Virginia (“Ginni”) Thomas is the wife of ultra-conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Ms. Thomas has long been active in far right wing affairs and organizations. This was detailed in an important and far reaching article in The New Yorker by Jane Mayer, rather directly entitled, “Is Ginni Thomas A Threat To The Supreme Court?”
Mayer details Ms. Thomas’s connections to numerous far right organizations and people. Ginni supported the Trump election lies, and on the morning of January 6th, albeit before the violence started, she posted on Facebook “Love MAGA people!!!!”
Among the more disturbing connections is that Ginni Thomas cohosted a 2010 conference featuring OathKeeper founder Stewart Rhodes. The same Stewart Rhodes just charged with sedition as he conspired to violently disrupt the electoral college count and conspired to have large caches of weapons around the Capitol on that day. The allegations are beyond chilling in detailing how the mob was nearly supplemented by OathKeepers heavily armed with assault weapons.
When Donald Trump appealed the turning over of National Archivist information to the January 6 Committee the vote was 8 to 1 against him. The one vote supporting Trump was Clarence Thomas.
To Summarize: The wife of a Supreme Court Justice cohosted an event featuring a man now charged with seditious conspiracy. That Supreme Court Justice was then the sole vote characterizing as illegitimate the Congressional investigation of that seditious conspiracy.
Ginni Thomas has herself, quite recently, characterized the January 6th Committee as illegitimate. Just last month she signed a letter urging Kevin McCarthy to excommunicate from the Republican caucus Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger “due to their egregious actions as part of the House of Representative’s January 6th Select Committee.” The Supreme Court Justice’s wife stated that the Committee “improperly issued subpoenas . . . designed not to pursue any valid legislative end” that brings “legal harassment to private citizens who have done nothing wrong.”
Ginni Thomas signed that letter and there are likely to be more challenges to the 1/6 Committee’s efforts that get before her husband’s court.
To Summarize: Last week before Justice Thomas was a case where the former President of the United States argued just what his wife had said, that the subpoena at issue was harassment and improperly issued by a committee with no valid legislative purpose. Rather than recuse himself, Justice Thomas was the sole vote characterizing the Committee as illegitimate.
Trump’s coup attempt included many scary banana republic tactics. It included a multi-state conspiracy to forge electoral college certificates with the counterfeits submitted to Congress and the National Archives as a pretext for Trump’s Vice President to unilaterally invalidate the electoral college results of the people. It included plans to use the United States military to seize voting machines and equipment. It included corruptly urging the Department of Justice to lie to states by falsely claiming the FBI had found indications of widespread election fraud. It included the President of the United States attempting to personally extort a Secretary of State into finding the exact number of votes the President needed.
In large part this wide ranging, multi-pronged, coup attempt failed because even as our executive and legislative branches were near broken, the judicial branch worked properly to enforce the rule of law. Justice Thomas, and his wife, are a threat to that rule of law.
