to Thomas’s clerks,” Ward said. Clarence Thomas is now the Court’s senior member, having served for thirty years, and Ward estimates that there are “something like a hundred and twenty people on that Listserv.” In Ward’s view, they comprise “an élite right-wing commando movement.” Justice Thomas, he says, doesn’t post on the Listserv, but his wife “is advocating for things directly.” Ward added, “It’s unprecedented. I have never seen a Justice’s wife as involved.”

Clarence and Ginni Thomas declined to be interviewed for this article. In recent years, Justice Thomas, long one of the Court’s most reticent members, has been speaking up more in oral arguments. His wife, meanwhile, has become less publicly visible, but she has remained busy, aligning herself with many activists who have brought issues in front of the Court. She has been one of the directors of C.N.P. Action, a dark-money wing of the conservative pressure group the Council for National Policy. C.N.P. Action, behind closed doors, connects wealthy donors with some of the most radical right-wing figures in America. Ginni Thomas has also been on the advisory board of Turning Point USA, a pro-Trump student group, whose founder, Charlie Kirk, boasted of sending busloads of protesters to Washington on January 6th.

Stephen Gillers, a law professor at N.Y.U. and a prominent judicial ethicist, told me, “I think Ginni Thomas is behaving horribly, and she’s hurt the Supreme Court and the administration of justice. It’s reprehensible. If you could take a secret poll of the other eight Justices, I have no doubt that they are appalled by Virginia Thomas’s behavior. But what can they do?” Gillers thinks that the Supreme Court should be bound by a code of conduct, just as all lower-court judges in the federal system are. That code requires a judge to recuse himself from hearing any case in which personal entanglements could lead a fair-minded member of the public to question his impartiality. Gillers stressed that “it’s an appearance test,” adding, “It doesn’t require an actual conflict. The reason we use an appearance test is because we say the appearance of justice is as important as the fact of justice itself.”

The Constitution offers only one remedy for misconduct on the Supreme Court: impeachment. This was attempted once, in 1804, but it resulted in an acquittal, underscoring the independence of the judicial branch. Since then, only one Justice, Abe Fortas, has been forced to step down; he resigned in 1969, after members of Congress threatened to impeach him over alleged financial conflicts of interest. Another Justice, William O. Douglas, an environmental activist, pushed the limits of propriety by serving on the board of the Sierra Club. In 1962, he resigned from the board, acknowledging that there was a chance the group would engage in litigation that could reach the Court. The historian Douglas Brinkley, who is writing a book about the environmental movement, told me, “I think Bobby and Jack Kennedy told Douglas to cool his jets.”

In recent years, Democrats have been trying to impose stronger ethics standards on the Justices—a response, in part, to what Justice Sonia Sotomayor has described as the “stench” of partisanship on the Court. In 2016, Republicans in Congress, in an unprecedented act, refused to let President Barack Obama fill a vacancy on the Court. Trump subsequently pushed through the appointment of three hard-line conservative Justices.Last summer, Democrats in Congress introduced a bill that would require the Judicial Conference of the United States to create a binding code of conduct for members of the Supreme Court. They also proposed legislation that would require more disclosures about the financial backers behind amicus briefs—arguments submitted by “friends of the court” who are supporting one side in a case.

So far, these proposals haven’t gone anywhere, but Gillers notes that there are extant laws circumscribing the ethical behavior of all federal judges, including the Justices. Arguably, Clarence Thomas has edged unusually close to testing them. All judges, even those on the Court, are required to recuse themselves from any case in which their spouse is “a party to the proceeding” or is “an officer, director, or trustee” of an organization that is a party to a case.

Ginni Thomas has not been a named party in any case on the Court’s docket; nor is she litigating in any such case. But she has held leadership positions at conservative pressure groups that have either been involved in cases before the Court or have had members engaged in such cases. In 2019, she announced a political project called Crowdsourcers, and said that one of her four partners would be the founder of Project Veritas, James O’Keefe.Project Veritas tries to embarrass progressives by making secret videos of them, and last year petitioned the Court to enjoin Massachusetts from enforcing a state law that bans the surreptitious taping of public officials. Another partner in Crowdsourcers, Ginni Thomas said in her announcement, was Cleta Mitchell, the chairman of the Public Interest Legal Foundation,a conservative election-law nonprofit. It, too, has had business before the Court, filing amicus briefs in cases centering on the democratic process. Thomas also currently serves on the advisory board of theNational Association of Scholars, a group promoting conservative values in academia, which has filed an amicus brief before the Court in a potentially groundbreaking affirmative-action lawsuit against Harvard. And, though nobody knew it at the time, Ginni Thomas was an undisclosed paid consultant at the conservative pressure group the Center for Security Policy, when its founder, Frank Gaffney, submitted an amicus brief to the Court supporting Trump’s Muslim travel ban.

Bruce Green, a professor at Fordham specializing in legal ethics, notes, “In the twenty-first century, there’s a feeling that spouses are not joined at the hip.” He concedes, though, that “the appearance” created by Ginni Thomas’s political pursuits “is awful—they look like a mom-and-pop political-hack group, where she does the political stuff and he does the judging.” It’s hard to imagine, he told me, that the couple doesn’t discuss Court cases: “She’s got the ear of a Justice, and surely they talk about their work.” But, from the technical standpoint of judicial ethics, “she’s slightly removed from all these cases—she’s not actually the legal director.” Green feels that the conflict of interest is “close, but not close enough” to require that Thomas recuse himself.

David Luban, a professor of law and philosophy at Georgetown, who specializes in legal ethics, is more concerned. He told me, “If Ginni Thomas is intimately involved—financially or ideologically tied to the litigant—that strikes me as slicing the baloney a little thin.”

When Clarence Thomas met Ginni Lamp, in 1986, he was an ambitious Black conservative in charge of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission—and she was even more conservative and better connected than he was. Her father ran a firm that developed housing in and around Omaha, and her parents were Party activists who had formed the backbone of Barry Goldwater’s campaign in Nebraska. The writer Kurt Andersen, who grew up across the street from the family, recalls, “Her parents were the roots of the modern, crazy Republican Party. My parents were Goldwater Republicans, but even they thought the Lamp family was nuts.”

Ginni graduated from Creighton University, in Omaha, and then attended law school there. Her parents helped get her a job with a local Republican candidate for Congress, and when he won she followed him to Washington. But, after reportedly flunking the bar exam, she fell in with a cultish self-help group, Lifespring, whose members were encouraged to strip naked and mock one another’s body fat. She eventually broke away, and began working for the Chamber of Commerce, opposing “comparable worth” pay for women.She and Thomas began dating, and in 1987 they married. As a woman clashing with the women’s movement, she had found much in common with Thomas, who opposed causes supported by many Black Americans. At Thomas’s extraordinarily contentious Supreme Court confirmation hearings, in 1991, Anita Hill credibly accused him of having sexually harassed her when she was working at the E.E.O.C. Ginni Thomas later likened the experience to being stuck inside a scalding furnace. Even before then, a friend told the Washington Post, the couple was so bonded that “the one person [Clarence] really listens to is Virginia.”

Ginni Thomas had wanted to run for Congress, but once her husband was on the Supreme Court she reportedly felt professionally stuck. She moved through various jobs, including one at the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank. In 2010, she launched her lobbying firm, Liberty Consulting. Her Web site quotes a client saying that she is able to “give access to any door in Washington.”

Four years ago, Ginni Thomas inaugurated the Impact Awards—an annual ceremony to honor “courageous cultural warriors” battling the “radical ideologues on the left” who use “manipulation, mobs and deceit for their ends.” She presented the awards at luncheons paid for by United in Purpose, a nonprofit that mobilizes conservative evangelical voters. Many of the recipients have served on boards or committees with Ginni Thomas, and quite a few have had business in front of the Supreme Court, either filing amicus briefs or submitting petitions asking that the Justices hear cases. At the 2019 event, Ginni Thomas praised one of that year’s recipients, Abby Johnson, a former Planned Parenthood employee who became an anti-abortion activist, for her “riveting indictment of Planned Parenthood’s propagation of lies.” That year, Thomas also gave a prize to Mark Meadows, then a hard-line Republican in Congress, describing him as the leader “in the House right now that we were waiting for.” Meadows, in accepting the award, said, “Ginni was talking about how we ‘team up,’ and we actually have teamed up. And I’m going to give you something you won’t hear anywhere else—we worked through the first five days of the impeachment hearings.”

Thomas’s decision to bestow prizes on Johnson and Meadows underscores the complicated overlaps between her work and her husband’s. In 2020, Johnson, a year after receiving an Impact Award, filed with the Court an amicus brief supporting restrictions on abortion in Louisiana. Last year, Johnson participated in the January 6th protests, and the insurrection has since become the object of much litigation, some of which will likely end up before the Court. Last month, she went on Fox News and said that “a couple of the liberal Justices”—she singled out Justice Sotomayor by name—had been “idiotic” during oral arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Mississippi abortion case now under consideration by the Supreme Court. (Johnson didn’t respond to requests for comment.)

Soon after Ginni Thomas gave Mark Meadows an Impact Award, he became Trump’s chief of staff. This past December, he refused to comply with a subpoena from the House select committee that is investigating the Capitol attack. Cleta Mitchell, who advised Trump on how to contest Biden’s electoral victory, received an Impact Award in 2018. She has moved to block a committee subpoena of her phone records. The House of Representatives recently voted to send the Justice Department a referral recommending that it charge Meadows with criminal contempt of Congress. The same thing may well happen to Mitchell. It seems increasingly likely that some of Ginni Thomas’s Impact Award recipients will end up as parties before the Supreme Court.

