In crowd at pre-riot rally, says Justice Thomas’ wife

WASHINGTON — Virginia Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, for the first time has publicly acknowledged that she participated in the Jan. 6, 2021 “Stop-the-Steal” rally on the Ellipse that preceded the storming of the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob.

In an interview with the conservative outlet The Washington Free Beacon that was published Monday, Thomas said she was part of the crowd that gathered at the Ellipse that morning to support President Donald Trump.

Trump was claiming that widespread voter fraud delivered the presidency to Joe Biden — a claim he continues to repeat. Thomas, who goes by Ginni, said she was at the rally for a short period of time, got cold and went home before Trump took the stage at noon that day.

“I was disappointed and frustrated that there was violence that happened following a peaceful gathering of Trump supporters on the Ellipse on Jan. 6,” the conservative activist told the publication. “There are important and legitimate substantive questions about achieving goals like electoral integrity, racial equality, and political accountability that a democratic system like ours needs to be able to discuss and debate rationally in the political square. I fear we are losing that ability.”

A spokeswoman for the Supreme Court did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In February 2021, Thomas apologized to her husband’s former law clerks after a rift developed among them over her election advocacy of Trump and endorsement of the Jan. 6 rally that led to violence and death at the Capitol.

“I owe you all an apology. I have likely imposed on you my lifetime passions,” Thomas wrote to a private Thomas Clerk World email list of her husband’s staff over his three decades on the bench.

As an activist, Ginni Thomas has drawn scrutiny to her husband’s work on the Court and his impartiality, most recently in connection to the Jan. 6 attack and the House select committee tasked with investigating the riot.

While Ginni Thomas’s activism has, in multiple instances, overlapped with cases that have been decided by her husband, her connection to the rally that preceded the insurrection has reignited anger among his critics.

In the interview, Ginni Thomas insisted that her work is separate from that of her husband.

“Like so many married couples, we share many of the same ideals, principles, and aspirations for America,” Ginni Thomas said. “But we have our own separate careers, and our own ideas and opinions, too. Clarence doesn’t discuss his work with me and I don’t involve him in my work.”

Gabe Roth, executive director of Fix the Court, a nonpartisan advocacy group that advocates for changes to the Supreme Court, said Ginni Thomas’s participation in the rally should have been enough of an excuse for Clarence Thomas to recuse from the House committee case.

The justice’s failure to do so, Roth said, is yet another example of how poorly Supreme Court justices follow the recusal standard.

While the Supreme Court is supposed to operate under regulations guiding all federal judges, including a requirement that a justice “shall disqualify himself in any proceeding in which his impartiality might reasonably be questioned,” there is no procedure to enforce that standard.

Each justice can decide whether to recuse. There is no way to appeal a Supreme Court member’s failure to do so.

“Because of her participation in that rally, which then led to the breach of the Capitol, which then led to the January 6 committee. … That means that you, as a justice, your impartiality still might reasonably be questioned,” Roth said.

Roth said it is not only Clarence Thomas who does not properly follow the recusal standard, noting as an example that Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Neil Gorsuch did not recuse when dealing with cases involving their book publisher, Penguin Random House. But the Thomases’ case, Roth said, is different because of the importance of the Jan. 6 riot in American history.

“There should be a recusal,” Roth said of the Thomases’ case. “But again, I’m sort of on the side of there should be more recusals. … There is an exacting standard that exists and that’s simply not being followed through on and I think that is a shame and it hurts [and] impugns the integrity of the institution.”