I Can Haz Impeachment?

It has been known for some time that Clarence Thomas and his wife Virginia have been a sterling example of conflict of interest and corruption, with the Associate Justice steadfastly refusing to recuse himself on matters that his wife has aggressively lobbied for, and in some cases has received payment for:

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The claim that the Justices’ opinions are politically neutral is becoming increasingly hard to accept, especially from Thomas, whose wife, Virginia (Ginni) Thomas, is a vocal right-wing activist. She has declared that America is in existential danger because of the “deep state” and the “fascist left,” which includes “transsexual fascists.” Thomas, a lawyer who runs a small political-lobbying firm, Liberty Consulting, has become a prominent member of various hard-line groups. Her political activism has caused controversy for years. For the most part, it has been dismissed as the harmless action of an independent spouse. But now the Court appears likely to secure victories for her allies in a number of highly polarizing cases—on abortion, affirmative action, and gun rights.

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Clarence and Ginni Thomas declined to be interviewed for this article. In recent years, Justice Thomas, long one of the Court’s most reticent members, has been speaking up more in oral arguments. His wife, meanwhile, has become less publicly visible, but she has remained busy, aligning herself with many activists who have brought issues in front of the Court. She has been one of the directors of C.N.P. Action, a dark-money wing of the conservative pressure group the Council for National Policy. C.N.P. Action, behind closed doors, connects wealthy donors with some of the most radical right-wing figures in America. Ginni Thomas has also been on the advisory board of Turning Point USA, a pro-Trump student group, whose founder, Charlie Kirk, boasted of sending busloads of protesters to Washington on January 6th.

Normally, this litany of wrongdoing would be fairly anodyne, the Supreme Court is not held to the same ethical standards as the lower courts, and Thomas' corrupt behavior is public knowledge.

But these are not normal times, and Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Robert Costa are reporting that Ginny Thomas was intimately involved in the attempt to overthrow the elections results,  texting Trump officials on strategies to keep Trump in office and including giving a speech at what became the January 6 insurrection. .

Virginia Thomas, a conservative activist married to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, repeatedly pressed White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows to pursue unrelenting efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election in a series of urgent text exchanges in the critical weeks after the vote, according to copies of the messages obtained by The Washington Post and CBS News.

The messages – 29 in all – reveal an extraordinary pipeline between Virginia Thomas, who goes by Ginni, and President Donald Trump’s top aide during a period when Trump and his allies were vowing to go to the Supreme Court in an effort to negate the election results.

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The messages, which do not directly reference Justice Thomas or the Supreme Court, show for the first time how Ginni Thomas used her access to Trump’s inner circle to promote and seek to guide the president’s strategy to overturn the election results – and how receptive and grateful Meadows said he was to receive her advice. Among Thomas’s stated goals in the messages was for lawyer Sidney Powell, who promoted incendiary and unsupported claims about the election, to be “the lead and the face” of Trump’s legal team.

The text messages were among 2,320 that Meadows provided to the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. The existence of messages between Thomas and Meadows – 21 sent by her, eight by him – have not previously been reported and were reviewed by The Post and CBS News. They were then confirmed by five people who have seen the committee’s documents.

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Thomas has publicly denied any conflict of interest between her activism and her husband’s work on the Supreme Court. “Clarence doesn’t discuss his work with me, and I don’t involve him in my work,” she said in an interview with the Washington Free Beacon, a conservative outlet, for an article published March 14.

Ginni Thomas, in that interview, also acknowledged that she had attended Trump’s “Stop the Steal” rally at the Ellipse near the White House on Jan. 6, but said that she left early because it was too cold and that she did not have any role in planning the event.

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The text exchanges with Thomas that Meadows provided to the House select committee pause after Nov. 24, 2020, with an unexplained gap in correspondence. The committee received one additional message sent by Thomas to Meadows, on Jan. 10, four days after the “Stop the Steal” rally Thomas said she attended and the deadly attack on the Capitol.

In that message, Thomas expresses support for Meadows and Trump – and directed anger at Vice President Mike Pence, who had refused Trump’s wishes to block the congressional certification of Biden’s electoral college victory.

This gets more interesting because Clarence Thomas was the only Supreme Court justice to vote against releasing White House documents, including the aforementioned text messages, to the House committee investigation the events surrounding the January 6 insurrection.

While there is no direct evidence (yet) that Clarence Thomas knew of Ginny Thomas' actions, it does not require any great leap to conclude that he did know of her actions, and that he attempted to cover up her involvement.

Obviously, impeachment is problematic, because the Senate is not going to get the ⅔ required to convict, but a criminal investigation of both Clarence and Ginny is justified:

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The work of the January 6 select committee has already come before the Supreme Court. In January, the court did not stand in the way of the release of thousands of documents from the Trump White House despite the former President suing to keep them secret under executive privilege. The vote on the matter was 8-1, with only Thomas dissenting.

(emphasis mine)

Nothing to see here, move along.