The Justice Department has so far charged more than seven hundred people in connection with the insurrection, and Attorney General Merrick Garland has said that the federal government will prosecute people “at any level” who may have instigated the riots—perhaps even Trump. On January 19th, the Supreme Court rejected the former President’s request that it intervene to stop the congressional committee from accessing his records. Justice Thomas was the lone Justice to dissent. (Meadows had filed an amicus brief in support of Trump.) Ginni Thomas, meanwhile, has denounced the very legitimacy of the congressional committee. On December 15th, she and sixty-two other prominent conservatives signed an open letter to Kevin McCarthy, the House Minority Leader, demanding that the House Republican Conference excommunicate Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger for their “egregious” willingness to serve on the committee. The statement was issued by an advocacy group called the Conservative Action Project, of which Ginni Thomas has described herself as an “active” member. The group’s statement excoriated the congressional investigation as a “partisan political persecution” of “private citizens who have done nothing wrong,” and accused the committee of serving “improperly issued subpoenas.”

A current member of the Conservative Action Project told me that Ginni Thomas is part of the group not because of her qualifications but “because she’s married to Clarence.” The member asked to have his name withheld because, he said, Ginni is “volatile” and becomes “edgy” when challenged. He added, “The best word to describe her is ‘tribal.’ You’re either part of her group or you’re the enemy.”

Ginni Thomas has her own links to the January 6th insurrection. Her Web site, which touts her consulting acumen, features a glowing testimonial from Kimberly Fletcher, the president of a group called Moms for America: “Ginni’s ability to make connections and communicate with folks on the ground as well as on Capitol Hill is most impressive.” Fletcher spoke at two protests in Washington on January 5, 2021, promoting the falsehood that the 2020 election was fraudulent. At the first, which she planned, Fletcher praised the previous speaker, Representative Mary Miller, a freshman Republican from Illinois, saying, “Amen!” Other people who heard Miller’s speech called for her resignation: she’d declared, “Hitler was right on one thing—he said, ‘Whoever has the youth has the future.’ ” At the second protest, not far from the Trump International Hotel, Fletcher declared that, when her children and grandchildren one day asked her, “Where were you when the Republic was on the verge of collapse?,” she would answer, “I was right here, fighting to my last breath to save it!”

Vivian Brown, who returned a call to Moms for America, said that she would not discuss Fletcher’s testimonial for Ginni Thomas or clarify whether Fletcher had been Thomas’s business client. But the record suggests that the two have been political associates for more than a decade. A program from Liberty xpo & Symposium, a 2010 convention that has been described as the “largest conservative training event in history,” indicates that Fletcher and Thomas co-hosted a Remember the Ladies Banquet. A list of other speakers at the symposium includes Stewart Rhodes, the founder of the Oath Keepers, an extremist militia group. Rhodes was arrested earlier this month and charged, along with ten associates, with seditious conspiracy for allegedly plotting to halt the congressional certification of Biden’s electoral win by storming the Capitol. (Rhodes has pleaded not guilty.)

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.

Norman Eisen, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who, between 2009 and 2011, served as the special counsel and special assistant to the President for ethics and government reform, told me that “it is hard to understand how Justice Thomas can be impartial when hearing cases related to the upheaval on January 6th, in light of his wife’s documented affiliation with January 6th instigators and Stop the Steal organizers.” He argues that “Justice Thomas should recuse himself, given his wife’s interests in the outcome of these cases.”

Gillers, of N.Y.U., and other legal scholars say that there is little chance of such a recusal. Justice Thomas has recused himself at least once before, from a 1996 case involving a military academy that his son was attending. But, as Eisen observed, though Ginni Thomas’s activism has attracted criticism for years, Clarence Thomas has never acknowledged it as a conflict of interest.

Recusals on the Supreme Court are extremely rare, in part because substitutes are not permitted, as they are for judges on lower courts. Yet several other Justices have stepped aside from cases to avoid even the appearance of misconduct. Justice Stephen Breyer recuses himself from any case that has been heard by his brother, Charles Breyer, a federal judge in the Northern District of California. “It’s about the appearance of impropriety,” Charles Breyer told me. “Laypeople would think you would favor your brother over the merits of the case. It’s [done] to make people believe that the Supreme Court is not influenced by relationships.” Justice Breyer also recused himself from a case involving the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, because his wife had previously worked there.

Charles Breyer told me that, although Justices sometimes “might have a right not to recuse, that doesn’t change the question, which is: How does that affect the appearance of impropriety?” When I asked him whether the Justices confront one another about potential conflicts of interest, he said, “My guess is that they don’t discuss it. They leave it entirely up to the independent judgment. They wouldn’t dare suggest recusal—it’s part of the way they get along with one another.”

In 2021, Justice Brett Kavanaugh recused himself, without explanation, from a case apparently related to a family member. According to Gabe Roth, the executive director of Fix the Court, a nonprofit advocating for reforms to the federal judiciary, an amicus brief had been filed by a cosmetics trade association that Kavanaugh’s father used to run.

The spouses of other Justices have taken steps to avoid creating conflicts of interest in the first place. When Ruth Bader Ginsburg joined the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, her husband, Martin Ginsburg—then one of the country’s most successful tax lawyers—left his law firm and turned to teaching. After John Roberts was nominated to be a Justice, his wife, Jane Sullivan Roberts, retired from practicing law and resigned from a leadership role in Feminists for Life, an anti-abortion group.

In 2004, Justice Antonin Scalia famously defended his decision to continue presiding over a case that involved former Vice-President Dick Cheney after it was revealed that the two men had gone duck hunting together while the case was in the Court’s docket. Scalia argued, in essence, that Washington is a small town where important people tend to socialize. But in 2003 Scalia recused himself in a case addressing whether the mention of God in the Pledge of Allegiance violated the Constitution’s separation of church and state—because, several months before oral arguments began, he’d given a speech belittling the litigant’s arguments.

Ginni Thomas has complained that she and her husband have received more criticism than have two well-known liberal jurists with politically active spouses: Marjorie O. Rendell continued to serve on the appeals court in Pennsylvania while her husband at the time, Ed Rendell, served as the state’s governor; Stephen Reinhardt, an appeals-court judge in California, declined to recuse himself from cases in which the American Civil Liberties Union was involved, even though his wife, Ramona Ripston, led a branch of the group in Southern California.

Ethics standards may be changing, however. Cornelia T. L. Pillard, a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, currently handles a spousal conflict of interest more rigorously. She is married to David Cole, the national legal director for the A.C.L.U., and recuses herself from any case in which the A.C.L.U. has been involved, whether at a national or local level—and regardless of whether her husband worked on the case.

Roth, of Fix the Court, told me that there is an evident need “for a clearer and more exacting recusal standard at the Supreme Court—especially now, as it’s constantly being thrust into partisan battles, and as the public’s faith in its impartiality is waning.”

Traditionally, judges have not been particularly fastidious about potential conflicts of interest connected to amicus briefs. But that standard may be changing, too. As the number of partisan political issues facing the judicial branch has grown, so has the number of these briefs. Many of them are being filed by opaquely funded dark-money groups, whose true financial sponsors are concealed, thus enabling invisible thumbs to press on the scales of justice. Paul Collins, a political scientist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, who has studied the use of amicus briefs, told me, “There’s been an almost linear increase in the number of them since the World War Two era. Now it’s the rare case that doesn’t have one.” The reason, he said, is that, “more and more, the courts are seen as a venue for social change.” He explained that political groups, many with secret donors, are “using the courts the way they used to use Congress—basically, amicus briefs are a means of lobbying.”

The problem has become so widespread that in 2018 the rules for appellate-court judges were amended to make it possible for judges to strike any amicus brief that might force them to recuse themselves. There has been no such reckoning at the Supreme Court—not even when close political associates of Ginni Thomas’s have filed amicus briefs. One such associate is Frank Gaffney, a defense hawk best known for having made feverish claims suggesting that Obama is a Muslim and that Saddam Hussein’s regime was involved in the Oklahoma City bombings.Leaked documents show that Gaffney was a colleague of Ginni Thomas’s at Groundswell as far back as 2013.Gaffney was a proponent of Trump’s reactionary immigration policies, including, most vociferously, of the Administration’s Muslim travel ban. As these restrictions were hit by lawsuits, Gaffney’s nonprofit, the Center for Security Policy, signed thefirst of two big contracts with Liberty Consulting. According to documents that Gaffney’s group filed with the I.R.S., in 2017 and 2018 it paid Ginni Thomas a total of more than two hundred thousand dollars.

It’s not entirely clear where Gaffney’s nonprofit got the funds to hire Liberty Consulting. (Gaffney didn’t respond to interview requests.) But, according to David Armiak—the research director at the Center for Media and Democracy, which tracks nonprofit political spending—one of the biggest donors to Gaffney’s group in 2017 was a pro-Trump political organization, Making America Great, whose chairman, the heiressRebekah Mercer,was among Trump’s biggest backers. While two hundred thousand dollars was being passed from Trump backers to Gaffney to Ginni Thomas, the Supreme Court agreed to hear legal challenges to Trump’s travel restrictions. In August, 2017, Gaffney and six other advocates submitted an amicus brief to the Court in support of the restrictions, arguing that “the challenge of Islam must be confronted.”

That December, as the case was still playing out, Ginni Thomas bestowed one of her Impact Awards on Gaffney, introducing him “as an encourager to me and a great friend” but giving no hint that his group was paying her firm. The Impact ceremony was held at the Trump International Hotel, and, according to another guest, Jerry Johnson, Justice Thomas was in attendance. Johnson later recalled that the Justice sat in front of him and was a “happy warrior,” pleased to be watching his wife “running the meeting.” Throughout the 2017 and 2018 sessions, as various challenges to the travel restrictions were considered by the Court, Justice Thomas consistently took a hard pro-Trump line. Finally, in June, 2018, Thomas and four other Justices narrowly upheld the final version of the restrictions.

