Thanks to some excellent reporting in The New Yorker and The New York Times, it’s clear that power-politics couple Ginni and Clarence Thomas are feeling the heat of a harsh ethical spotlight they have effectively dodged for decades. But instead of coming out and recognizing that Justice Clarence Thomas should acknowledge conflicts of interest and make appropriate recusals, Ginni Thomas is playing the right-wing victim with a load of BS that would be laughable if the stakes were not so high.
We at Crooks and Liars (especially managing editor Karoli Kuns) have been reporting for years about the ethical stink of Ginni Thomas’ politicking. But Jane Mayer – with a shoutout to our Karoli! – assembled the pieces in a New Yorker article so troubling that The New York Times launched its own investigation.
Now Ginni Thomas is crying on the sympathetic shoulder of The Washington Free Beacon. She comes up with a slew of ridiculous claims, including this carefully parsed, additional version of “I didn’t inhale.”
"The legal lane is my husband's—I never much enjoyed reading briefs and judicial opinions anyway and am quite happy to stay out of that lane," Thomas told the Free Beacon. "We do not discuss cases until opinions are public—and even then, our discussions have always been very general and limited to public information."
Notice that while she denies discussing cases, she does not deny discussing, say, the issues or the people behind the cases.
In a terrific Twitter thread that destroys Ginni Thomas’ rehab efforts, Jamison Foser points out that she publicly denies involving her husband in her work, but has privately dropped her husband's name in an email recruiting Ron DeSantis to speak at an event.
LEFT: Ginni Thomas tells the Free Beacon she doesn't involve her husband in her political work.
RIGHT: Ginni Thomas drops her husband's name in an email recruiting Ron DeSantis to speak at an event. pic.twitter.com/21BGTFmWLf— Jamison Foser (@jamisonfoser) March 14, 2022
Also, her half-a**ed criticism of the insurrection:
Have you ever seen a more tepid criticism of a deadly insurrection? Does Ginni Thomas think the violence ~just happened~ or does she know who was responsible for it (i.e., her allies)? pic.twitter.com/eGOYdvEpbB
— Jamison Foser (@jamisonfoser) March 14, 2022
But the real issue is her husband’s conflict of interest.
MSNBC host Ari Melber and guest Joyce Vance stressed that the problem is not Ginni Thomas’ activities but Clarence Thomas’ failure to recuse himself from cases related to them. For example, while every other justice on the Supreme Court ruled that Congress clearly had the power to obtain Donald Trump’s records for its January 6th investigation, Thomas was the sole dissenting opinion. Couple that with his wife’s public support for the January 6 rally, plus her failure to previously disclose her attendance at the rally, and it doesn’t pass the smell test.
Vance agreed. The problem, she said is that now we don’t know whether Thomas’ lone ruling in the January 6th case was “part of his jurisprudence or was it motivated by something else.”
And just what are the chances that Clarence Thomas had no idea his wife was at the January 6th rally? Slim and none, Melber pointed out. “It seems to me,” he said, “if you went to January 6th, that you went to that rally that turned into the insurrection, and you came home that night, it might come up at dinner or the next day. It doesn't seem like something that the justice logically would never have known about.” On top of that, “Justice Thomas has not publicly denied that he knew about this earlier than the rest of us,” Melber added.
Sadly, Clarence Thomas seems more interested in letting his wife take the heat than he is in owning up to his own professional responsibilities. But the heat is obviously there and that means it’s time to turn it up.
