First came the text messages sent between former Donald Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, Clarence Thomas’ wife. The text messages sent between Mark and Ginni in the weeks following the 2020 election show Ginni’s extraordinary access to the White House and, not only championed, but encouraged efforts to overturn the perfectly valid 2020 presidential election.

 

On November 10th, seven days after the election, Ginni texted: “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.”

 

Even though some of the text messages were completely unhinged on Ginni’s part – “Release the Kraken and save us from the left taking America down.” (Kraken is a term often used by followers of QAnon) – every American has the right to his or her own political opinion, regardless of whom they are married to. Plus, to be fair, in her September 29, 2022 testimony before the January 6th U.S. House Select Committee, Ginni said her husband was “uninterested in politics” and that they don’t discuss her “day-to-day work” or who she is “calling, emailing, texting or meeting.” Also in her testimony – where she made clear she still believes the 2020 election was “stolen” – she claimed that she “never spoke to her husband about legal challenges to the 2020 election” and that they do not talk about pending Supreme Court cases as “an iron clad rule.”

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However, in a text exchange between Meadows and Ginni on November 24, 2020, she mentions having a “conversation” with her “best friend” (it is well documented that Clarence and Ginni often refer to one another as their “best friend” in public). Meadows kicks things off with, “This is a fight of good versus evil. 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.” Ginni responds: “Thank you!! Needed that! This plus a conversation with my best friend just now… I will try to keep holding on. America is worth it!”In case there was any doubt she was speaking of her husband in the text, Ginni’s testimony to the January 6th committee pretty much cleared it up: “My husband often administers spousal support to the wife that’s upset. So, I assume that that’s what it was.”

 

** It is very, VERY important to remember that, at the time of these texts, Donald Trump was very publicly declaring his intention to take what he called a “major fraud on our nation” to the U.S. Supreme Court.” **

 

We get that Ginni Thomas having a “conversation” with her “best friend” is not illegal. BUT it becomes highly suspicious when her husband is the ONLY Supreme Court Justice to voice dissent after the U.S Supreme Court rejected Donald Trump’s 2021 efforts to stop the National Archives from releasing documents to the January 6 House Select Committee – a release of documents that eventually uncovered Meadows’ and Ginni’s text messages.

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This Meadows/Ginni text episode is in addition to the facts that 1) Ginni has often been cozy with many right-wing individuals and groups with interests before the Supreme Court, and 2) that Crowdsourcing for Culture and Liberty, a right-wing think tank she led, received nearly $600,000 in anonymous donations between 2019 and 2022 to ostensibly bring together – in the words of Mark Paoletta, Ginni’s personal attorney – “conservative leaders to discuss amplifying conservative values with respect to the battle over culture.”

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The anonymous donations came to Crowdsourcing for Culture and Liberty via the think tank Capital Research Center (CRC) as a “fiscal sponsorship,” with at least $400,000 routed through yet another nonprofit called Donors Trust, a fund also known to support conservative causes. The same year CRC funneled the money to Ginni Thomas’ organization, the organization filed an amicus brief before the Supreme Court requesting the Court hear a case to limit fuel emission regulations in Oregon. This was the only time CRC filed a brief with the Supreme Court since at least 2001, which is the latest information available.

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Then there is this. Federalist Society leader Leonard Leo, a conservative judicial activist, directed GOP pollster Kellyanne Conway (yes, the same Kellyanne Conway who became a senior adviser in the first Trump White House) to bill a nonprofit group he advises and use that money to pay Ginni for “consulting work,” telling Conway he wanted her to “give” Ginni Thomas “another $25K.” Leo helpfully added to his directive: “No mention of Ginni, of course.” Yes. Of course.

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That very day, Conway’s firm, The Polling Company, sent the nonprofit Judicial Education Project a bill for $25,000. As Leo instructed, Conway listed the purpose of the payment as “Supplement for Constitution Polling and Opinion Consulting.” All in, The Polling Company paid Ginni Thomas’ firm, Liberty Consulting, $80,000 between June 2011 and June 2012, with the expectation they would pay another $20,000 by the end of 2012.

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In what must be the craziest “coincidence” in U.S. history, in 2012 the Judicial Education Project filed an amicus brief in the U.S. Supreme Court case Shelby County v. Holder, a landmark voting rights case that challenged a civil rights law that protected minority voters. The Court held the predominately conservative view that it is unconstitutional to use the coverage formula in the Voting Rights Act to determine which jurisdictions are subject to the preclearance requirement. Clarence Thomas was part of the 5-to-4 majority.

 

But the worst was yet to come. Soon after all these revelations, it got much darker for Clarence Thomas. ProPublica reported that Justice Thomas accepted luxury trips (think huge yachts and private jets) for over twenty years from Dallas real estate tycoon Harlan Crow, a well-known, wealthy Republican donor. Just one of the luxury vacations Clarence and Ginni enjoyed – a 2019 trip to Indonesia – would have cost the couple over $500,000 if they had paid for it out of their own pocket. Associate Supreme Court Justices earn $274,200/year.

 

ProPublica also revealed that, in 2014, one of Harlan Crow’s companies bought several properties in Savannah, Georgia from Clarence Thomas, his mother, and the family of Clarence’s deceased brother. Not long after the purchase, contractors began an extensive remodel of the home, where Clarence’s mother still lived.

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Yet another story showed that, although Thomas reported on financial disclosure forms that his family received between $50,000 and $100,000 a year from an entity called Ginger, Ltd., Partnership, this partnership has not existed since 2006. Evidently, the family created a new company when Ginger, Ltd., Partnership was supposedly shuttered but, as is everything with this man and his wife, the details are murky and the record-keeping at best sloppy.