It’s impossible to know whether Thomas was influenced by his wife’s lucrative contract with Gaffney, by Gaffney’s amicus brief, or by her celebration of Gaffney at the awards ceremony. Given the Justice’s voting history, it’s reasonable to surmise that he would have supported the travel restrictions no matter what. Nevertheless, the lawyers on the losing side of the case surely would have wanted to know about Ginni Thomas’s financial contract with Gaffney. Judges, in their annual financial disclosures, are required to report the source of their spouses’ incomes. But Justice Thomas, in his disclosures in 2017 and 2018, failed to mention the payments from Gaffney’s group. Instead, he put down a curiously low book value for his wife’s lobbying firm, claiming in both years that her company was worth only between fifteen and fifty thousand dollars.

Roth, of Fix the Court, told me that, at the very least, Justice Thomas should be asked to amend his financial statements from those years—as he did in 2011, after it became public that he hadn’t disclosed the six hundred and eighty-six thousand dollars that his wife had earned at the Heritage Foundation between 2003 and 2007. Beyond that, Roth said, “the Justices should, as a rule, disqualify themselves from cases in which a family member or the family member’s employer has filed an amicus brief.” In Congress, the Democratic senator Sheldon Whitehouse, of Rhode Island, is pushing for reform. Amicus briefs, he told me, are “a form of lobbying that has two terrible aspects—the interests behind them are hidden, and they are astonishingly effective in terms of the win rate.” He added, “They open up real avenues for secret mischief.”

In January, 2019, Ginni Thomas secured for Gaffney the access that her Web site promises. As Maggie Haberman, of the Times, and Jonathan Swan, of Axios, have reported, not long after Clarence and Ginni Thomas had a private dinner at the White House with Donald and Melania Trump, the President’s staff gave in to a months-long campaign by Ginni to bring her, Gaffney, and several other associates to the White House to press the President on policy and personnel issues. The White House was not informed that Gaffney’s group had been paying Liberty Consulting for the previous two years. (Gaffney’s group did not report signing a contract with Liberty Consulting for 2019.)

The White House meeting was held in the Roosevelt Room, and by all accounts it was uncomfortable. Thomas opened by saying that she didn’t trust everyone in the room, then pressed Trump to purge his Administration of disloyal members of the “deep state,” handing him an enemies list that she and Groundswell had compiled. Some of the participants prayed, warning that gay marriage, which the Supreme Court legalized in 2015, was undermining morals in America.

One participant told me he’d heard that Trump had wanted to humor Ginni Thomas because he was hoping to talk her husband into retiring, thus opening up another Court seat. Trump, given his manifold legal problems, also saw Justice Thomas as a potentially important ally—and genuinely liked him. But the participant told me that the President considered Ginni Thomas “a wacko,” adding, “She never would have been there if not for Clarence. She had access because her last name was Thomas.”

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 2018Barbara 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. And many, if not all, of these groups have been involved in cases that have come before her husband. Her Web site lists the National Association of Scholars—the group that has filed an amicus brief in the lawsuit against Harvard—among her “endorsed charities.” The group’s brief claims that the affirmative-action policies used by the Harvard admissions department are discriminatory. Though the plaintiffs have already lost in two lower courts, they are counting on the Supreme Court’s new conservative super-majority to side with them, even though doing so would reverse decades of precedent. Peter Wood, the president of the N.A.S., is another Impact Award recipient. So, too, is Robert George, a legal scholar at Princeton who, according to the N.A.S.’s Web site, serves with Ginni Thomas on its advisory board. (He says that he has “not been active” on the board.) He received a “Lifetime” Impact Award from Ginni Thomas in 2019, and recently filed an amicus brief before the Supreme Court, in support of Mississippi’s ban on nearly all abortions after fifteen weeks of pregnancy.

In April, 2020, when Ginni Thomas was serving as one of eight members on the C.N.P. Action board, it was chaired by Kelly Shackelford, the president and C.E.O. of First Liberty, a faith-based litigation group that is currently involved in several major cases before the Court. Last week, to the surprise of many observers, the Court agreed to hear a case in which First Liberty is defending a football coach at a public high school in Washington State who was fired for kneeling and praying on the fifty-yard line immediately after games. Richard Katskee, the legal director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, who is defending the school board, told me that the case was “huge,” and could overturn fifty years of settled law. Shackelford’s group is also the co-initiator of another case before the Court: a challenge to a Maine law prohibiting the state from using public funds to pay parochial-school tuition for students living in areas far from public schools.

In addition to these cases, First Liberty has filed lawsuits that challenge covid-19 restrictions on religious grounds—an issue that has come before the Court—and Ginni Thomas and Shackelford have served together on the steering committee of the Save Our Country Coalition, which has called covid-19 health mandates “unconstitutional power grabs.” In a phone interview, Shackelford told me that he couldn’t see why Ginni Thomas’s work with him posed a conflict of interest for Justice Thomas. “It’s no big deal, if you look at the law on this,” he said. It would be different, he argued, if there were a financial interest involved, or if she were arguing First Liberty’s cases before the Court herself—but, he said, “almost everyone in America is connected through six degrees of separation.”

Another of Ginni Thomas’s fellow-directors on the C.N.P. Action board in 2020 was J. Kenneth Blackwell, a former Ohio secretary of state who is tied to one of the most consequential gun cases currently under consideration by the Supreme Court. In 2020, he was on the National Rifle Association’s board of directors, and at the time the gun group’s official affiliate in New York was challenging the state’s restrictions on carrying firearms in public spaces. Earlier this term, the Court heard a related challenge, and a decision is expected later this year. (Blackwell didn’t respond to an interview request.) Meanwhile, the Web site friendsofnra.org currently boasts that a winner of its youth competition had the opportunity to meet with “the wife of current Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.”

For lawyers involved in cases before the Supreme Court, it can be deeply disturbing to know that Ginni Thomas is an additional opponent. In 2019, David Dinielli, the visiting lecturer at Yale Law School, was a deputy legal director of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which had submitted an amicus brief in a gay-rights case before the Court. He told me he was acutely aware that Ginni Thomas and other members of the Council for National Policy loathed the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks right-wing hate groups. In 2017, C.N.P. Action directed its members to “commit to issuing one new post on Facebook and Twitter each week about the Southern Poverty Law Center to discredit them.” In Thomas’s leaked 2018 speech to the Council for National Policy, she denounced the S.P.L.C. for calling the Family Research Council—which is militantly opposed to L.G.B.T.Q. rights—a hate group.

For Dinielli, the idea that a Justice’s spouse belonged to a group that had urged its members to repeatedly attack his organization was “counter to everything you’d expect if you want to get a fair shake” before the Court. He explained, “These activities aren’t just political. They’re aimed at raising up or denigrating actors specifically in front of the Supreme Court. She’s one step away from holding up a sign in front of her husband saying ‘This person is a pedophile.’ ”

Dinielli went on, “The Justices sit literally above where the lawyers are. For these people to do the job they were tasked with, they have to maintain that level. But this degrades it, mocks it, and threatens it.” He warned, “Since the Court doesn’t have an army, it relies on how it behaves to command respect. Once the veneer cracks, it’s very hard to get it back."

BAK

GINNI

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a former top FBI official who served as Chief of the Bureau’s Counterespionage Section and led the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election says it’s “concerning” that Ginni Thomas signed a letter attacking the House January 6 Select Committee.

Peter Strzok, who also led the FBI’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a personal email server and for a short time served on the Mueller Investigation, responded to Tuesday’s social media eruption over the resurfaced letter signed by Thomas, a far right wing conspiracy theorist and lobbyist who happens to be married to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

That letter calls for U.S. Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger to be expelled from the House Republican conference, which would also involve stripping them of their committee assignments.

Strzok was more focused on the current makeup of the Supreme Court, and other points of the letter which was signed in December by Thomas and more than 60 other mostly far right wing conservatives – making it a veritable who’s who of well-known extreme conservative activists including the head of an anti-LGBTQ hate group.

“Which is more concerning: That the spouse of a SC Justice recently signed a letter calling the Jan 6 Cmttee ‘an overtly partisan political persecution that brings disrespect to our country’s rule of law [and] legal harassment to private citizens who have done nothing wrong’ Or,” Strzok wrote, “The fact that the former President who encouraged those ‘private citizens who have done nothing wrong’ to violently oppose the peaceful transfer of power appointed three of nine Justices to the Supreme Court?”

More than 700 Americans have been charged in conjunction with the January 6 attack.

The letter, resurfaced by Charlie Sykes at the never-Trump media outlet The Bulwark, also claims, falsely, that the January 6 Committee is using “improperly issued subpoenas and other investigatory tactics…for the sake of political harassment and demagoguery.”

On the morning of the January 6 attack Ginni Thomas, as Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern has pointed out, expressed support for the so-called protestors, declaring “LOVE MAGA PEOPLE!!!!”...[twt]

omfg

no lnx

lAW SCHOOLS

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

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

By KATHRYN RUBINO

onOctober 5, 2021

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

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

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

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

From ABOVE THE LAW

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

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

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

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

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

who is poster boy of clarence clerks?

https://www.alternet.org/2021/02/economy-republicans/

stoehr edit bd

I trust the New York Times' David Leonhardt knows what he's talking about when it comes to economics and economic policy. But I feel I have something to contribute to the question he posed Tuesday. Why are Republican presidents so bad for the economy? In addition to considering the Gross Domestic Product and other empirical factors, we ought to consider a moral one, to wit: the reason the United States fails to thrive under GOP presidents is because they so often seek out more and better ways to lie to us.

These lies are intentional. They are ubiquitous. They are huge. And the bigger they are, the more pain they cause, over years and over decades. If the lies are not directly related to the economy, they are certainly related indirectly, as most of them are conceived and motivated by the desire for riches, with the net effect being the crowding out of the many from the center of American democracy for the benefit of the few.

Fortunately, truth now has more in its favor than good people doing what they think is right. It has partisanship on its side.

