Ginni Thomas

[WiseGirl]

Hey, hey, ho, ho, Clarence Thomas has got to go (imo) and recuse himself from every single one of these cases. Some dodgy ethics there Thomas.

"Behind closed doors, Justice Clarence Thomas’s wife is working with many groups directly involved in controversial cases before the Court."

 https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/01/31/is-ginni-thomas-a-threat-to-the-supreme-court

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/new-report-about-clarence-thomas-wife-ginni-thomas/vi-AAT21bY

[GreyhoundFan]

I don’t know who is worse, Ginni or her husband. 

[AlmostSavedAtTacoBell]

I really need someone to find a good picture of Anita Hill sipping tea. She was so brave and strong. This country owes her a huge apology. 

[GreyhoundFan]

1 hour ago, AlmostSavedAtTacoBell said:

I really need someone to find a good picture of Anita Hill sipping tea. She was so brave and strong. This country owes her a huge apology. 

Every man who was in the senate at the time, especially those on the confirmation committee, owes her an apology. I know Biden has done so, but not until it was far too late. 
 

if you have access to HBO on-demand or HBOMax, there is an excellent HBO original movie, “Confirmation “, starring Kerry Washington and Wendell Pierce. It’s about the confirmation hearings. I think it’s worth a watch, though I came of of it despising the senate more than before. 
 

Edited January 23, 2022 by GreyhoundFan

[KSmom]

There’s a great podcast called, “Because of Anita”.  It is four parts and talks about the impact that the hearings have had. One episode is a conversation between Anita Hill and Dr. Christine Blakey Ford. I highly recommend it.

[Cartmann99]

[GreyhoundFan]

[Cartmann99]

Ginni Thomas’ Election Fraud Guru Claims He Arrested Pope

Quote

As Ginni Thomas, a prominent conservative activist and the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, made the case to overturn the election to a top adviser to former President Donald Trump in the days after the 2020 election, she cited several conspiracy theories popular with the president’s most deluded supporters

In her messages, published Thursday by CBS News and the Washington Post, Thomas urged then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows to look into the claims of Steve Pieczenik, a little-known conspiracy theorist whose ideas are often too crazy for even Alex Jones.

Thomas appeared to have wholly embraced Pieczenik’s off-the-wall claims in her texts, including the idea that Trump’s election defeat was really a ruse meant to entrap Democratic voter fraudsters.

“If you believe what Steve Pieczenik has to say, you have completely lost all touch with reality,” said Jordan Holmes, a comedian who follows InfoWars and its guests, including Pieczenik, on his Knowledge Fight podcast.

Thomas and Pieczenik didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Pieczenik has a history of lying and often claims to have worked throughout the national security bureaucracy—including in classified positions, all of which makes it difficult to discern what’s true about his identity. He emerged in the media in the late 1980s as an expert on the psychology of hostage-taking. In the 1990s, Pieczenik launched a series of novels with national-security thriller author Tom Clancy.

Whatever grip Pieczenik had on reality began to slip decades ago, when he began to appear on InfoWars. Pieczenik became known for claiming that a tragic event, often a mass shooting, was in fact a false flag event or even faked entirely. He’s argued that the 9/11 attacks, the Sandy Hook shooting, and Pearl Harbor were all false flags. Among other claims, Pieczenik insists he once arrested Pope Francis.

His stories were so wild they even became too much for Jones. After he claimed the 2017 Las Vegas mass shooting that killed 60 people was fake, for example, Jones appeared to temporarily block him from appearing on the outlet. All that has given him a reputation as a loose cannon even by the already outré standards of the InfoWars green room.

“Pieczenik goes on to hit the ball out of the fences every single time, which means he goes too far sometimes,” Holmes said. “And when that happens, he winds up getting put on the backburner for a little while.”

