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      Ginni Thomas urged Arizona Republicans to overturn 2020 result – report

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      Ginni Thomas urged Arizona Republicans to overturn 2020 result – reportWife of supreme court justice Clarence Thomas emailed six days after election already called for Joe Biden Ginni Thomas, the wife of the US supreme court justice Clarence Thomas, pressed Republicans in Arizona to overturn Joe Biden’s victory there in 2020, the Washington Post reported.The Trump loyalist who could be a major threat to US democracyRead moreRepeating Donald Trump’s lie that the vote had been marred by fraud, Thomas wrote: “Please stand strong in the face of political and media pressure. Please reflect on the awesome authority granted to you by our constitution. And then please take action to ensure that a clean slate of electors is chosen for our state.”Thomas did not mention Biden or Trump. But, the Post said, “the context was clear”.Biden won Arizona, a swing state vital to the contest, by about 10,000 votes. The call was first made by Fox News, enraging Trump.Ginni Thomas is an activist with deep ties on the Republican far right. Reports of her involvement in Trump’s attempt to hold on to power have led to calls for her husband’s impeachment and removal, or at least recusal from election-related cases.In January, Thomas was the only justice to say Trump should be able to withhold from the House committee investigating the January 6 Capitol attack documents which turned out to include texts sent by his wife to Trump’s chief of staff.On Friday, the Post said Ginni Thomas emailed two Arizona Republicans on 9 November, six days after election day and two days after Biden’s win was called.She also requested a live or online meeting “so I can learn more about what you are doing to ensure our state’s vote is audited and our certification is clean”.One of the lawmakers, Shawnna Bolick, replied, saying, “I hope you and Clarence are doing great!” but deflecting the demand for a meeting.The Post said Thomas replied: “Fun that this came to you! Just part of our campaign to help states feel America’s eyes!!!”The Post also reported that Thomas emailed the same Republicans on 13 December, a day before the electoral college met to confirm Biden’s victory.That email said: “Before you choose your state’s electors … consider what will happen to the nation we all love if you don’t stand up and lead.”The Post said the email contained a link to a video of a man who appeared to be Geoffrey Botkin, an activist, “delivering a message meant for swing-state lawmakers, urging them to ‘put things right’ and ‘not give in to cowardice’ [and saying] ‘You have only hours to act’.”The video is no longer available. Botkin did not comment to the newspaper. Nor did Ginni Thomas. The Post said a supreme court spokesperson did not respond.On 14 December, the day the electoral college confirmed Biden’s win, Bolick signed a letter calling for Arizona’s electoral votes to go to Trump or “be nullified completely until a full forensic audit can be conducted”.In 2021, Arizona Republicans conducted a controversial vote audit. It did not reveal substantial electoral fraud. It did increase Biden’s margin of victory.Time for Clarence Thomas to recuse himself from election cases – his wife’s texts prove itRead moreAlso in 2021, the New Yorker reported that Bolick had introduced a bill that “would enable a majority of the legislature to override the popular vote … and dictate the state’s electoral college votes itself”.Like Trump loyalists elsewhere, Bolick is now running for secretary of state, the office which runs elections.On Friday, the New Yorker reporter Jane Meyer tweeted “one additional detail”, linking Ginni Thomas’s moves in Arizona back to her husband.Clarence Thomas, Meyer said, is godfather “to Clint Bolick’s child, and Bolick’s wife is the Arizona lawmaker who Ginni Thomas pressured to overturn the 2020 election.“No conflicts of interest?”TopicsUS elections 2020Clarence ThomasUS politicsArizonanewsReuse this content More

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      Republican won’t say whether Capitol attack panel will question Ginni Thomas

