Elections

There is debate within the committee investigating the assault on the Capitol over whether to seek testimony from the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas about her efforts to overturn the 2020 election.WASHINGTON — Buried in the thousands of documents that Mark Meadows, former President Donald J. Trump’s final White House chief of staff, turned over late last year to the House committee examining the Jan. 6 attack were text messages that presented the panel with a political land mine: what to do about Virginia Thomas, the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas.The messages showed that Ms. Thomas relentlessly urged Mr. Meadows to overturn the 2020 presidential election, which she called a “heist,” and indicated that she reached out to Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, about Mr. Trump’s legal efforts to keep power. She even suggested the lawyer who should be put in charge of that effort.The public disclosure of the messages on Thursday focused new attention on one avenue of the investigation and risked creating a rare rift within the committee about how aggressively to pursue it, including whether to seek testimony from Ms. Thomas, who goes by Ginni.In the Thomases, the committee is up against a couple that has deep networks of support across the conservative movement and Washington, including inside the committee. The panel’s Republican vice chairwoman, Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, has led the charge in holding Mr. Trump to account for his efforts to overturn the election, but has wanted to avoid any aggressive effort that, in her view, could unfairly target Justice Thomas, the senior member of the Supreme Court.So although a debate has broken out inside the committee about summoning Ms. Thomas to testify, the panel at this point has no plans to do so, leaving some Democrats frustrated. That could change, however: On Friday, despite the potential for political backlash, Ms. Cheney indicated she has no objection to the panel asking Ms. Thomas for a voluntary interview.A New York Times Magazine investigation last month examined the political and personal history of Ms. Thomas and her husband. That included her role in efforts to overturn the election from her perch on the nine-member board of CNP Action, a conservative group that helped advance the “Stop the Steal” movement, and in mediating between feuding factions of organizers “so that there wouldn’t be any division around Jan. 6,” as one organizer put it.During that period, the Supreme Court was considering a number of cases related to the election, with Justice Thomas taking positions at times sympathetic to Mr. Trump’s efforts to challenge the outcome.This month, Ms. Thomas acknowledged attending the rally that preceded the violence in an interview with a conservative news outlet, but otherwise downplayed her role. Then came disclosure of the texts to Mr. Meadows, the contents of which were earlier reported by The Washington Post and CBS News.If the committee does not summon Ms. Thomas, some legal analysts said, it runs the risk of appearing to have a double standard. The panel has taken an aggressive posture toward many other potential witnesses, issuing subpoenas for bank and phone records of both high-ranking allies of the former president and low-level aides with only a tangential connection to the events of Jan. 6.“I think it would be a dereliction not to bring her in and talk to her,” said Kimberly Wehle, a University of Baltimore law professor who has closely tracked the committee’s work. “It certainly is inconsistent with their neutral, ‘find the facts where they go’ type of approach to this.”The committee’s light touch with Ms. Thomas to date reflects a number of considerations by both members and investigators, according to people familiar with the inquiry. Some saw the pursuit of Ms. Thomas as a distraction from more important targets. Others worried that pursuing Ms. Thomas could by implication sully the reputation of Justice Thomas, an icon among the Republican base. Still others argued that the panel could not know the full extent of her role without further questioning. And some members of the committee saw the text messages for the first time on Thursday.Text messages show that Ms. Thomas relentlessly urged the president’s chief of staff to overturn the 2020 presidential election.Susan Walsh/Associated PressThe lack of consensus also underscores the extent to which Justice Thomas’s shadow, including his network of supporters and former clerks, looms over various aspects of the investigation. Three of Justice Thomas’s former clerks — a federal judge, a top committee investigator and a key adviser to Mr. Trump — have major roles in the matter.A main strategist in the effort to try to overturn the election, the lawyer John Eastman, was a former clerk of Justice Thomas’s. John Wood, one of the Jan. 6 committee’s top investigators and another former Thomas clerk, is leading the so-called gold team examining Mr. Trump’s inner circle. And a federal judge, Carl J. Nichols, who is hearing cases related to the Capitol riot, is also a former clerk of Justice Thomas’s.This dynamic was on display during a deposition in December of Mr. Eastman, who was subpoenaed by the committee to talk about his role in helping Mr. Trump try to overturn the election. Mr. Wood began the questioning by noting that Mr. Eastman had once served as a clerk to Justice Thomas.“Like you, John,” Mr. Eastman shot back.For at least several weeks, the committee’s senior level has discussed whether to call Ms. Thomas to testify, as well as whether to issue subpoenas for any other communications she may have had with the White House or the president’s legal team about the election, including a message she told Mr. Meadows she sent to Mr. Kushner, according to people with knowledge of the investigation.There are plenty of leads to pursue. The committee could recall Dustin Stockton, a rally organizer who told The Times about a conversation he had with Caroline Wren, a Republican who helped raise money for the Jan. 6 “March for America,” in which she described Ms. Thomas’s peacemaking role. They could also recall Amy Kremer and Jenny Beth Martin, two rally organizers close to Ms. Thomas, to ask about her postelection communications with them.It could subpoena records from not only Ms. Thomas, but also CNP Action, which was deeply involved in the effort to spread falsehoods about the election. Investigators could ask her the name of the friend she was referring to when she wrote back to thank Mr. Meadows, saying: “Needed that! This plus a conversation with my