While Jones distanced himself from Pieczenik after the Las Vegas shooting claims, Pieczenik reemerged a few years later as a “vector” to push QAnon claims on InfoWars, according to Holmes. He also became a key figure on the show in the 2020 election, ready to pump out the kind of crazed optimism for Trump supporters that Ginni Thomas later repeated to Trump’s chief of staff. Two days after the election, Thomas texted Meadows video of a Pieczenik appearance on InfoWars’ “War Room” show.

While the YouTube video she sent Meadows has been deleted, other copies posted on far-right YouTube alternatives reveal that the video was about Pieczenik’s claim that the election was a ruse meant to catch Democrats. In the video, a Hawaiian shirt-clad Pieczenik tells InfoWars host and future Jan. 6 indictee Owen Shroyer about how secret watermarks on the ballots would be used to find fake ballots and arrest leading liberals.

Pieczenik predicted the arrests would begin within days.

“You’re seeing a sophisticated sting operation that was initiated by Trump,” Pieczenik said. “I’m just a lowly peasant in this game.”

Thomas appears to have found solace in Pieczenik’s claim that Trump hadn’t really lost the election.

“I hope this is true; never heard anything like this before, or even a hint of it,” Thomas wrote to Meadows. “Possible???”

Thomas embraced other Pieczenik claims, telling Meadows that military “white hats”—a QAnon term for pro-Trump forces in the federal government—had been deployed to key states.

It’s not clear how Thomas first encountered Pieczenik’s work. But her praise for his obviously ludicrous claims demonstrate the power that conspiracy theories had on Trump’s inner circle.

“It’s so funny how crazy this guy is,” Holmes said. “But at the same time he’s been around pulling these weirdo [psychological operations] for the past 50 years, and it does seem like he’s had a pretty big effect on people.”

Click the link above if you prefer to listen to the article.

[47of74]

Yeah something has got to be done about the Supreme Court.  I wish Biden would pack that shit so full of justices the place would burst at the seams.  I don't think the current model is sustainable if we want to keep our democracy intact.     

[GreyhoundFan]

[fraurosena]

The spluttering on the right that you can't hold Clarence accountable for his wife's actions is equally applicable to Joe being held accountable for what they are accusing Hunter Biden of and that hypocrisy is simply infuriating. Especially as Ginni actually did act felonously, and Hunter is the victim of a whipped up conspiracy theory.

Edited March 30, 2022 by fraurosena

[Cartmann99]

 

[WiseGirl]

 

[WiseGirl]

Can't find the SCOTUS thread so I'll put this here.

 

[Ozlsn]

Photo in spoiler:

Spoiler

 

[GreyhoundFan]

New reporting from the Washington Post: "Ginni Thomas pressed 29 Ariz. lawmakers to help overturn Trump’s defeat, emails show"

Quote

Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, pressed 29 Republican state lawmakers in Arizona — 27 more than previously known — to set aside Joe Biden’s popular vote victory and “choose” presidential electors, according to emails obtained by The Washington Post.

The Post reported last month that Thomas sent emails to two Arizona House members, in November and December 2020, urging them to help overturn Biden’s win by selecting presidential electors — a responsibility that belongs to Arizona voters under state law. Thomas sent the messages using FreeRoots, an online platform intended to make it easy to send pre-written emails to multiple elected officials.

New documents show that Thomas indeed used the platform to reach many lawmakers simultaneously. On Nov. 9, she sent identical emails to 20 members of the Arizona House and seven Arizona state senators. That represents more than half of the Republican members of the state legislature at the time.

The message, just days after media organizations called the race for Biden in Arizona and nationwide, urged lawmakers to “stand strong in the face of political and media pressure” and claimed that the responsibility to choose electors was “yours and yours alone.” They had “power to fight back against fraud” and “ensure that a clean slate of Electors is chosen,” the email said.

Among the lawmakers who received the email was then-Rep. Anthony Kern, a Stop the Steal supporter who lost his reelection bid in November 2020 and then joined U.S. Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Tex.) and others as a plaintiff in a lawsuit against Vice President Mike Pence, a last-ditch effort to overturn Biden’s victory. Kern was photographed outside the Capitol during the riot on Jan. 6 but has said he did not enter the building, according to local media reports.

