Virginia Thomas, the wife of the longest-serving member of the US Supreme Court, advised the White House chief of staff after Donald Trump’s defeat. In short messages that have now been published, she wrote that the election loser should not give up. This raises questions about her husband’s possible bias.
Clarence Thomas is one of the longest serving judges on the Supreme Court in Washington. His wife’s lobbying calls his independence into question (April 23, 2021).
Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, the wife of the senior Supreme Court justice in Washington, is a fanatical supporter of President Donald Trump’s ouster. This is well known in Washington; on January 6, 2020, Thomas took part in a demonstration at the White House, where Trump and his advisers bitterly complained about the Republican’s allegedly stolen victory in the presidential election. However, the conservative activist grew cold and left the rally before the President’s appearance. When hundreds of Trump fans then stormed the Capitol, Thomas said he was no longer in the center of the capital.
Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, wants to clear up a few things about January 6.
Via @KevinDaleyDC https://t.co/CRTyj7P9mu
— Washington Free Beacon (@FreeBeacon) March 14, 2022
What is new, however, is that Thomas also tried to influence the White House behind the scenes. On Thursday, Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward and CBS journalist Robert Costa published a total of 21 text messages that Thomas sent directly to Mark Meadows in late 2020, early 2021. Meadows was the White House chief of staff at the time. The former MP served as an interface between the increasingly out-of-touch president, his lawyers and Trump fans.
In her text messages, the judge’s wife sounds as if she were a commentator on a right-wing television station. For example, on November 5, 2020, two days after Democrat Joe Biden won the election, Thomas sent the chief of staff a link to a YouTube video that allegedly provided evidence of Trump watermarking ballots to avoid possible Democrat cheating to prevent. “I hope that’s true,” wrote Thomas.
On the same day, the political adviser speculated that Biden and his family were about to be transferred to the Guantanamo Bay prison camp in Cuba, where they would have to face a military tribunal on charges of treason. On November 10, Thomas wrote: “The majority know that Biden and the left are attempting the greatest heist in our history.” That’s why Trump shouldn’t give up.
Woodward and I both see this as an unprecedented entanglement between a top official in the Exec Branch and the spouse of a Justice.
They are privately discussing strategy, lawyers, managing WH staff, and conspiracy theories. @CBSNews @washingtonpost https://t.co/ch2JSUSviQ
— Robert Costa (@costareports) March 24, 2022
In further short messages, Thomas gave the chief of staff advice on further legal action. And she complained bitterly that Trump was allegedly being abandoned by his party friends in the Senate and House of Representatives. Meadows, in turn, encouraged Thomas in his eight surviving responses and assured her that the president-elect would win the battle of “good versus evil”. The short messages are said to be in the possession of a House of Representatives commission investigating the storming of the Capitol.
“We have separate careers”
This back and forth is important because Trump had already announced on election night that he would appeal to the Supreme Court – because in his eyes, what shouldn’t be could not be. In the end, this strategy didn’t work out due to a lack of evidence of Biden’s fraud and Trump’s incompetent lawyers.
But when the Supreme Court declined to deal with a lawsuit brought by the Republican Party of the state of Pennsylvania in February 2021, Thomas’s husband wrote in dissent: “By doing nothing, we are allowing for further confusion and erosion of voter confidence.” Clarence Thomas, who has been married to “Ginni” since 1987, did not succeed in convincing a sufficiently large number of the nine Supreme Court judges with his arguments.
The Thomases take the position that Clarence’s judgeship and Virginia’s work as a lobbyist and political adviser have no bearing on each other. “We have our separate careers,” she recently told a conservative online publication. “Clarence doesn’t discuss his work with me and I don’t include him in my work.” However, observers of the Supreme Court have long found that Judge Thomas should step down from lawsuits related to the 2020 presidential election and the storming of the Capitol. However, there is no way to force him to do it.
For the time being, neither Thomas nor his wife wanted to comment on the text messages. One reason for this may be that 73-year-old Clarence Thomas is apparently in poor health. It was announced over the weekend that he was in hospital care due to an infection. It is unclear if he has since been released.
US Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is being treated at Washington’s Sibley Memorial Hospital for an infection. He is expected to be released in a day or two, the court said in a statement https://t.co/dze3m6e2Pm pic.twitter.com/1xRyYTfEzg
— Reuters (@Reuters) March 21, 2022
Trump, on the other hand, still seems to think he actually won the 2020 presidential election. A conservative Alabama congressman revealed this week that Trump regularly urges him to “cancel” the result, kick Biden out of the White House and reinstate him, Trump, as president. The fact that there is no legal basis for such a procedure does not seem to bother the Republican.
Mo Brooks this morning: Trump “always brings up, ‘we got to respind the election. We got to take Joe Biden out and put me in now.’l
Q – “He still says that?”
Mon – “Yes.” pic.twitter.com/AldbwHtMmm
— Ron Filipkowski ?? (@RonFilipkowski) March 24, 2022