best friend just now…I will try to keep holding on.” (Ms. Thomas and her husband have publicly referred to each other as their best friends.) Ultimately, they could ask her whether she had discussed Mr. Trump’s fight to overturn the election with her husband.Ms. Thomas said she attended a rally on Jan. 6 before the pro-Trump mob attacked the Capitol.Pete Marovich for The New York TimesJustice Thomas has declined to comment on the matter, through a representative. A lawyer for Ms. Thomas did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Privately, some Republicans conceded that Ms. Thomas’s texts to Mr. Meadows were a mistake — particularly ones in which she urged Mr. Meadows to make Sidney Powell, a lawyer who had advocated conspiracy theories about voting machines being hacked, the face of the legal team. Yet the Republicans, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they worried about being seen as critical of Ms. Thomas, predicted that if Democrats increased pressure on the Thomases, the right would counter with more calls for investigations of Democrats if Republicans win back the House in the November elections.Capitol Riot’s Aftermath: Key DevelopmentsCard 1 of 3Virginia Thomas’ text messages. More

The nature of the text messages was enough to require recusal, legal experts said. But the Supreme Court has traditionally left such decisions to the discretion of the justice in question.WASHINGTON — The disclosure that Virginia Thomas, the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas, had sent a barrage of text messages to the Trump White House urging efforts to overturn the 2020 election brought into sharp focus the conflict of interest her political activism has created — and the lack of a clear-cut remedy.It is one thing, experts in legal ethics said on Friday, for the spouse of a Supreme Court justice to express political views, even ones shot through with wild conspiracy theories. That may not by itself require the justice’s recusal from cases touching on those views.But the text messages from Ms. Thomas, a longtime conservative activist who goes by Ginni, revealed something quite different and deeply troubling, experts said.The messages from Ms. Thomas to Mark Meadows, President Donald J. Trump’s chief of staff, sent during and just after the fraught weeks between the 2020 presidential election and the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, demonstrated that she was an active participant in shaping the legal effort to overturn the election.“I’m not sure how I would have come out if we just had a lot of texts from her saying that ‘this is terrible,’ said Amanda Frost, a law professor at American University in Washington.“But she wasn’t doing just that,” Professor Frost said. “She was strategizing. She was promoting. She was haranguing.”The texts were among about 9,000 pages of documents that Mr. Meadows turned over to the congressional committee investigating the Capitol attack. Democrats immediately seized on the disclosure to draw attention to the conflicts they said were presented by Ms. Thomas’s political activities and to press Justice Thomas to recuse himself from cases concerning the election and its aftermath. Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, said that Justice Thomas’s “conduct on the Supreme Court looks increasingly corrupt” and that he had been “the lone dissent in a case that could have denied the Jan. 6 committee records pertaining to the same plot his wife supported.”Justice Thomas, Mr. Wyden said, “needs to recuse himself from any case related to the Jan. 6 investigation, and should Donald Trump run again, any case related to the 2024 election.”But Justice Thomas, who was released from the hospital on Friday after being treated for the last week for flulike symptoms, has long been a pillar of the conservative establishment. Republicans, even those who have distanced themselves from Mr. Trump and the more extreme wing of their party, showed no interest in pressuring him to recuse himself.Ms. Thomas’s text messages were heated and forceful, urging Mr. Meadows to pursue baseless legal challenges. “Biden and the Left is attempting the greatest Heist of our History,” one said.Ms. Thomas’s activities should have prompted Justice Thomas to disqualify himself from cases related to them, said Stephen Gillers, a law professor at New York University.“He had an obligation not to sit in any case related to the election, the Jan. 6 committee or the Capitol invasion,” he said.Professor Frost agreed that the situation was “an easy case.”“When your spouse is conversing with people who have some control over litigation to challenge an election,” she said, “you shouldn’t be sitting on the Supreme Court deciding that election or any aspect of it.”But Justice Thomas did participate in a ruling in January on an emergency application from Mr. Trump asking the court to block release of White House records concerning the attack on the Capitol. The court rejected the request, in a sharp rebuke to the former president.Only Justice Thomas noted a dissent, giving no reasons.He also participated in the court’s consideration of whether to hear a related appeal, one in which Mr. Meadows filed a friend-of-the-court brief saying that “the outcome of this case will bear directly” on his own efforts to shield records from the House committee investigating the attacks beyond those he had provided.The Supreme Court last month refused to hear the case, without noted dissent. There was no indication that Justice Thomas had recused himself.In December 2020, around the time of the text messages, Justice Thomas participated in a ruling on an audacious lawsuit by Texas asking the court to throw out the election results in four battleground states. The court rejected the request, with Justices Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. issuing a brief statement suggesting the majority had acted too soon in shutting the case down.In February 2021, Justice Thomas addressed election fraud in a dissent from the Supreme Court’s decision to turn away a challenge to Pennsylvania’s voting procedures.Ms. Thomas’s messages urged Mark Meadows, President Donald J. Trump’s chief of staff, to pursue baseless legal challenges.Oliver Contreras for The New York Times“We are fortunate that many of the cases we have seen alleged only improper rule changes, not fraud,” he wrote. “But that observation provides only small comfort. An election free from strong evidence of systemic fraud is not alone sufficient for election confidence.”Justice Thomas did not respond to a request for comment on Friday.All federal judges, including Supreme Court justices, are subject to a federal law on recusal. The law says that “any justice, judge or magistrate judge of the United States shall disqualify himself in any proceeding in which his impartiality might reasonably be questioned.”Judging by the nature of the text messages and the uproar over them, that provision alone is enough to require Justice Thomas’s recusal, legal experts said.A more specific provision concerning relatives, including spouses, might also apply to his situation. Judges should not participate, the law says, in proceedings in which their spouse has “an interest that could be substantially affected by the outcome of the proceeding.”Professor Gillers said the word “interest” was the key.