Former President Trump aide Kellyanne Conway lamely responded to allegations she helped funnel secret payments to Ginni Thomas, the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas, in the latest scandal to come out of this corrupt Supreme Court. Just one day after the news broke that Clarence Thomas' sugar daddy paid for his nephew's tuition, we found out his wife was cashing in from the vice president of the Federalist Society as well: Judicial activist directed fees to Clarence Thomas’s wife, urged ‘no mention of Ginni’:
Conservative judicial activist Leonard Leo arranged for the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas to be paid tens of thousands of dollars for consulting work just over a decade ago, specifying that her name be left off billing paperwork, according to documents reviewed by The Washington Post.
In January 2012, Leo instructed the GOP pollster Kellyanne Conway to bill a nonprofit group he advises and use that money to pay Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, the documents show. The same year, the nonprofit, the Judicial Education Project, filed a brief to the Supreme Court in a landmark voting rights case.
Leo, a key figure in a network of nonprofits that has worked to support the nominations of conservative judges, told Conway that he wanted her to “give” Ginni Thomas “another $25K,” the documents show. He emphasized that the paperwork should have “No mention of Ginni, of course.”
Conway’s firm, the Polling Company, sent the Judicial Education Project a $25,000 bill that day. Per Leo’s instructions, it listed the purpose as “Supplement for Constitution Polling and Opinion Consulting,” the documents show.
Conway ran to Fox to defend herself, of course, and when asked about the scandal, served up a big heaping helping of whataboutism and also failed to respond to why they felt it was necessary to hide where the money was going:
In total, Conway’s Polling Company paid Thomas’s Liberty Consulting firm $80,000 between June 2011 and June 2012, according to the Post. It was expected to pay another $20,000 by the end of 2012.
Conway said Friday that Thomas was one of her contractors, emphasizing Thomas’s long history of involvement in the conservative movement.
“[Thomas] had worked with the Heritage Foundation. She was part of the grassroots, is part of the grassroots. She had worked in the Reagan administration,” Conway told Fox News. “This is a serious person who for years had worked in public policy.”
“And at the Polling Company, we did public opinion research and data analytics,” she added. “We had no business before the court.”
The Judicial Education Project, however, filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court later in 2012, according to the Post.
Conway followed that with attempting to conflate what happened with Thomas to Justice Sotomayor having a book deal and not recusing herself from a case involving the company. Elie Mystal did a great job of knocking that nonsense down on Twitter.
Sotomayor may not have recused herself from the case, but she did disclose the payments and wasn't trying to hide them. If ConJob wants to get into the long list of cases that these judges should be recusing themselves from, I'm fairly sure the list for Thomas is a lot longer than the list for the rest of them.