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      Republican won’t say whether Capitol attack panel will question Ginni ThomasAdam Kinzinger vows to ‘get to the bottom’ of insurrection after Clarence Thomas’s wife reportedly urged White House to overturn Trump’s election defeat Adam Kinzinger, one of two Republican members on January 6 committee, on Sunday vowed to “get to the bottom” of events surrounding the 2021 insurrection at the US Capitol but refused to reveal whether the panel intends to question Ginni Thomas – wife of US supreme court justice Clarence Thomas – over reports of her urging the White House to overturn Donald Trump’s election defeat.Senior Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar said Clarence Thomas must recuse himself from relevant cases and warned the integrity of the supreme court is at stake.Kinzinger refused to confirm or deny the existence of text messages Ginni Thomas is reported to have exchanged with then White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, although he did not contest the Washington Post and CBS’s joint revelation last week that they obtained copies of such messages from materials submitted to the congressional committee by Meadows.“The question for the committee in this or any exchange is ‘was there a conspiracy, or how close did we get to overturning the election?’” he told CBS’s Face the Nation show on Sunday.Kinzinger, one of two Republicans on the House select committee investigating the events surrounding 6 January 2021, said of witnesses being summoned to give evidence to the committee: “We’ll call in whoever we need to call in.”He added: “Was there an effort to overturn the legitimate election of the United States? What was January 6 in relation to that? And what is the rot in our system that led to that and does it still exist today?…We are going to get to the bottom of this.”He did not say whether that “rot” extended to the nation’s highest court.Thomas and her husband are rightwing political darlings who have described themselves as “one being – an amalgam,” according to the New York Times.Amid the latest reports, Justice Thomas is now facing calls to recuse himself from any cases surrounding the 2020 presidential election, the insurrection and potentially the 2024 presidential election, should Trump run for re-election.Time for Clarence Thomas to recuse himself from election cases – his wife’s texts prove itRead moreMeanwhile Klobuchar of Minnesota, chairwoman of the Senate rules committee and a member of the Senate judiciary committee, which quizzes nominees for the supreme court, demanded that Clarence Thomas be removed from any such cases.“This is unbelievable,” Klobuchar told ABC’s This Week. “You have the wife of a sitting supreme court justice advocating for an insurrection, advocating for overturning a legal election, to the sitting president’s chief of staff. And she also knows this election, these cases, are going to come before her husband. This is a textbook case for removing him, recusing him, from these decisions.”The 29 exchanges reported between Ginni Thomas and Meadows reveal how the wife of one of the land’s top jurists disseminated disinformation related to the QAnon conspiracy theory and other inaccurate arguments during the tempestuous days following the November 2020 election when right-wingers were claiming Democrat Joe Biden had not won.Even as Trump strategized efforts to overturn his defeat through the courts, Virginia “Ginni” Thomas “spread false theories, commented on cable news segments and advocated with urgency and fervor that the president and his team take action to reverse the outcome of the election,” the Post reported.It reported she wrote to Meadows: “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.”Pressed about how he and his colleagues would broach Thomas’s alleged attempts to undermine a legitimate US election, Kinzinger said they want to ensure their work is “not driven by a political motivation, it’s driven by facts”.The House select committee has so far hesitated to demand cooperation from Thomas in part because they are worried she may “create a political spectacle to distract from the investigation”, the Guardian previously reported.Klobuchar said: “All I hear is silence from the supreme court right now. And that better change in the coming week because every other federal judge in the country except supreme court justices would have guidance from ethics rules that says you got to recuse. The entire integrity of the court is on the line here.”TopicsUS elections 2020US Capitol attackClarence ThomasUS politicsUS supreme courtLaw (US)newsReuse this content More

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      Ginni Thomas texts spark ethical storm about husband’s supreme court role

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      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

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      Ginni Thomas urged Trump’s chief of staff to overturn election results

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      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

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      Ginni Thomas, wife of Clarence Thomas, attended rally preceding Capitol attack

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      Ginni Thomas, wife of Clarence Thomas, attended rally preceding Capitol attackConservative activist who runs a political lobbying firm, says she briefly attended rally but left before Trump addressed crowd Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, wife of the supreme court justice Clarence Thomas, has admitted attending a rally which preceded the January 6 attack on the US Capitol but denied helping to plan it.Critics accuse CPAC of becoming pay-to-play as Trump loyalists gain powerRead moreIn an interview with the Washington Free Beacon, Thomas, a conservative activist who runs a political lobbying firm, said she briefly attended the rally near the White House on 6 January 2021 but left before Donald Trump addressed the crowd.Trump used his address to tell supporters to “fight like hell” in support of his lie that his defeat by Joe Biden was the result of electoral fraud. A bipartisan Senate report said seven deaths were connected to the assault on Congress which followed.Thomas said brief attendance at the rally was the full extent of her involvement.“I was disappointed and frustrated that there was violence that happened following a peaceful gathering of Trump supporters on the Ellipse on 6 January,” she told the Free Beacon, a conservative site.Investigations by the New York Times and the New Yorker have raised questions about Thomas’s ties to organizers of the January 6 rally.According to the Times, Thomas sits on the board of a rightwing group that circulated “action steps” after the 2020 election, in an attempt to keep Trump in power.One of the organizers of the rally told the Times Thomas was a peacekeeper between various factions. Thomas denied those allegations.“I played no role with those who were planning and leading the 6 January events,” she said.The Times told the Free Beacon it stood by its “fair and accurate” reporting.Thomas, who has been involved in conservative activism for decades, also categorically rejected any suggestion her political activities present a conflict of interest for her husband. Some judicial ethics experts have called on Clarence Thomas to recuse himself from cases involving causes with which his wife has been involved.However, Ginni Thomas’s comments on the morning of 6 January only intensified questions about her husband’s possible conflicts of interest.In a series of Facebook posts that are no longer visible, Thomas said “LOVE MAGA people!!!!” and “GOD BLESS EACH OF YOU STANDING UP or PRAYING!”She later added a note that the posts were written before the attack on the Capitol, according to Slate.Clarence Thomas: supreme court could be ‘compromised’ by politicsRead moreThomas has insisted her activism has no bearing on her husband’s rulings, saying they have kept their careers separate since he was confirmed in 1991.“Like so many married couples, we share many of the same ideals, principles and aspirations for America,” Thomas told the Free Beacon. “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.”Justice Thomas’s critics will closely scrutinize his work related to the Capitol attack.In January, he provided an early hint about his opinion of efforts to investigate January 6. The supreme court rejected Trump’s request to stop a House select committee accessing his White House records.Only one justice dissented: Clarence Thomas.TopicsClarence ThomasUS supreme courtLaw (US)US politicsUS Capitol attacknewsReuse this content More