“By writing to Meadows, who was chief of staff and active in the ‘Stop the Steal’ movement, she joined the team resisting the results of the election,” Professor Gillers said. “She made herself part of the team and so she has an interest in the decisions of the court that could affect Trump’s goal of reversing the results.”The Trump InvestigationsCard 1 of 6Numerous inquiries. More

The ruling, in which the judge said Democrats had drawn an “extreme gerrymander,” was the first time this redistricting cycle that the party’s legislators had a congressional map defeated in court.A Maryland judge ruled on Friday that Democrats in the state had drawn an “extreme gerrymander” and threw out the state’s new congressional map, the first time this redistricting cycle that a Democratic-controlled legislature’s map has been rejected in court.The ruling by Senior Judge Lynne A. Battaglia of the Circuit Court for Anne Arundel County found that the map drawn by Democrats had “constitutional failings” and ignored requirements of focusing on “compactness” and keeping similar communities together.“All of the testimony in this case supports the notions that the voice of Republican voters was diluted and their right to vote and be heard with the efficacy of a Democratic voter was diminished,” Judge Battaglia wrote in her opinion.The congressional map drawn by Democrats would have most likely guaranteed them at least seven of Maryland’s eight House seats, or 87 percent of the state’s seats. President Biden carried the state with 65 percent of the vote in 2020.Judge Battaglia ordered the General Assembly to redraw the map by March 30, an extraordinarily tight deadline for a complicated process that often takes weeks, and she set a hearing for the new map for April 1. This year, the Maryland Court of Appeals moved the state’s primary election from June 28 to July 19 because of pending legal challenges to the new map.Democrats across the country have taken a much more aggressive tack this redistricting cycle than they have in the past, seeking to counteract what they have long denounced as extreme Republican gerrymanders from the 2010 cycle. Republicans’ map-drawing gains that year helped the party maintain power in the House of Representatives despite a Democratic victory at the presidential level in 2012. Democratic state legislatures in New York, Illinois and Oregon drew new maps this year that would have given them a significant advantage over Republicans — and congressional delegations at odds with the overall partisan tilt of each state. What to Know About RedistrictingRedistricting, Explained: Here are some answers to your most pressing questions about the process that is reshaping American politics.Understand Gerrymandering: Can you gerrymander your party to power? Try to draw your own districts in this imaginary state.Analysis: For years, the congressional map favored Republicans over Democrats. But in 2022, the map is poised to be surprisingly fair.Killing Competition: The number of competitive districts is dropping, as both parties use redistricting to draw themselves into safe seats.Rather than looking to aggressively add new seats this cycle, Republicans, for the most part, have sought to shore up their previous advantages in gerrymandered maps in states like Texas and Georgia, removing competition and packing Democrats together in deeply blue districts.Maryland was one of the few states during the last redistricting cycle where Democrats enacted an aggressive gerrymander, pushing to add a Democratic seat to the state’s delegation, which consisted of six Democrats and two Republicans at the time. The eventual map added a batch of new Democratic voters to the Sixth District, leading to the defeat of Representative Roscoe Bartlett, a 20-year Republican incumbent. Former Gov. Martin O’Malley, a Democrat and former presidential candidate, has since acknowledged in a court deposition that the goal of the last redistricting process was to draw a map that was “more likely to elect more Democrats rather than less.”Judge Battaglia’s decision comes as state courts have emerged as a central battleground for parties and voters to challenge maps by calling them partisan gerrymanders, after a 2019 Supreme Court ruling that partisan gerrymandering could not be challenged at the federal level. This year, state courts in Ohio and North Carolina have tossed out maps drawn by legislators as unconstitutional gerrymanders. Judge Battaglia, who was appointed by former Gov. Parris N. Glendening, a Democrat, is a former U.S. attorney in Maryland. She also served as chief of staff to former Senator Barbara A. Mikulski, a Democrat from Maryland. Gov. Larry Hogan of Maryland, a Republican whose veto of the map was overridden by the Democratic-controlled legislature, praised the decision and called on the General Assembly to pass a map drawn by an independent commission he created. “This ruling is a monumental victory for every Marylander who cares about protecting our democracy, bringing fairness to our elections, and putting the people back in charge,” Mr. Hogan said in a statement. The office of Brian Frosh, the attorney general of Maryland and a Democrat, said that it was reviewing the decision and that it had not yet decided whether to appeal it.How U.S. Redistricting WorksCard 1 of 8What is redistricting? More