A very, very short list: Tax decreases pay for themselves. Tax increases hurt job-creators. Regulations hurt business. The minimum wage hurts workers. Redistribution is theft. Welfare is addiction. Abortion is murder. Feminism is reverse sexism. Equality is reverse racism. Iraq had WMDs. Obama wasn't an American. Voter fraud is rampant. All/Blue Lives Matter. Political correctness. Cancel culture. Trump won.

There are more, but let's not forget the most obvious and deadly lie in recent years, to our bodies and our republic—that the covid pandemic is nothing much to worry about, indeed worrying about it means you're on the other side of a president trying to root out a conspiracy against "the people" by Democrats in league with a global (Jewish) cabal of satanists who fornicate with children before eating them, a conspiracy so evil the Democrats in the Congress deserve nothing less than capture and assassination.

Donald Trump was the most conspicuous of all the liars, it goes without saying, but Republican presidents going back to my childhood lied with such frequency, felicity and nuance the inevitable result was four years of hourly nonstop fire-hose lying. The outcome of that has been half a million deaths by the covid by the end of this month, and a national economy that hasn't been this bad since 1946. Leonhardt and others are correct, of course, in looking at interest rates, the unemployment rate, GDP and other empirical factors in order to answer the question of why Republicans fail so badly. But let's not forget that lying causes pain and that suffering often comes in economic form.

The bigger the lie, the bigger the pain inflicted on everyone until the lie and the pain are so nearly total that the distinction between believing and not believing the lie is a distinction without a moral difference. The Post reported Tuesday that Ginni Thomas, wife of US Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, apologized to her husband's former clerks for her role in supporting the January 6 protest-turned-insurrection. What's astounding isn't that Ginni Thomas admitted obliquely to having some responsibility for the republic's near-death. What's astounding is she seems to continue to believe the lie—Trump won—even after that near-death experience.

Clarence Thomas' former clerks constitute a "blue-ribbon membership," according to the Post, with major influence inside and outside the courts. Yet some of its members appear to believe what Ginni Thomas believes. "Many of my friends and I had been praying our knees off that January 6 would see light and truth being shed on what we believe in our hearts was likely a stolen election," wrote Wendy Stone Long, and that eventually "President Trump would be determined to be the legitimate winner."

What does it mean when a society's cream of the crop continues to believe lies so big they nearly bring down a republic? It means the rest of us, who have nothing like the influence these people have, must spend valuable time and energy sorting through the lies, organizing ourselves and convincing as many people as possible, but especially those at the very top, that lies they espouse or spread or both are causing pain not just to the common people, but to the nation as a whole, including them. In the process, this drains the economy of resources that could be used for something more productive.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/heres-the-case-for-impeaching-clarence-thomas-the-most-corrupt-supreme-court-justice

With the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett, the radical right has completed its long and painstaking project to seize control of the Supreme Court, and to reshape constitutional law for generations to come. Barrett's elevation will give conservatives a 6-3 majority on the court and usher in a crisis of legitimacy for the third branch of government not seen since the 1930s.

The right's triumph has prompted anger and soul-searching among Democrats and progressives, sparking calls to expand the number of Supreme Court justices, echoing Franklin D. Roosevelt's unsuccessful effort to add additional seats to the high tribunal in the midst of the Great Depression.

Enlarging the Supreme Court is entirely within the power of Congress, as the number of justices is not set by the Constitution. The court's composition has, in fact, varied over time, ranging from six justices when the Constitution was ratified to 10 in 1863. The panel was reduced to nine by an act of Congress in 1867 and has remained there since then by statute.

While Democrats should definitely demand court expansion if they retake the White House and the Senate and hold the House, there is at least one additional step they should take to address the court's legitimacy crisis—the impeachment of its most corrupt member—Clarence Thomas.

Thomas should be impeached on charges of perjury for allegedly lying in his annual financial disclosure statements for over a decade and, more fundamentally, for lying in his 1991 confirmation hearing about his disgusting history of sexual harassment.

Although federal judges are appointed for life, their terms are subject to "good behavior." Like all civil officers of the United States, they can be removed, under Article II, Section 4 of the Constitution, "on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors."

The impeachment process, as we were reminded by the experience of President Trump, consists of two basic steps: First, members of the House of Representatives impeach an official by adopting, on a simple majority vote, one or more articles of impeachment, which read very much like a criminal complaint or a grand jury indictment. Step two proceeds with a trial in the Senate, which has the power to convict on a two-thirds ballot. Ouster from office follows conviction automatically, and cannot be appealed.

Only three presidents—Andrew Johnson, Bill Clinton, and Trump—have been impeached in our history, and all were exonerated in their Senate trials. A fourth, Richard Nixon, resigned in the face of near-certain impeachment and removal for his role in the Watergate scandal.

The impeachment of federal judges, by contrast, has been far more common. To date, 15 federal judges have been impeached, and eight have been convicted by the Senate. Indeed, the only Senate impeachment trials resulting in convictions have involved judges.

Since 1988, three federal judges have been impeached and removed on charges involving perjury. The last judge to be impeached was G. Thomas Porteous Jr. of the Eastern District of Louisiana, a Clinton appointee who was convicted by the Senate and ejected from office in December 2010 for accepting bribes and, among other derelictions, signing false financial declarations under penalty of perjury.

Thomas, if targeted, would become just the second Supreme Court Justice to be impeached. In 1804, the House charged Associate Justice Samuel Chase with eight articles of impeachment for engaging in arbitrary and oppressive conduct and expressing political bias while serving as a trial judge in certain Sedition Act cases during an era when Supreme Court justices also conducted trials. An outspoken Federalist and supporter of John Adams, Chase incurred the ire of Thomas Jefferson and his Republican allies. Chase was acquitted the following year in a Senate trial presided over by Vice President Aaron Burr. (The chief justice of the Supreme Court presides only in presidential impeachment trials.)

As the Senate's website instructs, Chase's exoneration has since been construed to insulate the "judiciary from… congressional attacks based on disapproval of judges' opinions." Guided by the Chase example, an impeachment proceeding against Thomas could not be initiated because of policy differences Democrats may have with him, even though Thomas has demonstrated a flagrant disregard for the constitutional rights of minorities, women and criminal defendants during his tenure on the Supreme Court.

Like Porteous, however, Thomas is vulnerable to perjury allegations.

Under the 1978 Ethics in Government Act, all high-ranking federal officials are required to file yearly financial disclosure statements for themselves and their spouses to safeguard against conflicts of interest. But for 13 years, Thomas failed to report his wife Virginia's earnings on the mandatory annual financial disclosure forms that he signed under penalty of perjury, indicating that his spouse had no non-investment income when in fact she was steadily employed in high-level jobs as a policy analyst and an outspoken conservative activist.

According to Common Cause, Virginia—who is also a lawyer and a one-time aide to former Republican House Majority Leader Dick Armey—received more than $686,000 between 2003 and 2007, working for the Heritage Foundation. In 2011, claiming incredulously that he had misunderstood his reporting responsibilities, Thomas amended his financial disclosures, which can now be examined on the OpenSecrets.org website.

As University of Colorado law professor Paul Campos pointed out in a 2011 Daily Beast article, "The relevant question on the disclosure form isn't complicated: Even if Justice Thomas wasn't a lawyer, he shouldn't have needed to hire one to explain to him that the box marked NONE next to the phrase 'Spouse's Non-Investment Income' should only be checked if his spouse had no non-investment income." In Campos' view, Thomas' omissions were "criminal."

Thomas' alleged perjury in his testimony before Senate Judiciary Committee in 1991 was of a far greater magnitude...

moyers 1020

ANNE NELSON: I think that statement would have required someone who could restrain their ambition. And for me, the moment of truth in those hearings came when she was asked if it was against the law to interfere with the vote in a federal election. And she couldn't answer that either. Which to me demonstrated either an ignorance of the law or a disregard for the law that is truly alarming on the eve of an election.

BILL MOYERS: I was noticing in a story in THE WASHINGTON POST that the Council for National Policy had a three-day meeting in Southern California. And one member — a woman named Rachel Bovard — described Ginni Thomas, the wife of Justice Thomas as a crucial link to the White House. “She is one of the most powerful and fierce women in Washington. She is really the tip of the spear in these efforts." Did you come across Ginni Thomas in your book?

ANNE NELSON: I came across her repeatedly, and she has risen to the rank of the executive committee of CNP Action, which is their lobbying arm. She also is very active with another CNP member named Charlie Kirk who runs something called Turning Point U.S.A. She's also a so-called correspondent for a right-wing media platform called The Daily Caller, which is owned by members of the Council for National Policy. So, Ginni Thomas, who is from Omaha is married to a Supreme Court justice and is both a public and behind-the-scenes radical right-wing activist across the country. I don't know what the protocol is for spouses of Supreme Court justices, but I find it difficult to believe that people think this is appropriate.

BILL MOYERS: But what struck me about that is that so many of the characters that are now on stage in the third and fourth year of Trump's administration are clearly linked by the Council for National Policy, something few Americans have heard of. How did you come upon it?

voter felon suppression 2020, pal of ginni and jok?

Cash matters, but O’Keefe’s personal connections are where the depth and seamlessness of this coordination with the Republican Party become truly apparent. They also offer a glimpse into the vast network that has formed to suppress the vote this fall—a network years in the making, of which Project Veritas is but a humble node.

Take litigator William Consovoy, the legal point man on many of the conservative-funded election integrity cases pursued during the Trump era. He is, like O’Keefe, a New Jersey native with a long history in local Republican politics. A former law clerk for Clarence Thomas, Consovoy is also reportedly a friend of Federalist Society Executive Vice President Leonard Leo, whose nephew David Maxham has been a friend of O’Keefe’s since their undergraduate years at Rutgers. (Maxham, naturally, was also invited to O’Keefe’s wedding.)