Kern did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday. He is seeking his party’s nomination for a seat in the Arizona state Senate and has been endorsed by former president Donald Trump.

On Dec. 13, the day before members of the electoral college were slated to cast their votes and seal Biden’s victory, Thomas emailed 22 House members and one senator. “Before you choose your state’s Electors … consider what will happen to the nation we all love if you don’t stand up and lead,” the email said. It linked to a video of a man urging swing-state lawmakers to “put things right” and “not give in to cowardice.”

Speaker of the House Russell “Rusty” Bowers and Rep. Shawnna Bolick, the two recipients previously identified, told The Post in May that the outreach from Thomas had no bearing on their decisions about how to handle claims of election fraud.

But the revelation that Ginni Thomas was directly involved in pressing them to override the popular vote — an act that would have been without precedent in the modern era — intensified questions about whether her husband should recuse himself from cases related to the 2020 presidential election and attempts to subvert it. Ginni Thomas’s status as a leading conservative political activist has set her apart from other spouses of Supreme Court justices.

Ginni Thomas did not respond to requests seeking comment for this report. She has long insisted that she and her husband operate in separate professional lanes.

A spokeswoman for the Supreme Court did not respond to questions for Clarence Thomas.

The Post obtained the emails under Arizona’s public records law, which — unlike the laws in some other key 2020 swing states — allows the public to access emails, text messages and other written communications to and from state lawmakers.

In March, The Post and CBS News obtained text messages that Ginni Thomas sent in the weeks after the 2020 election to Mark Meadows, then Trump’s chief of staff. The messages showed Thomas spreading false claims and urging Meadows to keep fighting for Trump to remain in the White House.

“That conflict of interest just screams at you,” said Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.), who serves on the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, on MSNBC in response to The Post’s May report revealing the emails to Bolick and Bowers.

Schiff pointed to Clarence Thomas’s decision not to recuse when Trump went to the Supreme Court to try to block the House committee from getting access to his White House records. The high court declined to block the release of those documents. Thomas, siding with Trump, was the only justice to dissent.

“Here you have the wife of a Supreme Court justice,” Schiff said, trying to “get Arizona to improperly cast aside the votes of millions. And also, to add to it, her husband on the Supreme Court, writing a dissent in a case arguing against providing records to Congress that might have revealed some of these same e-mails.”

After the May article, Mark Paoletta — a longtime ally of the Thomases who, as a member of the George H.W. Bush administration, played a role in the confirmation of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court — confirmed that Ginni Thomas signed the emails, but he sought to minimize her role.

“Ginni signed her name to a pre-written form letter that was signed by thousands of citizens and sent to state legislators across the country,” Paoletta wrote on Twitter on May 20. He described Thomas’s activities as “a private citizen joining a letter writing campaign” and added, sarcastically, “How disturbing, what a threat!”

The letter-writing campaigns were organized on FreeRoots.com, which advertised itself as a platform to amplify grass-roots advocacy across the political spectrum. A Post review of its archived webpages shows that it was heavily used in late 2020 by groups seeking to overturn the presidential election results.

One of those groups was Every Legal Vote, which organized the campaign to send the message that Ginni Thomas sent on Nov. 9. In those first days after the Nov. 3 election, Every Legal Vote described itself online as a “labor of love by American citizens, in partnership” with the nonprofit United in Purpose, according to webpages preserved by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. United in Purpose, which harnesses data to galvanize conservative Christian voters, in recent years hosted luncheons where Thomas presented her Impact Awards to right-wing leaders.

On Dec. 14, 2020, Biden electors in Arizona cast their votes, after the election results were certified by Secretary of State Katie Hobbs (D) and Gov. Doug Ducey (R).

Trump electors met in Arizona that day and signed a document declaring themselves the state’s “duly elected and qualified Electors.” One of them was Kern, the outgoing state representative.