What did Justice Clarence Thomas know, and when did he know it?The question usually gets directed at politicians, not judges, but it’s a fair one in light of the revelation on Thursday that Justice Thomas’s wife, Ginni, was working feverishly behind the scenes — and to a far greater degree than she previously admitted — in a high-level effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election.As The Washington Post and CBS News first reported, Ms. Thomas, a supremely well-connected right-wing agitator, was in constant communication with the White House in the weeks following the election, strategizing over how to keep Donald Trump in office despite his incontrovertible loss. “Do not concede,” she texted to Mark Meadows, Mr. Trump’s chief of staff, on Nov. 6, the day before the major news networks called the election for Joe Biden. “It takes time for the army who is gathering for his back.” (To date, Mr. Trump has not conceded.)In dozens of messages with Mr. Meadows over several weeks, Ms. Thomas raged over baseless allegations of voter fraud and shared unhinged conspiracy theories, including one that the “Biden crime family” was in the process of being arrested and sent to Guantánamo Bay for “ballot fraud.”“Help This Great President stand firm, Mark!!!” Ms. Thomas wrote at one point. “The majority knows Biden and the Left is attempting the greatest Heist of our History.”Ms. Thomas had already acknowledged some involvement in the fight over the 2020 election count, recently confirming that she attended the Jan. 6 Stop the Steal rally in Washington, but she said she went home before Mr. Trump spoke to the crowd and before a mob of hundreds stormed the Capitol in a violent attempt to block the certification of Mr. Biden’s Electoral College victory. The texts reveal that her efforts to subvert the election were far more serious than we knew.Now recall that in January, the Supreme Court rejected Mr. Trump’s request to block the release of White House records relating to the Jan. 6 Capitol attack. Mr. Meadows had submitted a brief in the case supporting Mr. Trump. The court’s ruling came as an unsigned order, with only one noted dissent: from Justice Thomas.Perhaps Justice Thomas was not aware of his wife’s text-message campaign to Mr. Meadows at the time. But it sure makes you wonder, doesn’t it?And that’s precisely the problem: We shouldn’t have to wonder. The Supreme Court is the most powerful judicial body in the country, and yet, as Alexander Hamilton reminded us, it has neither the sword nor the purse as a means to enforce its rulings. It depends instead on the American people’s acceptance of its legitimacy, which is why the justices must make every possible effort to appear fair, unbiased and beyond reproach.That may seem naïve, particularly in the face of the crippling assaults on the court that Mitch McConnell and his Senate Republicans have carried out over the past six years in order to secure a right-wing supermajority that often resembles a judicial policy arm of the Republican Party — starting with their theft of a vacancy that was President Barack Obama’s to fill and continuing through the last-second confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett while millions of voters were already in the process of casting Mr. Trump out of office.And yet the public’s demand for basic fairness and judicial neutrality is not only proper but critical to the court’s integrity, as the justices, whoever nominated them, are well aware. Partly in response to the court’s tanking public-approval ratings, several of them have grown increasingly outspoken in defense of their independence. (Though not all of them.)The most obvious way for justices to demonstrate that independence in practice, of course, is to recuse themselves from any case in which their impartiality might reasonably be questioned. It does not matter whether there is, in fact, a conflict of interest; the mere appearance of bias or conflict should be enough to compel Justice Thomas or any other member of the court to step aside.Many of them have over the years, out of respect for the court as an institution and for the public’s faith in their probity. Just this week, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson vowed that if confirmed she would recuse herself from an upcoming case challenging Harvard’s affirmative-action policies, because of her multiple personal and professional connections to the university. Legal-ethics experts are not even in agreement that her recusal would be necessary, but Judge Jackson is right to err on the side of caution.Justice Thomas has paid lip service to this ideal. “I think the media makes it sound as though you are just always going right to your personal preference,” he said in a speech last year. “That’s a problem. You’re going to jeopardize any faith in the legal institutions.”Bench memo to the justice: You know what jeopardizes public faith in legal institutions? Refusing to recuse yourself from numerous high-profile cases in which your wife has been personally and sometimes financially entangled, as The New Yorker reported in January. Especially when you have emphasized that you and she are melded “into one being.” Or when you have, as The Times Magazine reported last month, appeared together with her for years “at highly political events hosted by advocates hoping to sway the court.”Ms. Thomas’s efforts, and her husband’s refusal to respond appropriately, have been haunting the court for years, but this latest conflagration shouldn’t be a close call. “The texts are the narrowest way of looking at this,” Stephen Gillers, a New York University law professor and one of the nation’s foremost legal-ethics experts, told me. “She signed up for Stop the Steal. She was part of the team, and that team had an interest in how the court would rule. That’s all I need to know.” He said he has over the years resisted calling for Justice Thomas’s recusal based on his wife’s actions, “but they’ve really abused that tolerance.”Yes, married people can lead independent professional lives, and it is not a justice’s responsibility to police the actions of his or her spouse. But the brazenness with which the Thomases have flouted the most reasonable expectations of judicial rectitude is without precedent. From the Affordable Care Act to the Trump administration’s Muslim ban to the 2020 election challenges, Ms. Thomas has repeatedly embroiled herself in big-ticket legal issues and with litigants who have wound up before her husband’s court. All the while, he has looked the other way, refusing to recuse himself from any of these cases. For someone whose job is about judging, Justice Thomas has, in this context at least, demonstrated abominably poor judgment.If Justice Thomas were sitting on any other federal court in the country, he would likely have been required by the code of judicial ethics to recuse himself many times over. But the code does not apply to Supreme Court justices, creating a situation in which the highest court in the land is also the most unaccountable.This is not tolerable. For years, Congress has tried in vain to extend the ethics code to the Supreme Court. For the sake of fundamental fairness and consistency, the code must apply to all federal judges; it would at the very least force the hand of those like Justice Thomas who seem unmoved by any higher sense of duty to the institution or to the American people who have agreed to abide by its rulings.The court is in deep trouble these days, pervaded by what Justice Sonia Sotomayor recently called the “stench” of partisanship — a stench arising in no small part from the Thomases’ behavior. It is hard to imagine that the other justices, regardless of their personal politics, aren’t bothered.No one should have to choose between their devotion to their spouse and their duty to the nation. But Justice Thomas has shown himself unwilling or unable to protect what remains of the court’s reputation from the appearance of extreme bias he and his wife have created. He would do the country a service by stepping down and making room for someone who won’t have that problem.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected] The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