This year, Leonard Leo has stepped aside from day-to-day management of the Federalist Society to run a new conservative donor group, CRC Advisors, that is pouring money into Consovoy’s legal challenges in key battleground states across the country. CRC has been steering money into something called the “Honest Elections Project,” a fictitious name filed in Virginia for Leo’s old group the Judicial Education Project, now officially called the 85 Fund. As The Guardian reported, 99 percent of the Judicial Education Project’s funding in 2018 was a single $7.8 million donation funneled through Donors Trust.guk?

With generous assistance from the Honest Elections Project and the RNC, Consovoy’s firm Consovoy McCarthy PLLC has recently brought cases against the re-enfranchising of felons in Florida and sued to block California’s plans to deliver absentee ballots to all of the state’s registered voters. Consovoy has contributed to related motions filed in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Nevada, Michigan, and Texas, where Ken Paxton’s victory against mail-in voting in May earned praise from President Trump on Twitter.

an 220

Nancy LeTourneau / Washington Monthly February 25, 2020

You might be wondering why Trump decided to go on the attack against Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor this week.

To understand why Sotomayor has suddenly become a target, it is helpful to talk about the way that this administration is changing how presidential policies are being handled in the courts.

One of the reasons Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is so committed to stacking the courts with extremist conservative judges is that, as I pointed out last week, the Trump administration’s incompetence has led to an abysmal record in the courts. Whereas previous administrations prevailed in the courts 80 percent of the time, this president has failed in over 90 percent of the cases his administration has argued.

What this often means is that lower courts issue injunctions against the implementation of the administration’s policies while the case works its way through the courts. Attorney General William Barr complained about that practice in his speech to the Federalist Society.

First used in 1963, and sparely since then until recently, these court orders enjoin enforcement of a policy not just against the parties to a case, but against everyone. Since President Trump took office, district courts have issued over 40 nationwide injunctions against the government. By comparison, during President Obama’s first two years, district courts issued a total of two nationwide injunctions against the government…

It is no exaggeration to say that virtually every major policy of the Trump Administration has been subjected to immediate freezing by the lower courts. No other President has been subjected to such sustained efforts to debilitate his policy agenda.

Of course, Barr didn’t mention that those major policies have been frozen by the lower courts because the Trump administration failed to make a coherent case in support of them, so the courts have temporarily halted their implementation. As an example, this is what Coral Davenport wrote about their efforts to roll back Obama’s fuel efficiency standards.

In January, administration staff members appointed by President Trump sent a draft of the scaled-back fuel economy standards to the White House, but six people familiar with the documents described them as “Swiss cheese,” sprinkled with glaring numerical and spelling errors (such as “Massachusettes”), with 111 sections marked “text forthcoming.”

The cost-benefit analysis showed that consumers would lose more money than they would gain. And, because the new auto pollution rule lacks the detailed technical analyses required by law, the regulations would be unlikely to withstand court challenges…

More basic issues holding up the regulations point to another problem: the skeleton crew of inexperienced political appointees who are heading the drafting process may not be up to a job that would usually be handled by career federal workers with decades of expertise.

The Trump administration’s response to these failures has been to go directly to the Supreme Court and ask them to expedite emergency relief from the injunctions of the lower courts.

Professor Steve Vladeck, a CNN contributor who has studied the issue of emergency requests, noted in a recent piece for the Harvard Law Review that Solicitor General Noel Francisco has been more aggressive in seeking to “short-circuit” the ordinary course of appellate litigation than his immediate predecessors.

In an interview, Vladeck noted that Francisco has not always prevailed, “but he has done so far more often than his predecessors.”

“This is now the 24th time that the Trump administration has asked the Supreme Court to put a lower court decision on hold in less than three years compared to a total of eight such requests during the 16 years of the George W. Bush and Obama administration’s combined,” Vladeck said.

That is precisely what sparked Justice Sotomayor’s critique against the conservative justices on the Supreme Court, who have consistently been willing to grant that relief to the Trump administration.

The justice wrote that granting emergency applications often upends “the normal appellate process” while “putting a thumb on the scale in favor of the party that won.” Targeting her conservative colleagues, she said “most troublingly, the Court’s recent behavior” has benefited “one litigant over all others.”…

“Claiming one emergency after another, the Government has recently sought stays in an unprecedented number of cases,” Sotomayor said. “It is hard to say what is more troubling,” she said, pointing to the case at hand, “that the Government would seek this extraordinary relief seemingly as a matter of course, or that the Court would grant it.” She noted that in the case at hand, the lower court order that the Supreme Court lifted was narrow and only impacted one state.

That is what has placed Sotomayor’s name in the news. I seriously doubt, however, that Trump understands or cares about these legal maneuverings, which is why he couldn’t articulate his objections to Sotomayor during a news conference in India today.

The reason Trump is on the attack against liberal Supreme Court justices probably has more to do with a case that is being made against Justice Clarence Thomas. As we’ve seen, the president is in the midst of a purge of federal employees who don’t demonstrate enough loyalty to him. Jonathan Swan reported that Ginni Thomas—the wife of Clarence Thomas—has been deeply involved in lobbying on behalf of a purge, providing the administration with lists of who needs to go as well as potential replacements.

In response, there have been calls for Thomas to recuse himself on matters related to Trump and his administration. Trump’s call for Sotomayor and Ginsberg to recuse themselves is not only a way to further politicize the Supreme Court; it also provides his media enablers with a distraction from the issues surrounding Thomas and the ability to pretend that both sides do it.

As I’ve been suggesting for a while now, the Supreme Court is scheduled to issue rulings in several explosive cases prior to the November election. One of them has to do with whether or not Trump will be required to release his tax returns. From everything we’ve seen, that is the hill that this president is prepared to defend at all costs. And according to CNN, the latest dissent issued by Sotomayor could indicate that tensions are rising as the justices consider these major cases.

The justices are behind schedule in releasing opinions, and court watchers have questioned if the delay is caused in part by Chief Justice John Roberts’ required participation in the impeachment proceedings, or if the justices themselves are fractured over a number of cases. Although Sotomayor wrote alone, her opinion suggests unease behind the scenes.

All of this is probably just the opening salvo in what promises to be a very contentious season for the Supreme Court.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/heres-the-real-reason-trump-is-lashing-out-at-supreme-court-justices-as-his-cronies-try-to-short-circuit-the-judicial-process/

http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/hate-had-a-meeting-in-the-white-house/

President Donald Trump met with two representatives of groups that lobby for bigoted anti-immigrant policies at the White House this month, The New York Times reports.

Frank Gaffney of the anti-Muslim hate group Center for Security Policy and Rosemary Jenks of the anti-immigrant group NumbersUSA joined Rep. Louie Gohmert’s chief of staff Connie Hair in a meeting with Trump and a handful of White House aides. During the meeting, multiple comments were put forward to the president that many Americans would find offensive, including claims that gay marriage was destroying America.

In addition, some members of the group complained to the president that their suggested candidates for administration positions had been ignored. Some reportedly “also accused White House aides of blocking Trump supporters from getting jobs in the administration”—a claim popularized in pro-Trump social media circles.

The meeting was organized by Ginni Thomas, a right-wing activist who is married to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Thomas’ political activity has raised concerns about conflicts of interest for her husband, the Times reported, and she once hired a young activist who was ousted from the organization Turning Point USA after writing in a text message: “I HATE BLACK PEOPLE. Like fuck them all . . . I hate blacks. End of story.”

Thomas founded a conservative advocacy group that would later merge with the Patrick Henry Center for Individual Liberty. She used to write columns for The Daily Caller and was once employed at the Heritage Foundation.

In 2017, Thomas gave awards to right-wing activists including James O’Keefe, Gaffney, and Fox News host Sean Hannity. She has appeared as a speaker alongside her husband at an Eagle Forum conference in Washington, where anti-LGBTQ rhetoric was a staple in multiple presentations. In 2013, Thomas discussed “cultural Marxism” with the late anti-feminist activist Phyllis Schlafly—a conspiracy theory that was originally coined by an anti-Semites and white nationalists in the 1990s that alleged Jews were trying to degrade Western societies for their own benefits.

The White House meeting was scheduled for this month after “months of delay.” From The Times:

For 60 minutes Mr. Trump sat, saying little but appearing taken aback, the three people said, as the group also accused White House aides of blocking Trump supporters from getting jobs in the administration.

It is unusual for the spouse of a sitting Supreme Court justice to have such a meeting with a president, and some close to Mr. Trump said it was inappropriate for Ms. Thomas to have asked to meet with the head of a different branch of government.

A vocal conservative, Ms. Thomas has long been close to what had been the Republican Party’s fringes, and extremely outspoken against Democrats. Her activism has raised concerns of conflicts of interest for her husband, who is perhaps the most conservative member of the Supreme Court.

Gaffney and the Center for Security Policy have enjoyed increased access to government officials in the Trump era and cheered on the Trump administration’s anti-Muslim rhetoric and initiatives, such as the travel ban. NumbersUSA began as a program of a foundation run by John Tanton, who advocated for immigration policies that would maintain United States’ majority-white status. (Tanton has also published, through his The Social Contract Press, white nationalists and anti-Semites.) In 2015, NumbersUSA chided Trump for not being anti-immigrant enough.

jared holt, corrected

http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/ginni-thomas-teams-up-with-james-okeefe-in-dark-money-operation-to-protect-trump/

Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and a right-wing political activist, has launched a new set of organizations meant to “protect President Trump” and attack Democrats and left-leaning organizations, according to an article published by The Intercept this week.

The well-connected Thomas, a former Heritage Foundation staffer, presented her plans to build a “robust infrastructure” to a meeting of the secretive Council for National Policy last month. The CNP is a strategy-development-and-sharing network that includes leaders across the U.S. religious and political Right, including people like neo-Confederate Christian Reconstrucionist Michael Peroutka. CNP members pushed Trump to sign an executive order on religious liberty.