Kern was among more than a dozen lawmakers who signed on to a letter to Congress that same day calling for the state’s electoral votes to go to Trump or “be nullified completely until a full forensic audit can be conducted.”

The lawmakers’ letter was an exhibit in Kern and Gohmert’s lawsuit asking a federal court to rule that Pence had the “exclusive authority and sole discretion” in deciding which electoral votes to count for a given state. The plaintiffs asked the Supreme Court to intervene after the case was dismissed in lower courts. The day after the Jan. 6 insurrection, the court declined in an unsigned order.

 

[Ozlsn]

14 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Ginni Thomas did not respond to requests seeking comment for this report. She has long insisted that she and her husband operate in separate professional lanes

... sort of. I don't see how separate they can be in this case given their roles. His gives hers more weight, and hers has the potential to influence his. If she were working in conservative circles in a different sort of role or he wasn't on the Supreme Court then fine, go for it - but I don't think there is enough care being taken to avoid the appearance of conflict of interest or influence.

[GreyhoundFan]

[WiseGirl]

Fucking fucker.

Thomas calls for overturning precedents on contraceptives, LGBTQ rights.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/3535841-thomas-calls-for-overturning-precedents-on-contraceptives-lgbtq-rights/amp/

[GreyhoundFan]

"Ginni Thomas pressed Wisconsin lawmakers to overturn Biden’s 2020 victory"

Quote

Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, the conservative activist and wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, pressed lawmakers to overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 victory not only in Arizona, as previously reported, but also in a second battleground state, Wisconsin, according to emails obtained under state public-records law.

The Washington Post reported this year that Ginni Thomas emailed 29 Arizona state lawmakers, some of them twice, in November and December 2020. She urged them to set aside Biden’s popular-vote victory and “choose” their own presidential electors, despite the fact that the responsibility for choosing electors rests with voters under Arizona state law.

The new emails show that Thomas also messaged two Republican lawmakers in Wisconsin: state Sen. Kathy Bernier, then chair of the Senate elections committee, and state Rep. Gary Tauchen. Bernier and Tauchen received the email at 10:47 a.m. on Nov. 9, virtually the same time the Arizona lawmakers received a verbatim copy of the message from Thomas. The Bernier email was obtained by The Post, and the Tauchen email was obtained by the watchdog group Documented and provided to The Post.

Thomas sent all of the emails via FreeRoots, an online platform that allowed people to send pre-written emails to multiple elected officials.

“Please stand strong in the face of media and political pressure,” read the emails sent Nov. 9, just days after major media organizations called the presidency for Biden. “Please reflect on the awesome authority granted to you by our Constitution. And then please take action to ensure that a clean slate of Electors is chosen for our state.”

Neither Thomas nor her lawyer, Mark Paoletta, responded to requests for comment. A Supreme Court spokeswoman did not respond to a message seeking comment from Clarence Thomas.

Ginni Thomas’s political activism is highly unusual for the spouse of a Supreme Court justice, and for years it has raised questions about potential conflicts of interest for her husband. She has said that the two of them keep their professional lives separate.

But scrutiny of the Thomases intensified this year after The Post and CBS News obtained copies of text messages that Ginni Thomas exchanged with Mark Meadows, then President Donald Trump’s White House chief of staff, in the weeks following the 2020 election. Thomas repeatedly urged Meadows to keep fighting to overturn the election results. After Congress certified Biden’s victory Jan. 6, 2021, she expressed anger at Vice President Mike Pence, who had refused to intervene to keep Trump in office. “We are living through what feels like the end of America,” Thomas wrote to Meadows four days later.

Thomas was also in touch during the post-election period with John Eastman, the pro-Trump lawyer who once clerked for her husband, and whose role in the effort to overturn Biden’s win has drawn scrutiny from both the Justice Department and the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot. In early December 2020, Thomas invited Eastman to speak at a meeting of Frontliners for Liberty, which she described as a group of grass-roots activists, according to an email that Eastman published online.