Ginni Thomas texts spark ethical storm about husband’s supreme court roleStash of messages from Clarence Thomas’s activist wife released to January 6 committee have raised conflict-of-interest concerns Calls have erupted for ethical conflict-of-interest rules on America’s top court after it was revealed that Ginni Thomas, wife of the supreme court justice Clarence Thomas, pressed Donald Trump’s White House chief of staff to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.The Washington Post reported that it had obtained a stash of 29 text messages between Ginni Thomas and Mark Meadows, then Trump’s top White House aide, which were exchanged in the tumultuous days after the November 2020 election. In the texts, Thomas blatantly urged Meadows to do anything he could to subvert the democratic result so as to frustrate Joe Biden’s victory and keep Trump in power.Ginni Thomas urged Trump’s chief of staff to overturn election resultsRead moreEthics groups, members of Congress, law professors, media pundits and a slew of other interested parties have responded to the revelations with astonishment and concern. The Thomas-Meadows texts were contained in a trove of 2,320 digital communications that Meadows has handed to the House select committee investigating the storming of the US Capitol by Trump supporters on 6 January.Those communications were only obtained by the committee after the supreme court ordered them to be transferred to Congress, rejecting claims by Trump that they were covered by executive privilege. The court forced disclosure of the material, including the Ginni Thomas texts, by a vote of 8 to 1 – with Clarence Thomas providing the only dissent.Norman Ornstein, a senior emeritus fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, called the development “a scandal of immense proportions”. Branding Ginni Thomas a “radical insurrectionist”, he said it was time for the January 6 committee to subpoena her texts and emails to see what other incriminating evidence was out there.Laurence Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard law school, called on the justice department to investigate the apparent conspiracy between Thomas, Meadows and Trump. “Hard to see Justice Thomas not recusing when that reaches” the supreme court, he said.Gabe Roth, executive director of Fix the Court, which campaigns for reform of the supreme court, told the Guardian that the rule of law depended not just on impartiality, but on the appearance of impartiality.“There is a lack of moral authority on the supreme court right now, there is a lack of trust, and the court needs to acknowledge it and take steps to ameliorate it,” Roth said.The commotion has come at a torrid time for the supreme court. On Friday Clarence Thomas himself was discharged from hospital having been treated for days with an infection.Millions of Americans also viewed the televised spectacle of the first Black woman to be nominated for the highest court, Ketanji Brown Jackson, being subjected to bizarre and hostile questioning by Republicans in her confirmation hearings. Senators including Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley pressed her on her sentencing record of sex offenders in child-abuse imagery cases, and on anti-racist teaching in schools in ways that at times came closer to dog-whistle politics than a solemn constitutional process.That Ginni Thomas was using her considerable network of contacts to try to subvert democracy came as little surprise to close observers of US politics. For decades she has acted as a prominent champion of ultra-rightwing causes, heading her own lobbying firm, Liberty Consulting, since 2010.In recent months, concern about apparent conflicts of interest relating to Clarence Thomas, who is the longest-serving of the nine justices on the supreme court, and his wife has been intensifying. Investigative articles by Jane Mayer in the New Yorker and by the New York Times have raised red flags about the interplay of such a leading rightwing lobbyist and her powerful judicial husband.The direct connection between Ginni’s texts and Clarence’s dissent in the supreme court’s ruling over disclosure of those same texts to Congress takes the issue to a new level. It raises the question of whether Clarence Thomas had any awareness of what was in the material that the January 6 committee demanded to see.As Dan Rather, the former CBS News anchor, put it: “What does Clarence Thomas know? And when did he know it?”The Thomases have always denied that they discuss each other’s work. In one of her texts, however, written three weeks after the 2020 election, she responded to Meadows – who described the attempt to overturn Biden’s win as “a fight of good versus evil” – by saying:“Thank you!! Needed that! This plus a conversation with my best friend just now … I will try to keep holding on.”