Thomas is planning to build a “robust infrastructure” of affiliated organizations. Among her partners in the new project are longtime right-wing operative Richard Viguerie; undercover videographer and political trickster James O’Keefe; Republican campaign lawyer Cleta Mitchell; and Bill Meierling, chief marketing officer for the American Legislative Exchange Council, a matchmaker for corporate lobbyists and conservative legislators willing to do their bidding.

A slide from Thomas’s presentation at Council for National Policy notes, “Long Term teams taking shape will focus on Education, Media, Entertainment/Arts, Faith, Corporate/Economic, Government, Science, and more”—nearly identical to the list of spheres of cultural influence targeted by Religious Right proponents of Seven Mountains Dominionism.

The Intercept also reported that Thomas had spoken at another CNP event last October, at which she declared, “The hard left is in control of the Democrat Party … And they’re controlling the media and corporations and Hollywood and education.”

This January, Thomas organized a White House meeting where she was joined by anti-Muslim activist Frank Gaffney and others where, among other things, they complained that White House aides were blocking right-wing Trump supporters from getting administration jobs.

Thomas and many of her partners were among conservative activists who mobilized a year ago to try to replace then-House Speaker Paul Ryan with right-wing favorite Rep. Jim Jordan.

Thomas presented United in Purpose “Impact” awards to O’Keefe, Gaffney, and Sean Hannity in 2017. In 2016, TPM reported that Thomas “wanted to ‘target’ the ‘most questionable’ precincts in Virginia with an anti-voter fraud campaign.”

Thomas also interviewed right-wing radio host Jesse Lee Peterson for the Daily Caller in 2016. The two talked about what Thomas called “race hustlers” who she said are “in the business of keeping blacks angry” and about Black Lives Matter, which Peterson called “evil,” “wicked,” and “worse than the KKK.” Last year, Thomas reportedly hired a former Turning Point USA staffer who had resigned after The New Yorker published screenshots of text messages that included a text that said “I HATE BLACK PEOPLE.”

Tags: Bill MeierlingCleta MitchellGinni ThomasJames O'KeefeRichard ViguerieElection 2020Seven MountainsALECAmerican Legislative Exchange CouncilCouncil for National Policy

ref 2018

wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has reportedly hired a former Turning Point USA staffer who left the conservative organization after reports emerged that she once sent a text saying "I hate blacks."

Thomas's wife, Virginia "Ginni" Thomas, has reportedly hired ex-TPUSA staffer Crystal Clanton, Mediaite first reported.

Clanton's comments became public last year when The New Yorker obtained and published screenshots of text messages sent by Clanton to another TPUSA employee. "I HATE BLACK PEOPLE. Like fuck them all . . . I hate blacks. End of story," Clanton wrote, according to The New Yorker.

Clanton, at the time, told the New Yorker that she had "no recollection" of the messages.

“I have no recollection of these messages and they do not reflect what I believe or who I am and the same was true when I was a teenager," she said in a statement to the magazine.

Thomas has reportedly hired Clanton to assist her with right-wing media projects, Mediaite reported.

Thomas, whose husband is the only African-American Supreme Court justice, is a columnist for The Daily Caller and currently serves on TPUSA’s advisory board. She also founded the conservative advocacy group, Liberty Central, whose mission was to fight the "hard-left agenda," according to the outlet.

Clanton stepped down from her position as second-in-command at TPUSA when her text messages became public. Mediaite reported that Clanton has continued to post culturally insensitive comments on Snapchat, including remarks like “a bacon a day keeps the Islams away” and “Ramadan bombathon,” and recently posted a photo of a man, who appears to be Arab, with the caption, “Just thinking about ways to do another 9/11,” according to a photo obtained by the outlet.

Photos obtained by Mediaite reveal Clanton has accompanied Thomas to numerous conferences and events, even posing for photos at the Thomas's home in Fairfax Station, Virginia.

Clanton, Ginni Thomas and Clarence Thomas declined to comment for Mediaite's report.

TPUSA has long faced accusations of racism within its ranks. A HuffPost report earlier this year uncovered dozens of controversial social media posts from former and current staffers, which included use of the "n-word" and anti-Semitic and anti-Islam comments.

defund the left:

Turning Point USA with big-time cash from GOP donor Foster Friess. Friess and Ginni Thomas (a far right wing actvist who happens to be the spouse of Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas) sit on TPUSA's board.

caravan "invasion" thank god for trump

....

NEWS & POLITICS

Supreme Court Justice's Wife Spreads Fake News About Mexican Police Officer Beaten Up by Migrant 'Caravan'

Once again, the wife of the Supreme Court's most extreme justice shared execrable fake content on social media.

By Matthew Chapman / AlterNetOctober 23, 2018,Tuesday, Virginia "Ginni" Thomas, the wife of far-right Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, posted an image to Facebook purporting to show the violent nature of the so-called migrant "caravan" now making its way through Mexico. The image depicted what is purported to be the severly bloodied face of a Mexican police officer who was assaulted by the migrants.

"The media won't share THIS, will they?" she wrote. "It is an invasion, and thank GOD for President Trump."

The problem: the meme is fake. According to Snopes, the image is actually from a clash between Mexican police and student protestors in Mexico City in 2012, and has nothing to do with migrants. But sharing extremist right-wing content is not a new thing for Thomas, a conservative activist who has made frequent use of social media. Earlier this year, she shared posts attacking the Parkland kids and praising the "#WalkAway" movement, a fake campaign of Russian trolls pretending to be people of color leaving the Democratic Party.

The migrant caravan, which consists of thousands of men, women, and children fleeing civil strife in Central America and heading toward the United States, is not actually anything new or unusual; similar groups of migrants have routinely formed over the last 20 years, and there is no evidence anyone in the group poses a danger. But it has still become the fear du jour in the Republican Party, particularly among those hoping to gin up enough fearamong President Donald Trump's core voters to turn them out to the polls and counteract a blue wave.

Trump has claimed with no evidence that "unknown Middle Easterners" are traveling with the caravan. And last week, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) theorized that left-wing Jewish billionaire George Soros is secretly funding the caravan, in the hope that it will somehow disrupt the midterm election in favor of Democrats.

https://www.alternet.org/clarence-thomas-wife-goes-bat-rep-jim-jordan-claims-hes-under-attack-because-he-threatens-elite

wow, way to run into the fire

no lnx twit

Virginia Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, on Monday claimed that Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) is the target of “false accusations” stemming from his time as an assistant coach at Ohio State University because he “threatens elite”—even as a seventh former wrestler on Sunday accused the GOP representative of lying about his knowledge of sex abuse at the school.

“Jim Jordan is under attack, with false accusations, because he threatens the elite,” Thomas wrote, along with a video of Jordan emphatically denying any knowledge of sex abuse while he was a coach.

Mark Joseph Stern

@mjs_DC

Wow: Ginni Thomas—wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas—goes to bat for Jim Jordan, claiming that sexual assault victims are bringing "false accusations" that he knew of their abuse "because he threatens the elite." https://www.facebook.com/GinniLThomas/posts/2024191907613651 …

Jul 9, 2018

Last week, three athletes told NBC News Jordan turned a blind eye toward a team doctor who molested them and other students. Mike DiSabato, a former wrestler with the school, accused Jordan of “absolutely lying if he says he doesn’t know what was going on.”

As more former students came forward to dispute Jordan’s claim, the Ohio representative on Friday told Fox News’ Bret Baier the abuse was only discussed in “locker room conversations.”[it it worked from trump]

“Conversations in a locker room are a lot different than allegations of abuse, or reported abuse to us,” Jordan claimed. “No one reported any abuse to me, if they had I would have dealt with it."

Jordan also suggested the allegations were the result of DiSabato’s “vendetta” against Ohio State, and floated a connection to his heated exchange with deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein last month.

“I think the timing is suspect when you think about how this whole story came together after the Rosenstein hearing and the speaker’s race,” Jordan said last week.

Virginia Thomas, a columnist for the Daily Caller and former employee of the conservative Heritage Foundation, appears to agree. It’s not the first time Thomas has weighed into the political fray. In 2010, she formed the far-right advocacy group Liberty Central to battle what she described as the “tyranny” of the Obama administration. Her lobbying work has raised questions from ethics groups about Clarence Thomas’ impartiality.

Elizabeth Preza is the Managing Editor of AlterNet. Follow her on Twitter @lizacisms.

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/clarence-thomas-wife-ginni-posts-far-right-meme-mocking-radicalized-parkland

AN 818

Ginni Thomas is once again attacking Parkland High School student survivors, this time David Hogg and Emma Gonzalez. On Monday morning Thomas shared a meme to Facebook calling them "radicalized Democrats" and "dangerous to the survival of our nation." Thomas, a far right-wing political activist, conservative lobbyist, and political commentator, wades into troubling territory by framing her attack as an issue of "the survival of our nation," as she is the spouse of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

For years many have questioned what appears to be a conflict of interest, given Thomas' husband sits on the Supreme Court, and at times has appeared to share her views. No one should think she has no right to her opinion or to her activism, but frequently it is paid activism, and at times touches upon issues the Supreme Court is reviewing or might take up.[pix of 2 blk t shirt wanted POSTER terror training camps]

The post includes the statement, "What makes radicalized Democrats like David Hogg and others so dangerous to the survival of our nation is their total, shameless hypocrisy!" as part of the meme.

The pro-Trump group that Thomas shared the meme from, The Great American Movement, says on its Facebook page, "The enemy of America is the radical fascist left."

Stern adds that "Thomas has targeted Hogg before, ridiculing him for being 'a special kind of stupid' less than six weeks after the Parkland shooting. (She deleted the post after I wrote about it.)"

At the time of the shooting Hogg was 17 years old.

The Chamber's lawyers successfully got the Supreme Court to make it harder for victims of corporate negligence to sue for damages, whether they are claimants in the BP oil spill or employees of corporations filing class-action lawsuits in cases of abuse. They recently ruled in favor of agribusiness giant Monsanto in a seed patent case against a farmer trying to save his seeds, ruling that Monsanto had the right to claim domain over the farmer's crops, since their genetically-modified seeds had cross-pollinated into the neighboring organic crops on the farmer's plot. Justice Clarence Thomas once worked as a corporate attorney for Monsanto. He did not recuse himself from the decision. He also didn't recuse himself when ruling against the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act, despite his wife's having launched a lobbying group opposed to the Affordable Care Act's implementation.