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Unfortunately for Clarence, the ProPublica exposé brought back to the front-page other articles from the past, like a 2011 New York Times report that Harlan Crow had made other huge gestures for Clarence and Ginni since they all met in the mid-1990s – like giving them a Bible once owned by Frederick Douglass and coughing up $500,000 for Ginni to start a Tea Party-related organization.

And it just goes on and on and on. Next we heard that Crow paid for two years of private-school tuition for Clarence Thomas’s grandnephew, who Thomas has said he raised as a son.

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In what comes as no surprise, Harlan Crow isn’t the only generous Thomas benefactor – and the grift goes way, way back. It started just months after Thomas’ Supreme Court confirmation hearing, when he was accepted into the Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans, a club ripe with wealthy, mostly conservative members.

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The New York Times reports that “over the years, his Horatio Alger friends have welcomed him at their vacation retreats, arranged V.I.P. access to sporting events and invited him to their lavish parties. In 2004, he joined celebrities including Oprah Winfrey and Ed McMahon at a three-day 70th birthday bash in Montana for the industrialist Dennis Washington. Several Horatio Alger friends also helped finance the marketing of a hagiographic documentary about the justice in the wake of an HBO film that had resurfaced Anita Hill’s sexual harassment allegations against him during his confirmation.”

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ProPublica confirms much of the NYT’s reporting, revealing Justice Thomas’ wealthy friends “have treated him to far-flung vacations aboard their yachts, ushered him into the premium suites at sporting events and sent their private jets to fetch him – including, on more than one occasion, an entire 737.”​ These gifts include “at least 38 destination vacations, including a previously unreported voyage on a yacht around the Bahamas;” a “dozen VIP passes to professional and college sporting events, typically perched in the skybox;” “two stays at luxury resorts in Florida and Jamaica;” a “standing invitation to an uber-exclusive golf club overlooking the Atlantic coast;” and 26 private jet flights and eight helicopter flights.

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One of the most fun examples is from 1999, when Justice Thomas purchased a $267,230 40-foot Prevost Le Mirage XL Marathon R.V. Over the years, he described to friends and colleagues how he sacrificed and saved to purchase it, and he often used the R.V. to polish his down-to-earth, I-was-born-in-poverty-but-somehow-pulled-myself-out-of-it-by-my-bootstraps persona: “I don’t have any problem with going to Europe, but I prefer the United States, and I prefer seeing the regular parts of the United States. There’s something normal to me about it. I come from regular stock, and I prefer being around that.” Problem is, Thomas didn’t buy the R.V., at least not outright. His rich buddy Anthony Welters – who made tons of money in the health care industry – “financed” it for Thomas with terms Thomas would never have likely received from a bank.

 

Thomas would not comment on the transaction and beyond a cryptic email, Welters would also not answer straightforward questions, despite repeated requests from The New York Times: Anthony Welters “would not say how much he had lent Justice Thomas, how much the justice had repaid and whether any of the debt had been forgiven or otherwise discharged. He declined to provide The Times with a copy of a loan agreement – or even say if one existed. Nor would he share the basic terms of the loan, such as what, if any, interest rate had been charged or whether Justice Thomas had adhered to an agreed-upon repayment schedule. And when asked to elaborate on what he had meant when he said the loan had been ‘satisfied,’ he did not respond.”

 

We now know why Anthony Welters was so tight-lipped. After reviewing loan documents, Democratic members of the Senate Finance Committee found that “Welters forgave a substantial amount, or even all of the principal balance of his loan to Clarence Thomas, constituting of the forgiveness of approximately $267,230.00 of debt owed by Justice Thomas.”

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Since these extremely concerning revelations about Clarence and Ginni Thomas have come to light, much of the debate in political circles and on cable news has revolved around things like when should justices have to disclose certain things OR when should justices recuse themselves OR what is the definition of “personal hospitality.”

 

We call b.s. on all this background noise. Clarence Thomas’ behavior is corrupt, plain and simple.

 

Only one Supreme Court Justice – Samuel “Old Bacon Face” Chase – has ever been impeached, and that was in 1805. It’s time for it to happen again with Clarence Thomas. At a bare minimum the charge of bribery applies.

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It’s imperative that Justice Thomas be held accountable for his corrupt actions because, according to the analytics and advisory company Gallup, “by all measures, Americans’ opinions of the Supreme Court are the worst they have been in 50 years of polling.” In September 2022, Gallup found that “forty-seven percent of U.S. adults say they have ‘a great deal’ or ‘a fair amount’ of trust in the judicial branch of the federal government that is headed by the Supreme Court.” However, that number “represented a 20-percentage-point drop in just two years, including seven points since just the year before, and was the lowest in Gallup’s trend by six points.” Less than one year later, that number had dropped to 40 percent. We cannot have Americans lose trust in the American Judiciary. It just cannot happen.

 

< Note: In November 2023, under enormous pressure, the Supreme Court justices released a Code of Conduct to “set out succinctly and gather in one place the ethics rules and principles that guide the conduct of the Members of the Court.” The language is broad – for example, it prohibits justices from letting “family, social, political, financial or other relationships influence official conduct or judgment,” and engaging in activities that “detract from the dignity of the justice’s office,” “interfere with the performance of the justice’s official duties,” or “reflect adversely on the justice’s impartiality” – and offers no ideas on how to enforce the code or specific examples of compromised “activities” (i.e., expensive trips, R.V.s, and other perks given to them by rich friends). We’ll just have to wait and see if this is a serious attempt at changing behavior, or just a b.s. move to try to simply squelch bad press… >