“My best friend”, although veiled, was beyond doubt a reference to her husband, according to Mayer of the New Yorker, who tweeted: “‘best friend’ is how the Thomases refer to one another”.Mayer is one of many commentators who are now wondering whether it is time for an ethics code to be imposed on the supreme court – which is the only federal judicial panel in the country not to be governed by any such safeguards against corruption or conflict of interest.All other federal judges, including appeals court judges, are subject to a rule that says that they must recuse themselves in any matter in which “he or his spouse” is a party to, or has an interest in, the proceedings.Supreme court justices are required to recuse if their impartiality “might reasonably be questioned”. But as the constitutional law expert Steve Vladeck noted, there is no effective enforcement mechanism, underlining the need for a more solid set of ethics rules.The exposure of Ginni Thomas’s texts was revealed by Bob Woodward, of Watergate fame, and his Washington Post colleague Robert Costa, adding a patina of journalistic royalty to the furore, which has left even observers well versed in Thomas’s extreme politics astounded by how far she was willing to go in espousing a political coup on behalf of Trump.In her Meadows texts she regurgitated a conspiracy theory embraced by QAnon supporters that Trump had watermarked ballots sent by mail supposedly in order to detect voter fraud.She also sent Meadows a video – backing Trump’s big lie that the election was stolen from him – created by a far-right “truther”. The video maker had previously claimed that the 2012 gun massacre at Sandy Hook elementary school in Connecticut, in which 20 children were murdered, was an invention cooked up by gun-control advocates.Before the text messages emerged, Thomas’s links to Trump’s big lie were already known. She attended the January 6 “Save America” rally in Washington hours before the Capitol insurrection, posting on Twitter: “LOVE MAGA people!!!!” GOD BLESS EACH OF YOU STANDING UP or PRAYING!”“This is a really sad state of affairs,” Roth told the Guardian. “That a longtime political operative like Ginni Thomas should go down such a rabbit hole saddens me deeply.”TopicsUS supreme courtUS Capitol attackClarence ThomasnewsReuse this content More

Two of Donald Trump’s most prominent Senate endorsements have already backfired. Now the month of May looms large to measure his pull on the party. Donald J. Trump has sought to establish himself as the Republican Party’s undisputed kingmaker in the 2022 midterms, issuing more than 120 endorsements to elevate allies, punish those who have crossed him and turn his baseless claim that the 2020 election was stolen into a litmus test for the party.But the range of Trump-backed candidates has become so unwieldy that even some of his own advisers have warned that his expansive effort to install loyalists nationwide has not only threatened his brand but diluted its impact, exposing him unnecessarily to political risk, according to advisers and Republican strategists.Mr. Trump’s face-saving decision on Wednesday to retract his endorsement of Representative Mo Brooks, a longtime ally who has slumped in the polls in Alabama’s Senate race, only highlighted the perils of an upcoming primary season that will test the former president’s sway over the Republican Party.Already, two of Mr. Trump’s early and most prominent Senate endorsements have backfired long before voters head to the polls. In addition to Alabama, his initial choice in Pennsylvania, Sean Parnell, quit the race last fall after abuse allegations emerged in a child custody dispute. And fears of further setbacks have helped keep Mr. Trump on the sidelines so far in choosing a replacement there or a candidate in the Ohio or Missouri Senate races.Georgia, where Mr. Trump is headed this weekend, represents one of his riskiest bets. He has been fixated on unseating the Republican governor, Brian Kemp. But Mr. Trump’s handpicked challenger has been struggling to gain traction against the well-financed governor less than two months before the primary.“I don’t know whether he is letting emotion rule his decision making or if he is getting bad advice,” said Glen Bolger, a Republican pollster, “but it seems like he is picking candidates who are pretty weak, and that’s not a place — when you’re trying to be kingpin — where you want to be.” He added that Mr. Trump’s image remained “very strong” among Republican primary voters. The early stumbles have come as Mr. Trump’s rivals, and even some erstwhile allies, including former Vice President Mike Pence, have become more emboldened to break ranks publicly with Mr. Trump.The former president’s own obsession with his endorsement success rate as a metric of his power has only magnified attention on upcoming primaries. Mr. Trump crowed after the Texas primary this month about how all 33 people he had endorsed either won outright or were far ahead. But nearly all of those candidates were on a glide path to victory without his backing.Bigger tests loom. Mr. Trump’s advisers and his adversaries alike have circled May as the month that will either cement his hold on the Republican base or puncture his aura as the party’s untouchable leader.The only two races for governor in which Mr. Trump is seeking to unseat Republican incumbents, in Georgia and Idaho, are taking place that month, as is the Alabama Senate primary, in which Mr. Trump said he now planned to endorse again. There is also a North Carolina Senate race where Mr. Trump’s choice is not considered the favorite. And in West Virginia, one of the country’s Trumpiest states, his preferred candidate is locked in a bruising race that pits two House members against each other.How Donald J. Trump Still LoomsGrip on G.O.P.: Mr. Trump remains the most powerful figure in the Republican Party. However, there are signs his control is loosening.Power Struggle: Led by Senator Mitch McConnell, a band of anti-Trump Republicans is maneuvering to thwart the ex-president.Midterms Effect: Mr. Trump has become a party kingmaker, but his involvement in state races worries many Republicans.Post-Presidency Profits: Mr. Trump is melding business with politics, capitalizing for personal gain.Just the Beginning: For many Trump supporters who marched on Jan. 6, the day was not a disgraced insurrection but the start of a movement.Mr. Trump’s backing is still the most coveted in Republican politics, and his outpost at Mar-a-Lago in Florida sees a constant flow of candidates pitching themselves and pledging loyalty.“The complete and total failure of the Democrat ‘leadership’ has created a demand for the immediate return to the America First agenda President Trump championed,” Taylor Budowich, a spokesman for Mr. Trump, said. “The democratic process has never before seen the kind of power that President Trump’s endorsement has heading into the primary season.”Polls have shown Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia maintaining a lead in his re-election bid.Ben Gray/Atlanta Journal-Constitution, via Associated PressChallenging Georgia’s governor is former Senator David Perdue, whom Mr. Trump is endorsing.Matthew Odom for The New York TimesPerhaps no state embodies the risky gambit that Mr. Trump is undertaking to reorient the Republican Party around his false 2020 fraud claims than Georgia, where he will rally support on Saturday for former Senator David Perdue against Mr. Kemp. Mr. Trump has loudly feuded with the governor over his decision to certify the 2020 election.Polls have shown Mr. Kemp’s maintaining a lead despite Mr. Trump’s endorsement of Mr. Perdue and appearance in television commercials. In recent days, Mr. Trump also backed challengers to the Kemp-aligned attorney general and insurance commissioner after previously wading into the contests for Georgia’s secretary of state and lieutenant governor.