12/17

Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and a right-wing activist, presented“Impact Awards” to a dozen other right-wing activists on Wednesday. The awards were granted by United in Purpose, a group that mobilizes conservative evangelical voters and played a crucial role in turning out white evangelicals to vote for Donald Trump. The ceremony was held—of course—at Donald Trump’s hotel in Washington, D.C.

A press release from United in Purpose said the Impact Awards were Ginni Thomas’s idea, and were designed to honor “conservative leaders who are making a transformational impact on American culture.” Thomas praised the honorees as “the bravest, most effective, most dedicated, determined warriors defending the values that are the real strength of America. They have shown moral courage in the face of desperate times.”

The top prize—the Outstanding Impact Award—went to Fox pundit and propagandist Sean Hannity, who gave the keynote address:

The fight is greater than ever for truth, and perseverance is necessary in the battle against fake news and the determination to get to the truth. Under President Trump the forgotten man is forgotten no more, and we the people are going to work harder than ever to get the government back into the hands of American citizens; where it belongs.

Richard Viguerie, a founder of the modern right-wing political movement, was given the Lifetime Achievement Award.

Also honored was James O’Keefe, whose recent Project Veritas attempt to plant fake news stories about Roy Moore in the Washington Post blew up in his face when the Post’s real journalists did the kind of things real journalists do. Trump-supporting “prophet” Lance Wallnau tweeted a blustery clip from O’Keefe’s remarks, gushing that O’Keefe “takes on the powers of darkness.”

Other honorees included:

Anti-Muslim extremist Frank Gaffney, who sees Muslim Brotherhood infiltration happening everywhere, including within the conservative movement.

Leonard Leo, the Federalist Society executive who is helping Donald Trump fill the federal judiciary with far-right judges.

Right-wing activist Star Parker, a favorite at Religious Right conferences for her speeches denouncing welfare recipients and “entitlement culture.”

Larry Arnn, president of Hillsdale College, a favorite of far-right activists for refusing to accept any government funding. But they’re apparently happy to get a bit of government help; Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA) inserted a provision in the GOP tax plan exempting Hillsdale from a new tax on university endowments, but it was knocked out at the last minute.

Thomas Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, the right-wing group that tried desperately “to turn the tragedy in Benghazi into its own public relations and fundraising extravaganza.”

Charlie Kirk, who heads Turning Point USA, a right-wing youth leadership training organization.

Also honored were Dan Bongino, a former cop and secret service agent who unleashed a memorable profanity-laden tirade at a reporter during his 2016 run for Congress; Richard Manning, president of Americans for Limited Government; and Chris Plante, host of the Chris Plante Show on WMAL in Washington.

While MyBarackObama died a quick death as a functional community, the Right went to work building communities to oppose Obama and his agenda. Republican consultants flocked to Ning, an easy tool to create entire social networks for niche communities. Ning replicates common features of any social network: Users may create online identities, send messages within the network, post links and news articles, and create events for offline activities.

Template Ning networks provided the Right with the ability to quickly assemble Tea Party groups without the appearance of top-heavy Republican partisanship. Eric Odom, the former new media director of Sam Adams Alliance, used his consulting firms Strategic Activism and American Liberty Alliance to create dozens of ready-made Ning web sites to cultivate the early stages of the Tea Party movement. Some Tea Party groups he created, like the Patriot Caucus, were geared toward a national constituency, while others catered to specific localities, such as Lehigh County in Pennsylvania. Although the web sites appeared to be citizen generated, all of Odom’s sites were actually centrally planned and operated. Every major Tea Party organization got in on the act: Smart Girl Politics, working with Odom’s colleagues, created a Ning for Tea Party women; Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, used her Liberty Central group to help local Tea Party groups in Florida build Ning web sites; lee fang

February 4, 2011: Wife of Supreme Court Justice Named Head of Lobbying and Political Consulting Firm, Critics Say Position Creates Conflict of Interest

The media reports that Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, a former Republican campaign operative and the former head of a tea party organization, has become the head of a lobbying and political consulting firm, Liberty Consulting. The firm boasts that Thomas’s “experience and connections” will assist clients with “governmental affairs efforts” and political donation strategies. Critics say Thomas is in the midst of an enormous conflict of interest, because her husband, Clarence Thomas, is a Supreme Court justice. She left the tea party group in November 2009 because of questions that her leadership of the group, Liberty Central, which actively worked to defeat Democrats, was not appropriate for the wife of a sitting Court justice.

Thomas has met with almost half of the 99 Republican freshmen in the House and Senate, according to an email she sent out to congressional chiefs of staff last week in which she called herself “a self-appointed ambassador to the freshmen class and an ambassador to the tea party movement.” Ann Pearson of the government watchdog organization Common Cause says that Thomas’s position at a lobbying and consulting firm “show[s] a new level of arrogance of just not caring that the Court is being politicized and how that undermines the historic image of the Supreme Court as being above the political fray.… It raises additional questions about whether Justice Thomas can be unbiased and appear to be unbiased in cases dealing with the repeal of the health care reform law or corporate political spending when his wife is working to elect members of the tea party and also advocating for their policies.”

Some Republican lawmakers are uncomfortable with Thomas’s new position, with one senior House Republican aide criticizing Thomas for attempting to “cash in” on her ties to the tea party movement. Republican House freshman David Schweikert (R-AZ), who won his election in part because of support from tea party groups and was endorsed by Liberty Central, says he has not met Thomas and knows nothing of her background. “This is the spouse of Justice Thomas?” he says when asked about the situation by a reporter. “No, I’ve never met her. It’s not something I’ve heard about. And I hang out with a lot of freshman.” So far, only one Republican freshman will publicly admit to scheduling a meeting with Thomas.

Thomas used to be an aide to former House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-TX), who until recently headed the tea party financing organization FreedomWorks (see August 14, 2009). She has also worked as a staffer at the US Chamber of Commerce, a trade organization that contributes heavily to Republican causes (see January 21-22, 2010), and at the conservative Heritage Foundation. In 2009 she founded Liberty Central, which she described as a group that would bridge the gap between the conservative Republican establishment and the anti-government tea party movement. She eventually stepped down after questions were raised about her position’s impact on her husband’s appearance of impartiality, and the group was merged into another tea party organization (see November 2009 - November 2010). She filed incorporation papers for Liberty Consulting within a day of news reports about her departure from Liberty Central. She has told conservative news source Daily Caller that she intends to continue working for the group that bought Liberty Central, the Patrick Henry Center for Individual Liberty, and will “help them in any way I can think of, whether it’s lobbying on the Hill or connecting with the grass roots, or helping speak or write or fundraise.”

However, lobbying records show no registration for Thomas, Liberty Consulting, Liberty Central, or the Patrick Henry Center. Liberty Central general counsel Sarah Field refuses to answer questions about whether Thomas is being paid through Liberty Consulting as a consultant. A source familiar with the Thomases and with Capitol Hill Republicans says her sojourn from Liberty Central to Liberty Consulting has damaged her reputation among some conservatives. “Ginni’s reputation around town is now even more of a fake entitled woman who is only here because of her husband,” the source tells a reporter. “Now she has opened her own lobbying shop… not sure how [the] conservative circle will feel when they find that out, or if they’ll care or not.” [POLITICO, 2/4/2011]

Previous Conflicts of Interest - Virginia Thomas has weathered criticisms of conflict of interest before. In late 2000, as a Heritage Foundation staffer, she was helping select key members for the Bush administration even as her husband was engaged in deliberating the Bush v. Gore Court decision that installed George W. Bush as president (see 9:54 p.m. December 12, 2000). At the time she waved off criticisms, saying that she and her husband conducted “separate professional lives.” [LOS ANGELES TIMES, 3/14/2010]

'Cloud of Corruption' Surrounding Justice Thomas? - Legal analyst Ian Millhiser of the liberal news Web site Think Progress is far more blunt in his assessment than some more cautious critics, writing: “Now, Ginni Thomas appears to have found a way to earn money off her husband’s actions as a justice. Clarence Thomas released countless amounts of corporate spending on US elections [by voting with the majority in Citizens United], and Ginni Thomas can get rich advising those corporate clients on how to direct that spending. To be sure, it is possible that Ginni is somehow limiting her advice to ‘political investments’ that were legal before Clarence gave businesses like hers so many new potential customers. But if this is the case, Ginni has an obligation to explain just how she is limiting her advice—it’s the only way to remove the obvious cloud of corruption her actions have created around her husband.” [THINK PROGRESS, 2/4/2011]

Entity Tags: Heritage Foundation, David Schweikert, Clarence Thomas, Ann Pearson,Dick Armey, George W. Bush, Sarah E. Field, FreedomWorks, Patrick Henry Center for Individual Liberty, Virginia (“Ginni”) Thomas, Liberty Consulting, Ian Millhiser, Liberty Central, US Chamber of Commerce

Timeline Tags: Civil Liberties

http://www.historycommons.org/entity.jsp?entity=dick_armey_1

Dick Armey, FreedomWorks, and the Tea Baggers

The crusade to defund the left has not been limited to attempts to discredit progressive organizations. The so-called K Street Project of the 1990's, which was intended to steer lobbyist contributions more towards Republicans and to shut out Democrats, had the same objective. So did Jack Abramoff's courting of Indian tribes in order to cut off payments that had previously gone largely to Democrats.

Even calls for "tort reform" -- which are now being raised again in connection with health care -- are intended to prevent trial lawyers, who are often generous Democratic donors, from receiving a share of large settlements in personal injury cases.