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      Clarence Thomas: supreme court could be ‘compromised’ by politics

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      Clarence Thomas: supreme court could be ‘compromised’ by politicsThe court is set to rule this year on divisive issues including abortion, gun control, the climate crisis and voting rights

      The Agenda: how the supreme court threatens US democracy
      The US supreme court could “at some point” become “compromised” by politics, said Clarence Thomas – one of six conservatives on the nine-member court after Republicans denied Barack Obama a nomination then rammed three new justices through during the hard-right presidency of Donald Trump.Who has more influence on supreme court: Clarence Thomas or his activist wife?Read more“You can cavalierly talk about packing or stacking the court,” said Thomas, whose wife, Ginni Thomas, has come under extensive scrutiny for work for rightwing groups including supporting Trump’s attempts to overturn an election.“You can cavalierly talk about doing this or doing that. At some point the institution is going to be compromised.”Thomas was speaking at a hotel in Salt Lake City on Friday.“By doing this,” he said, “you continue to chip away at the respect of the institutions that the next generation is going to need if they’re going to have civil society.”The court is set to rule this year on divisive issues including abortion, gun control, the climate crisis and voting rights. Conservative victories are expected. The conservative-dominated court has already ruled against the Biden administration on coronavirus mitigation and other matters.The US constitution does not mandate that the court consist of nine justices. Some progressives and Democratic politicians have therefore called to expand it, in order to reset its ideological balance. Democrats in Congress last year introduced a bill to add four justices and Joe Biden has created a commission to study expansion.Few analysts think expansion is likely to happen.Republican senators are currently attacking Biden for his campaign promise to nominate a first Black woman to the court, a promise he fulfilled by nominating Ketanji Brown Jackson to replace the retiring Stephen Breyer.Republican presidents have nominated justices on grounds of identity, most recently when Trump said he would pick a woman to replace Ruth Bader Ginsberg, the liberal lion who died in September 2020.Ignoring their own claims about the impropriety of confirmations in election years, made in denying Merrick Garland even a hearing to replace Antonin Scalia in 2016, Senate Republicans installed Amy Coney Barrett, a hardline Catholic conservative, as Ginsberg’s replacement.In Utah on Friday, Thomas also voiced a familiar conservative complaint about so-called “cancel culture”, the supposed silencing of voices or world views deemed unacceptable on political grounds.He was, he said, “afraid, particularly in this world of cancel culture attack, I don’t know where you’re going to learn to engage as we did when I grew up.“If you don’t learn at that level in high school, in grammar school, in your neighborhood, or in civic organizations, then how do you have it when you’re making decisions in government, in the legislature, or in the courts?”Thomas also attacked the media for, he said, cultivating inaccurate impressions about public figures including himself, his wife and Scalia.Ginni Thomas has faced scrutiny for her involvement in groups that file briefs about cases in front of the supreme court, as well as using Facebook to amplify partisan attacks.Thomas has claimed the supreme court is above politics – a claim made by justices on either side of the partisan divide.Congress is preparing for confirmation hearings for Jackson. She will be installed if all 50 Democratic senators back her, via the casting vote of the vice-president, Kamala Harris. Some Republicans have indicated they could support her too.In Utah, Thomas recalled his own confirmation in 1991 as a humiliating and embarrassing experience. Lawmakers including Biden grilled Thomas about sexual harassment allegations from Anita Hill, a former employee, leading him to call the experience a “high tech lynching”. Biden has also been criticised for his treatment of Hill.‘The Scheme’: a senator’s plan to highlight rightwing influence on the supreme courtRead moreOn Friday, Thomas said he held civility as one of his highest values. He said he learned to respect institutions and debate civilly with those who disagreed with him during his years in school.Based on conversations with students in recent years, he said, he does not believe colleges are now welcoming places for productive debate, particularly for students who support what he described as traditional families or oppose abortion.Thomas did not reference the future of Roe v Wade, the 1973 decision that guaranteed abortion rights. The court on which he sits is scheduled to rule this year on Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, concerning whether Mississippi can ban abortions at 15 weeks.The court is expected to overturn Roe. While the justices deliberate, conservative lawmakers in Florida, West Virginia and Kentucky are advancing similar legislation.
      The Associated Press contributed to this report
      TopicsClarence ThomasUS supreme courtUS constitution and civil libertiesLaw (US)US politicsRepublicansUS CongressnewsReuse this content More