“I think Trump has overextended himself in Georgia,” said Erick Erickson, a conservative radio host in Georgia. “Many of these candidates won’t have the budget to get that information out there, and Trump doesn’t seem to be throwing big money their way.”While Mr. Trump seeks to put his imprint on the party across the country, the footprint of his political operation — despite a war chest of more than $122 million entering 2022 — is far smaller. Most of his endorsements come with only a small check and a public statement of support, with some candidates paying him to use his Mar-a-Lago resort for fund-raisers. The candidates must then raise sufficient money on their own to take advantage of his backing — and not all have.One of Mr. Trump’s political successes has been in the Georgia Senate primary, where Herschel Walker, the former football player, has essentially cleared the field with Mr. Trump’s backing and has emerged as a strong fund-raiser. But Mr. Walker also has a lengthy set of political vulnerabilities that Mr. Trump looked past and Democrats are expected to seize upon. He has faced accusations that he threatened his ex-wife as well as questions about his business dealings and recent residency in Texas. Other Trump-backed Georgia Republicans are facing challenging primaries, including John Gordon, who entered the attorney general’s race only days ago and is being advised by Corey Lewandowski, Mr. Trump’s first 2016 campaign manager. Mr. Trump greeted Herschel Walker, the former football player whom the president endorsed in the Georgia Senate race, in 2020.Anna Moneymaker for The New York TimesIn state after state, Mr. Trump’s endorsements have put him at odds with some of the most powerful local Republicans, including several governors.In Nebraska, Mr. Trump is crosswise with Gov. Pete Ricketts by supporting the rival of Mr. Ricketts’s preferred candidate in the open governor’s race. In Maryland, Mr. Trump is supporting Dan Cox for governor against the former state commerce secretary, Kelly Schulz, who has the support of her old boss, Gov. Larry Hogan. In Arizona, Mr. Trump’s feud with Gov. Doug Ducey is expected to spill into the open governor’s race there, too. Mr. Trump is backing a former newscaster, Kari Lake, and Mr. Ducey has not yet endorsed anyone.Kari Lake, the Trump-endorsed candidate for governor of Arizona, greeting supporters at a rally last year.Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York TimesMr. Trump is holding events in many states to rally his base, pledging to fly as far away as Alaska to try to unseat Senator Lisa Murkowski, the only Republican in the Senate who voted to convict him in his impeachment trial and who is on the ballot this year.In House races, Mr. Trump is most determined to oust the 10 Republicans who voted for his impeachment, particularly Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming. Mr. Trump has scored some early successes, helping to drive three Republicans who voted for his impeachment into retirement. But the remaining races have far fewer sure bets for him.In Michigan, where Mr. Trump will hold a rally in early April, he is trying to defeat two House Republicans who backed his impeachment as well as install numerous loyalists in a state where he has falsely claimed the 2020 election was rigged.Eric Greitens resigned as governor in 2018 amid a scandal. This week his ex-wife accused him of physical abuse. Jeff Roberson/Associated PressIn Missouri, Mr. Trump stayed on the sidelines despite intense lobbying, including from former Gov. Eric Greitens, who resigned in scandal in 2018 but now as a Senate candidate has wooed Mr. Trump in part by pledging to oppose Senator Mitch McConnell as Republican leader.But this week, Mr. Greitens’s ex-wife accused him of physical abuse in a court filing, and Republicans who have spoken to Mr. Trump are skeptical now that he will back Mr. Greitens. Mr. Trump put out a glowing statement about Representative Billy Long, another Republican candidate for the Senate seat, calling him a “warrior,” though he labeled it a nonendorsement. Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, meanwhile, has made the case to Mr. Trump for another candidate: Representative Vicky Hartzler. Mr. Hawley said that Mr. Trump’s “having something to say in the race would mean a lot” in the effort to stop Mr. Greitens.Mr. McConnell has been deeply concerned about the Missouri race and stayed publicly silent, though at a Senate Republican luncheon this week he told colleagues that “we caught a break,” in reference to the new Greitens accusations, according to one Republican official.Missouri Republicans are unsure if the new allegations against Mr. Greitens will prove politically fatal, but many remain alarmed by the possibility that Mr. Trump could still support him.“I do not want to see Mr. Trump embarrassed by a hasty endorsement,” said Peter Kinder, a former lieutenant governor who was a co-chair of the 2016 Missouri Trump campaign. Mr. Kinder called Mr. Greitens a “badly flawed, badly damaged candidate.” Alyssa Farah Griffin, a former Trump aide who has since become a critic, said the success of Mr. Trump’s endorsements in 2022 would directly impact the next presidential campaign.“It does bear on 2024,” she said, “because Republicans are going to see who the biggest power broker is.” More