The agenda for the meeting has not been publicly disclosed. But a federal judge ruling on which records had to be turned over in response to a subpoena from the committee wrote that the agenda shows Eastman discussed “State legislative actions that can reverse the media-called election for Joe Biden.” U.S. District Judge David O. Carter ordered Eastman to give congressional investigators emails related to Thomas and meetings of her Frontliners group, finding that the meetings “furthered a critical objective of the January 6 plan: to have contested states certify alternate slates of electors for President Trump.”

The House committee asked Thomas to sit for a voluntary interview in June. The committee also sought a broad range of documents from her, including any related to plans to overturn the election and all communications with members of Congress and their staff and Justice Department employees, according to a copy of the request published by the conservative Daily Caller.

At the time, Thomas indicated she would comply. “I can’t wait to clear up misconceptions. I look forward to talking to them,” Thomas told the Daily Caller, her former employer.

Less than two weeks later, on June 28, Paoletta told the committee that while Thomas remained willing to sit for an interview, he did not believe there was “sufficient basis” for her to do so.

In a letter obtained by The Post, Paoletta — a longtime close associate of the Thomases — described Ginni Thomas’s text messages to Meadows as “entirely unremarkable” and said they do not suggest she had any role in the attack on the Capitol. He cast her invitation to Eastman as simply an invitation to speak, not an endorsement of his views or “any indication of a working relationship.” He also said she played no role in organizing the email campaign to Arizona lawmakers and did not draft or edit the form letters she sent.

In an interview, Bernier, the Wisconsin lawmaker, said it would have been appropriate for the state legislature to consider decertifying the 2020 results in the weeks following the election if evidence had emerged of significant voter fraud. “But as we went through the process and the legal challenges were made and discounted by the judicial system, there was nothing proven as far as actual voter fraud,” she said.

Bernier said she had not realized that Thomas was among the thousands of people who emailed her after the election, but she said Thomas “has a First Amendment right to speak her mind.”

“I was married for 20 years. I took on some identity of my husband, but I had my own mind,” Bernier said. “Just because you’re married to someone doesn’t mean that you’re a clone.”

Tauchen did not respond to messages seeking comment.

Thomas’s Nov. 9 email was one of thousands sent via the FreeRoots platform that inundated Bernier and Tauchen’s offices in the weeks after the election, records show.

The Wisconsin State Journal reported in January 2021 that of more than 10,000 pages of emails received during that period by Bernier and state Rep. Ron Tusler (R), then the chair of his chamber’s elections committee, the majority were “mass-generated form letters making nonspecific claims about alleged irregularities, a right-wing fraud-finding effort and a clip from Fox’s Sean Hannity show.”

The fact that Thomas sent one of the FreeRoots emails to Bernier has not been previously reported. “Please do your Constitutional duty!” read the subject line of the message she sent.

According to the records disclosed by Bernier’s office to The Post, Thomas was the fourth of more than 30 people who sent that particular form email Nov. 9 and 10. The first sender of that email, three hours before Thomas, was a person named Stephanie Coleman, according to the records.

A woman named Stephanie Miller Coleman is the widow of one of Clarence Thomas’s former clerks. She was listed as the co-administrator, with Thomas, of a private Facebook group for Frontliners. The page listing the group’s administrators is no longer publicly visible.

Coleman did not respond to a message seeking comment.

Ginni Thomas’s communications with key players in the effort to overturn the election have led to calls for her husband to recuse himself from cases related to the 2020 election and attempts to subvert it. Clarence Thomas has given no indication that he intends to do so.

This year, eight Supreme Court justices declined Trump’s request to block congressional investigators from gaining access to White House records that might shed light on the events of Jan. 6, 2021. Thomas was the only justice to dissent, siding with Trump.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Why does this not surprise me?

Why d

[GreyhoundFan]

Wow, they really captured Ginni's spirit, didn't they?

 

[libgirl2]

He needs to be off the SCOTUS. This is ridiculous. No wonder people think the court is a joke. 

[GreyhoundFan]

[GreyhoundFan]

Oh please, she never spoke to her husband about her activities?