The Clarence and Virginia Thomas conundrum
“Ithink we should be careful destroying our institutions because they don’t give us what we want when we want it.”
Those were wise words, spoken in September by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas when he delivered a lecture at the University of Notre Dame Law School.
It is too bad Thomas’ advice didn’t get through to his wife, Virginia.
Ginni Thomas is a longtime right-wing activist, whose push-the-envelope ventures have repeatedly raised questions about conflicts of interest for her husband.
That she is among those dangerous individuals who are willing to destroy even the most precious of institutions that do not produce the results they want when they want them was made abundantly clear in a series of at least 21 emotional, even unhinged texts she sent to then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows in the aftermath of the 2020 election — an election that was not particularly close, that was fairly decided and that Donald Trump lost.
Those texts were revealed Thursday in a blockbuster article by the Post‘s Bob Woodward and our former colleague Robert Costa, who now works for CBS News. “Help This Great President stand firm, Mark!!!” Ginni Thomas wrote. “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.”
Another text makes reference to a reassuring conversation she had with her unnamed “best friend.” A reasonable supposition, which it would be good to hear her address, would be that Ginni Thomas was referring to her husband. Her overwrought texts were among a trove of material that Meadows has turned over to the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, riot by Trump supporters, who were seeking to block Congress’s certification of the electoral votes that made Joe Biden the president.
In other texts, she begged the White House chief of staff to take a look at bizarre conspiracy theories making the rounds with QAnon, including a preposterous one that Trump had secretly watermarked real ballots so he could identify frauds. “Watermarked ballots in over 12 states have been part of a huge Trump & military white hat sting operation in 12 key battleground states,” she wrote. She also urged Meadows to make lawyer Sidney Powell, who even some in Trump’s own circles considered bonkers, the “lead and the face” of the president’s legal team. Clarence Thomas was hospitalized with an infection until Friday morning, and neither he nor his wife has commented on the texts.
Ginni Thomas did not respond to a request for comment. She acknowledged this month, in an interview with the conservative Washington Free Beacon, that she attended the “Stop the Steal” rally that preceded the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, though she denied reports that she helped organize it.
Power couples are far from rare in Washington, of course, and it seems only fair to allow a lot of leeway to accomplished and well-connected life partners who want to chart their own paths professionally. I also generally ascribe to the doctrine espoused by first lady Betty Ford in 1975, when she told the International Women’s Year Conference in Cleveland: “Why should my husband’s job, or yours, prevent us from being ourselves? Being ladylike does not require silence.”
But in the Thomases’ case, there is an increasingly legitimate question about whether her political agenda influences his when it comes to the public trust.
Clarence Thomas is himself a stalwart conservative, but was that the reason he was the lone dissenter to the court’s January decision to reject Trump’s effort to block the release of some of his presidential records to the House committee investigating the capitol riot? Might he have had reason to know that the material could include communication between his wife and the White House?
Ginni Thomas had also been among the signatories of a letter by conservative leaders blasting that committee’s work as “overtly partisan political persecution.”
Clarence Thomas further wrote a forceful dissent in February 2021, after the court majority declined to hear a case filed by Pennsylvania Republicans who were trying to disqualify some of their state’s mail-in ballots.
Federal ethics regulations, as applied to the court, leave it up to a justice to decide when to disqualify himself or herself from any proceeding where his impartiality might “reasonably be questioned.”
Ginni Thomas wrote to Meadows that she felt she was living through “the end of Liberty.” If that is the case, she should have been reassured, as it has become and clearer that the election was a fair one.
As recently as Wednesday, an independent review in Arizona found, yet again, that Maricopa County’s results were on the up and up. That result was surely not what Ginni Thomas was hoping to see.
But as her husband would tell her, the institutions did what they were supposed to do. Whether they continue to in the future, however, is far less certain.