Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, was truly part of a web of efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Among her dozens of text messages with then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, CNN reports, was one passing along thoughts from her friend Connie Hair. But Hair wasn’t just a personal friend. She was also chief of staff to Rep. Louie Gohmert—and Gohmert joined or supported two lawsuits seeking to overturn Donald Trump’s election loss. Those lawsuits went to the Supreme Court, though the court didn’t take up either of them.
Clarence and Ginni Thomas have long made a mockery of the weak Supreme Court ethics rules allowing justices to decide, on their own, when to recuse themselves from cases in which they have conflicts of interest. Ginni is a far-right activist who has worked with groups actively advocating for specific outcomes in major Supreme Court cases, cases that Clarence never recuses himself from. It’s not just a matter of Ginni’s stated opinions, it’s also often a matter of her professional interests. But Team Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election have brought the corruption of the Thomases’ inside-outside act into renewed attention, because it’s noteworthy when a Supreme Court justice’s wife texts a White House chief of staff: “Do not concede. It takes time for the army who is gathering for [Trump’s] back,” and later the Supreme Court justice in question is the only member of the court dissenting on allowing Trump’s documents relating to Jan. 6 to be handed over to investigators.
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Hair turns up in a Nov. 14, 2020, text from Ginni Thomas to Meadows, reading, “This war is psychological. PSYOP. It's what I did in the military. They are using every weapon they have to try to make us quit ... It is fake, fraud and if people would take a deep breath and look at things through that filter we will see this through and win.”
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The text to Meadows mentions Hair in a context suggesting she was the author of those words, and a source told CNN that Thomas had cut and pasted Hair’s comments from other texts. Ginni Thomas does not have a military background, while Hair’s Twitter profile includes “#veteran.”
Publicly, Hair tweeted things like, “Was on a call with the Trump campaign manager and legal folks for a briefing this morning. WE ARE SEEING THIS THROUGH TO THE END OF THE COURT/COUNT BATTLE,” and “Massive amounts of voter fraud in big cities throughout the contested states.”
Hair’s boss, Gohmert, sued Mike Pence in an effort to get him to interfere in the certification of the Electoral College count, and endorsed a Texas lawsuit challenging the votes of four other states.
According to CNN’s source, Hair didn’t know about Gohmert’s involvement in those cases, and Thomas and Hair didn’t discuss them. But Hair has been friends with the Thomases for years, including dinners and a Colbie Caillat concert as well as photos from inside Clarence’s judicial chambers. So what we have is the Supreme Court justice’s wife texting her good friend the congressional chief of staff, then passing along words of wisdom from the latter to the White House chief of staff, while the member of Congress is involved in lawsuits headed to the Supreme Court.
It’s all a little suspicious.
Clarence Thomas should not be allowed to pick and choose which of the legal matters in which his wife is deeply involved he will take as a member of the Supreme Court—particularly as his answer to that question has been “all of them.” A Supreme Court justice whose wife was strategizing with someone actively engaged in a coup attempt, telling them “Do not concede,” and sending along conspiracy theories and advice about which lawyers should lead the effort in the courts should perhaps not be one out of nine votes on which of those efforts will succeed in court. If Thomas won’t start recusing himself where his wife has been actively involved—and he won’t—it’s another strong argument for, at a minimum, imposing a strong set of judicial ethics on the Supreme Court, and beyond that, investigating Thomas and expanding the court so that one corrupt justice will not loom so large.
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