Representative Jeff Fortenberry was accused of lying to F.B.I. agents investigating illegal foreign donations.LOS ANGELES — A Nebraska congressman was convicted Thursday on charges that he lied to federal authorities about having received an illegal campaign contribution from a foreign citizen.Representative Jeff Fortenberry was convicted in federal court in Los Angeles on one count of falsifying and concealing material facts and two counts of making false statements. Each carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison, according to the United States Department of Justice. A sentencing hearing was set for June 28.“The lies in this case threatened the integrity of the American electoral system and were designed to prevent investigators from learning the true source of campaign funds,” said Tracy L. Wilkison, one of the prosecutors.Mr. Fortenberry’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But outside the courthouse, Mr. Fortenberry said that the process had been unfair and that he would appeal immediately, according to The Associated Press.In October, when he was charged, the congressman vowed to fight the accusations and maintained his innocence.“Five and a half years ago, a person from overseas illegally moved money to my campaign,” Mr. Fortenberry said in a video he posted online at the time. “I didn’t know anything about this.”He was convicted after a weeklong trial.Mr. Fortenberry, a Republican who has been in Congress for almost two decades, received a $30,000 donation to his re-election campaign at a fund-raiser in 2016, according to the federal indictment in the case. Foreign citizens are prohibited from donating to U.S. election campaigns.Rather than report the contribution in an amended filing with the Federal Election Commission or return the money, as federal law dictates, prosecutors said Mr. Fortenberry kept it and told investigators in 2019 that he had been unaware of any contributions made by foreign citizens.The charges did not stem from the donation itself, which came from Gilbert Chagoury, a Lebanese Nigerian billionaire who was accused of conspiring to make illegal campaign contributions to American politicians in exchange for access to them.The charges came after prosecutors said Mr. Fortenberry denied knowing that the donation, which had been funneled through an intermediary, were from Mr. Chagoury — even after the congressman told a cooperating witness, a fund-raiser referred to in court filings as Individual H, that the donation “probably did come from Gilbert Chagoury.”Federal investigators first interviewed Mr. Fortenberry in 2019 as part of an investigation into Mr. Chagoury, who admitted to giving $180,000 to four candidates from June 2012 to March 2016. Mr. Fortenberry was one of those four.Mr. Chagoury ultimately reached a deal with the U.S. government and paid a $1.8 million fine.In court documents, prosecutors said Mr. Chagoury had been told to donate to “politicians from less-populous states because the contribution would be more noticeable to the politician and thereby would promote increased donor access.”Katie Benner contributed reporting. More

Ginni Thomas urged Trump’s chief of staff to overturn election resultsIn texts to Mark Meadows, the wife of supreme court justice Clarence Thomas pushed Trump’s ‘big lie’ In the weeks following the 2020 election, the conservative activist Ginni Thomas – who is married to the supreme court justice Clarence Thomas – repeatedly implored Donald Trump’s chief of staff to help overturn the results, according to text messages obtained by the Washington Post and CBS News.In one of 29 messages seen by the news outlets, Thomas wrote to Mark Meadows on 10 November: “Help This Great President stand firm, Mark!!! … You are the leader, with him, who is standing for America’s constitutional governance at the precipice. The majority knows Biden and the Left is attempting the greatest Heist of our History.”Republican says Trump asked him to ‘rescind’ 2020 election and remove Biden from officeRead moreThe messages shed light on Thomas’s direct line to the White House and how she used it to push the “big lie” that Trump had won the election – with Meadows’ apparent support, the Post reported. The exchanges are among 2,320 texts Meadows handed to the House committee investigating the January 6 attack on the US Capitol.“This is a fight of good versus evil,” Meadows wrote in a 24 November message. “Evil always looks like the victor until the King of Kings triumphs. Do not grow weary in well doing. The fight continues. I have staked my career on it. Well at least my time in DC on it.”Meadows’ lawyer, George Terwilliger III, acknowledged the messages’ existence to the Post but said they did not raise “legal issues”.Thomas did not respond to the newspaper’s requests for comment. She has previously said that she does not discuss her activist work with her husband, and the messages do not mention him or the supreme court, according to the Post.Terwilliger and Thomas did not immediately reply to requests for comment from the Guardian. Messages left for the supreme court’s public information office were not immediately returned.When the supreme court rejected Trump challenges over the election in February 2021, Clarence Thomas dissented, calling the decision “baffling”, the Post notes.The text messages – 21 of which are from Thomas and eight from Meadows – contain references to conspiracy theories. Thomas, for instance, highlighted a claim popular among QAnon followers that the president had watermarked certain ballots as a means of identifying fraud.She also suggested the Bidens were behind supposed fraud. “Biden crime family & ballot fraud co-conspirators … are being arrested & detained for ballot fraud right now & over coming days, & will be living in barges off GITMO to face military tribunals for sedition,” she wrote.Thomas seemed to condemn some Republicans in Congress for being insufficiently loyal to Trump. “House and Senate guys are pathetic too… only 4 GOP House members seen out in street rallies with grassroots,” she wrote in a 10 November message, adding later that night: “Where the heck are all those who benefited by Presidents coattails?!!!”Other messages refer to conservative commentators and lawyers who supported Trump’s cause, including Sidney Powell, whom Thomas apparently wanted to be “the lead and the face” of Trump’s legal team. Powell was behind a slate of lawsuits seeking to overturn the election and faces investigation by the Texas State Bar Association over alleged false claims in court. Thomas expressed repeated support for Powell even as she became a divisive figure in pro-Trump circles, the Post notes. “Sidney Powell & improved coordination now will help the cavalry come and Fraud exposed and America saved,” she wrote on 13 November.“Listen to Rush. Mark Steyn, Bongino, Cleta,” Thomas urged Meadows in another message, apparently referring to the commentators Rush Limbaugh, Mark Steyn and Dan Bongino, along with Cleta Mitchell, a lawyer who backed Trump’s claims in Georgia.“I will stand firm. We will fight until there is no fight left,” Meadows replied. “Our country is too precious to give up on. Thanks for all you do.”Thomas has acknowledged attending Trump’s rally prior to the Capitol attack on 6 January 2021, though she says she left before the then president spoke. She condemned the ensuing violence.TopicsUS elections 2020Clarence ThomasDonald TrumpMark MeadowsUS Capitol attackUS politicsnewsReuse this content More