Jane Mayer’s must-read piece in The New Yorker (which includes a shoutout to our very own Karoli Kuns!) should have already convinced you there’s something very, very wrong with the right-wing activism of Ginni Thomas while hubby Clarence rules on the same issues.
But now American Oversight has obtained evidence that Justice Thomas is in regular, direct contact with Florida’s MAGA governor, Ron DeSantis. In a pitch to his scheduling office in June, 2021, Ginni Thomas requested DeSantis’ attendance at one of her “coalition” meetings, saying:
Gov. DeSantis will be acquainted with me, as I video-interviewed him for a Leader series with Daily Caller years ago when he served in Congress, saw him at a state dinner in the Trump White House and my husband has been in contact with him too on various things of late. [My emphases added]
Ginni Thomas described the attendees at the meeting as a “cone of silence coalition” of “about 83 national leaders,” including Donald Trump’s former chief of staff, Mark Meadows “as well as many other allies he [presumably DeSantis] would know.”
Politico points out that that coalition also includes people affiliated with Judicial Watch. That group regularly files amicus curiae briefs and/or cases before the Supreme Court (a docket search uncovered 17 pages of SCOTUS cases with Judicial Watch involvement). Mayer describes amicus briefs as, essentially, a means of lobbying the court.
C&L has long documented Ginni Thomas as an under-the-radar subversive. One of my own recent posts strongly implicates her involvement in her husband’s rehabilitation of a federal law clerk after racist texts were revealed saying, “i hate black people. Like fuck them all . . . I hate blacks. End of story.”
A legal ethics expert quoted in Mayer's piece said that the appearance created by Ginni Thomas’ political pursuits “is awful—they look like a mom-and-pop political-hack group, where she does the political stuff and he does the judging.”
But it sure looks like Clarence Thomas is doing the political stuff, too.
Emails we obtained, reported on by @politico, suggest that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is in regular contact with Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.
In a June 2021, Ginni Thomas said DeSantis should be familiar with her because “my husband has been in contact with him[.]” pic.twitter.com/R8Sj3thLgC— American Oversight (@weareoversight) February 4, 2022