Attacks on federal funding of liberal non-profits, however, are particularly attractive as a strategy because most conservative non-profits receive the bulk of their funding from corporations and right-wing foundations and not from the federal government.

In 1995, the new Republican majority in Congress took part in a particularly ambitious -- though ultimately unsuccessful -- attempt to defund the left. According to a May 30, 1995 story in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (which does not appear to be available online except through subscription-only sources):

"Congressional Republicans -- with the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas playing a key role -- are preparing a new budget-cutting assault on scores of government-funded nonprofit groups whose liberal views are considered a threat to the conservative agenda. ... The effort, referred to by conservatives as 'defunding the left,' is intended to take aim at what they consider advocacy groups that lobby for liberal social programs from which they receive grants and contracts."

The story went on to say, "Led by Virginia Lamp Thomas, the wife of the Supreme Court justice, a special group of senior House Republican experts and staff members has been quietly working under the auspices of House Majority Leader Dick Armey of Texas. Their aim is to identify nonprofit organizations whose funding should be cut and to plan a strategy to end their grants or contracts with the government or the programs for which they provide services."

Thomas, who was then a policy analyst for Rep. Armey, later went to work for the Heritage Foundation. Armey himself left Congress in 2003 and became the co-chairman of Citizens for a Sound Economy -- one of whose representatives had participated in that same 2001 "Defunding the Left" panel as Morton Blackwell and CRC's Terrence Scanlon. Armey's organization is now known as FreedomWorks and is the principal astroturf backer of the teabagger protests.

K street

In early 1995, Jeff Shear wrote in the National Journal and subsequently the Baltimore Sun of a Republican project - later to be dubbed the K Street project - being co-ordinated out of the office of House Majority Leader Dick Armey. Heading the project was Virginia Thomas (wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas), which also involved Scott Hodges the Heritage Foundation's budget director. One of those involved in the project, conservative activists Grover Norquist, told Shear "we will hunt [these liberal groups] down one by one and extinguish their funding sources".

Now, Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, wife of Justice Clarence Thomas, has recast herself yet again, this time as the head of a firm, Liberty Consulting, which boasts on its website using her “experience and connections” to help clients “with “governmental affairs efforts” and political donation strategies.

Thomas already has met with nearly half of the 99 GOP freshmen in the House and Senate, according to an e-mail she sent last week to congressional chiefs of staff, in which she branded herself “a self-appointed, ambassador to the freshmen class and an ambassador to the tea party movement.”

...

While Thomas was well-known in conservative circles as an aide to former House Majority Leader Dick Armey, as a midlevel staffer at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and at The Heritage Foundation and as the spouse of one of the court's most conservative justices, she did not draw much attention until 2009, when she started speaking at tea party rallies.

http://www.americancrossroadswatch.org/index.php?q=node/235

Liberty Central Inc. is a 501(c)(4) Tea Party-affiliated nonprofit lobbying group who aims to "connect the grassroots to the political class" and whose website is "constantly assessing proposals that would limit liberty in America."[1] The group was launched in January 2010 by Virginia Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, raising questions about political impartiality for the nation's highest court. Thomas left the group in December 2010, but appears to have maintained close ties to the group. [2][3] After Thomas' departure, the group merged with the Patrick Henry Center for Individual Liberty.[2]

Contents

1 Supreme Court Impartiality?

1.1 Common Cause Alleges Justice Thomas Should Have Recused in Citizens United

1.2 Democrats Ask Justice Thomas for Recusal from Health Care Challenges

2 Corporate funding increases impartiality concerns

3 Virginia Thomas, Liberty Central's Founder

4 Contact

5 References

Supreme Court Impartiality?

Although Americans generally expect justices to be politically neutral, and judicial rules prohibit judges from participating in political activity, those rules don’t extend to spouses. As the Los Angeles Times reports, "[t]he move by Virginia Thomas, 52, into the front lines of politics stands in marked contrast to the rarefied culture of the nation's highest court, which normally prizes the appearance of nonpartisanship and a distance from the fisticuffs of the politics of the day." [4]

At the time the group was formed in January 2010, legal ethicists pointed to the fact that Thomas' husband had sided with the majority in the Citizens United decision, in effect making it possible for Liberty Central to operate with unlimited funding from secret donors. Further questions arose in July 2010 when POLITICO revealed that Liberty Central had received an anonymous $550,000 donation while Justice Thomas and the U.S. Supreme Court were deliberating over the case. [5]

Common Cause Alleges Justice Thomas Should Have Recused in Citizens United

In January 2011, Common Cause submitted a letter to the Justice Department alleging that Justice Thomas should have recused himself from the Citizens United case and that “the complete lack of transparency of Liberty Central’s finances makes it difficult to assess the full scope of the ethics issues raised by Ms. Thomas’ role in founding and leading the group.”[6] The letter also pointed to possible conflicts of interests arising from the attendance by Justices Thomas and Scalia at events sponsored by the Koch brothers.

"Thomas’s role as a de facto tea party lobbyist and — until recently — as head of a tea party group that worked to defeat Democrats in November 2010 “show a new level of arrogance of just not caring that the court is being politicized and how that undermines the historic image of the Supreme Court as being above the political fray,” Arn Pearson, a lawyer for Common Cause, tells Politico. [3]

More concerns have arisen since Virginia Thomas announced the formation of her lobbying firm Liberty Consulting (whose website claims it will use Thomas' “experience and connections” to help clients “with “governmental affairs efforts” and offer "advice on optimizing political investments for charitable giving in the non-profit world or political causes."). Think Progress has pointed out that Thomas' work advising clients on how to donate money to political causes could have been facilitated by her husband's vote in Citizens United; the decision enabled corporations to spend unlimited money influencing elections, and she can now make a living advising corporations on how to direct that spending. [7]

Democrats Ask Justice Thomas for Recusal from Health Care Challenges

In February 2011, seventy four House Democrats sent a letter to Justice Thomas asking that he recuse himself from hearing any challenge to the Affordable Care Act on grounds that his wife's political and financial interests were tied to overturning healthcare reform. [8] The letter stated, in part:

"The appearance of a conflict of interest merits recusal under federal law," the House Democrats wrote. "From what we have already seen, the line between your impartiality and you and your wife's financial stake in the overturn of health-care reform is blurred. Your spouse is advertising herself as a lobbyist who has 'experience and connections' and appeals to clients who want a particular decision -- they want to overturn health-care reform. Moreover, your failure to disclose Ginny Thomas's receipt of $686,589 from the Heritage Foundation, a prominent opponent of health-care reform, between 2003 and 2007 has raised great concern."

The entire letter can be read here.

Corporate funding increases impartiality concerns

Since the Supreme Court’s recent Citizens United decision permitted corporate dollars to flow into political campaigns, Liberty Central and Liberty Consulting will accept donations from corporations, and be permitted to spend those funds advocating for candidates. In addition to possible conflicts of interest arising from Justice Thomas hearing a case related to the group’s political activities, concerns also exist were he to face a decision involving one of Liberty Central’s donors.

This concern is exacerbated because Liberty Central is organized as a 501(c)(4) nonprofit, allowing the group to raise unlimited amounts of corporate money and largely avoid disclosing its donors. As reported by Slate Magazine's Emily Bazelon:

As a 501(c)(4), the group can raise unlimited money for lobbying without identifying all its donors. So how will we know whether Thomas is taking himself out of every relevant case? Liberty Central should err on the side of disclosure—let's see if it does. This is particularly salient because Justice Thomas, and Justice Thomas alone, will make the decision about whether to sit out a case. Recusal calls by the individual justices aren't reviewed by the court as a whole, or any other body. "That's the real problem," Stanford law professor Deborah Rhode says. "There's no structure for oversight. I'd say most of the time judges do the right thing, but when they don't, there's very little you can do about it. [9]

Virginia Thomas, Liberty Central's Founder

The Los Angeles Times reports that "Virginia Thomas has long been a passionate voice for conservative views. She has worked for former Republican Rep. Dick Armey of Texas and for the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank with strong ties to the GOP." [4] Further, according to the Liberty Central website, Ms. Thomas "is a fan of Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin and Laura Ingraham and other talk radio hosts," and "is intrigued by Glenn Beck." [10] See also the SourceWatch entry on Virginia Thomas.

Contact

Web site: http://www.libertycentral.org/

Liberty Central does not publish its physical address on its Web site.

References

↑ News page, Liberty Central website, accessed February, 2011

↑ 2.0 2.1 Kenneth Vogel, Clarence Thomas's wife, Ginni, reportedly quits Liberty Central, POLITICO, November 15, 2010.

↑ 3.0 3.1 Kenneth P. Vogel and Marin Cogan and John Bresnahan, Justice Thomas's wife now lobbyist, POLITICO, Feb. 4, 2011.

↑ 4.0 4.1 Justice's Wife Launches 'Tea Party' Group, Los Angeles Times, March 14, 2010

↑ Kenneth Vogel, Secret donors makes Thomas's wife's group a tea party player, POLITICO, July 6, 2010.

↑ Common Cause letter to the Justice Department re: Conflicts on Interest in Citizens United Case, accessed February 2011.

↑ Ian Millheiser, Is Ginni Thomas Getting Rich Off Clarence Thomas’ Supreme Court Decisions?, Think Progress, Feb. 4, 2011.

↑ Felicia Sonmez, [House Democrats say Justice Thomas should recuse himself in health-care case http://voices.washingtonpost.com/44/2011/02/house-democrats-say-justice-th.html], Washington Post, Feb. 09, 2011, accessed Feb. 10, 2011.

↑ Ginni Thomas Brings the Tea Party to the Supreme Court, Slate Magazine, March 16 2010

↑ Bio page Liberty Central website, accessed March 2010

Categories: Front groups portal | Front groups | Corporate strategy | Politics (U.S.)

copied form Va:

Virginia "Ginni" Lamp Thomas

$1.6 m 1997 -2011 from health care co's to lobby, not disclosed by hubby