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CONFLICT: Justice Thomas’ wife begged Trump’s Chief of Staff to overturn election, texts show

CONFLICT: Justice Thomas’ wife begged Trump’s Chief of Staff to overturn election, texts show

https://occupydemocrats.com/2022/02/22/denied-supreme-court-formally-slams-door-on-trumps-bid-for-secrecy/

New messages between Donald Trump’s former Chief of Staff and Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas’ wife just revealed her requests to extralegally cancel the 2020 election results and expose a major conflict of interest for the senior jurist on the high court. 

Now, the House’s Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol is in possession of texts between Ginni Thomas and former Trump White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. It’s significant because this is a direct link between Trump and the Supreme Court, which the twice-impeached President said would collaborate with him to steal President Joe Biden’s legitimate election victory. 

Twenty-nine text messages expose Thomas’ influence in the White House urging to help Trump reverse the election that he lost, arriving almost as soon as it became apparent that Joe Biden was the President-elect. The Post reports:

On Nov. 10, after news organizations had projected Joe Biden the winner based on state vote totals, Thomas wrote to Meadows: “Help This Great President stand firm, Mark!!!…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.”

She also strongly supported Sidney Powell aka “the Kraken Releaser” to run Trump’s team to overturn the election. 

Ginni Thomas is an extreme right-wing conservative activist. Her attendance at a January 6th Stop the Steal rally, a nightmarish event that devolved into an armed insurrection against the Capitol, set off alarm bells in Washington, D.C. just ten days ago.

Particularly, it is Justice Thomas’ stubborn refusal to recuse himself from January 6th cases that go against both the federal Code of Conduct for United States Judges and the American Bar Association’s Model Code of Judicial Conduct. The ABA says a judge should not preside over any case where their spouse could be a material witness or has more than minimal interest in the case. The federal code says that judges shouldn’t intervene when their spouse is a material witness or would be substantially affected.

Yet, in mid-January, the Supreme Court reviewed former President Trump’s request to stay the production of documents about January 6th to the House Select Committee. It would prove to be the final legal step before the National Archives delivering an abundance of damning evidence of the plots taking place in the White House in the lead up to January 6th. Justice Clarence Thomas was the lone dissenter in an 8-1 decision. That case concluded anti-climactically one month later.

Speaking for both of the Thomas’ Ginni claimed that she didn’t discuss his work at home when her attendance in the January 6th rally emerged.  

Avoiding the appearance of impropriety is the second federal judicial cannon, and part of its text says pretty plainly, “A judge should not allow family, social, political, financial, or other relationships to influence judicial conduct or judgment.” 

But that’s not what he said in an interview of her husband Ginni Thomas conducted four years ago for The Daily Caller Foundation, a news website founded by Fox’s Tucker Carlson. The Post reports:

[H]e told his wife that being a justice “would be impossible without you. I have to be honest. It’s sort of like, how do you run with one leg? You can’t.” 

Frankly, it is a fair statement to make that Justice Thomas hasn’t followed judicial ethics for decades when you consider that statement.

Numerous law professors say that Justice Thomas must recuse himself from cases involving January 6th because of her involvement in the overall scheme to whip Republicans into a seditious frenzy and lobbying the White House to keep the Big Lie going. Naturally, right-wing legal commentators note that Ginni Thomas isn’t a party to the case – which has no bearing on the ethics of when a judge should recuse – to defend Thomas’ behavior.

The only reason that Justice Thomas isn’t facing a complaint, investigation, and ruling by a panel of his judicial peers for grossly violating the ethics of his profession is that by law, they do not apply to the Supreme Court.

Supreme Court watchers have warned of the problem that Justices only face impeachment and not ethical review ever since Justice Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings. The beer-loving, Fox News visiting judge was able to escape investigation and perhaps expulsion from the judiciary, because Senate Republicans approved of his perjured testimony in his prior confirmation hearings by placing him onto the high court. Eighty-three ethics complaints against Kavanaugh were dismissed on the grounds that they couldn’t discipline a former judge after they became a justice.

Democrats in the House and Senate have proposed the Supreme Court Ethics Act to rein in the justices by binding them to the same code that lower court judges must adhere to strictly.

Senator Chis Murphy (D-CT) has been trying to get the Supreme Court Ethics Act through Congress since 2013. Despite being introduced into the last five congresses, it hasn’t passed either chamber’s judiciary committee or gotten any floor votes for passage.

RELATED STORY: DENIED: Supreme Court formally slams door on Trump’s bid for secrecy

 

Grant Stern
is the Executive Editor of Occupy Democrats and published author. His new Meet the Candidates 2020 book series is distributed by Simon and Schuster. He's also mortgage broker, community activist and radio personality in Miami, Florida., as well as the producer of the Dworkin Report podcast. Grant is also an occasional contributor to Raw Story, Alternet, and the DC Report, and an unpaid senior advisor to the Democratic Coalition and a Director of Sunshine Agenda Inc. a government transparency nonprofit organization. Get all of his stories sent directly to your inbox here:

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