Category: GinniThomas

Jan. 6 probe releases transcripts for Ginni Thomas, Rudy Giuliani, Tony Ornato, other key witnesses

Posted on (Updated by Brandi Buchman

The Jan. 6 committee released another trove of transcripts on Friday.

The panel published interviews from 21 witnesses including Ginni Thomas, the pro-Trump conspiracy theory-touting spouse of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas; former Secret Service agent and White House aide Tony Ornato; Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani; and several other figures who factored prominently in key themes underpinning the investigation of former President Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

Transcripts released on Friday are available below. Highlights and recaps from key transcripts will be updated in this post.

For access to all of the Jan. 6 committee transcripts published so far, check out the Daily Kos resource available here.

This story is developing. 

HIGHLIGHTS and RECAPS

Tony Ornato

Tony Ornato was interviewed by the committee three times. The transcript released Friday is from his Nov. 29, 2022. He was also interviewed on Jan. 28, 2022 and March 29, 2022. He left the Secret Service to work in the White House and lead security training. He was one of several points of contact on Jan. 6 tasked with passing along communications about security-related issues.

Ornato became a key focus for the committee after former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson testified that Ornato was present during an explosive moment on Jan. 6 when former President Donald Trump was informed that his motorcade would not be taken to the Capitol after his speech at the Ellipse.

Under oath, Hutchinson said Ornato invited her into his office at the White House on Jan. 6 along with Bobby Engel, the head of Trump’s Secret Service detail. She told investigators that Ornato asked her if she had yet caught wind of Trump’s episode in the motorcade. Hutchinson said Ornato recounted how Trump “lunged” at Secret Service agent Bobby Engel as Engel sat in the driver’s seat of the president’s armored vehicle. 

  • Curiously, Ornato testified that he didn’t recall whether he had read memos from the Secret Service, the Department of Homeland Security, the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department or any news reports about the potential for violence on Jan. 6. However, the committee obtained an email that he forwarded to Bobby Engel on Jan. 4 about the looming threat. Though he told the committee he received “hundreds of emails” daily, the Jan. 4 email was one of the only ones the committee received from the Secret Service that Ornato forwarded to Engel.
  • Ornato received an email, subject line: “Enrique Tarrio post” on Dec. 12 from the Protective Intelligence Division. It had been sent as well to Secret Service agent and other officials, including Bobby Engel. Ornato testified he wasn’t familiar with Tarrio, the leader of the extremist Proud Boys, at the time. The email disclosed that Tarrio had taken a tour of the White House that morning and there was “no known media coverage” at that moment. 
    • “So, as | read it today, ‘there is no known media coverage,’ meaning that there could be possible media coverage of this gentleman having a tour at the White House. And, at the time, | probably -- | didn't -- | wasn't aware of all the groups and everything back then, as | am more familiar with them now. However, if it was relayed to me that that's who that particular person was, | would've made the chief of staff aware that this had taken place that day,” Ornato testified
    • When the committee pushed back, saying he had to be aware of who the Proud Boys were—they participated in a MAGA rally that was heavily reported in November and on the night of Dec. 12, held another rally in Washington—Ornato said: “I don't recall. There was so many groups. | mean, | could've known at the time. | just don't recall this specific group of knowing -- you know, | knew Code Pink, | knew -- there's different -- when | was actually working as a special agent in charge, there were different groups that | was always briefed on and had in my head. During this time, not being in that environment, | don't recall all the groups that | knew or didn't know.”
  • Ornato’s memory wasn’t jogged any further when asked whether he was aware that Bobby Engel had received an email on Dec. 12 questioning why the Secret Service hadn’t been alerted that the leader of the Proud Boys went on a White House tour. Ornato said he may have passed the information along to Mark Meadows, however he couldn’t recall specifically. 
    • “I don’t specifically [remember a conversation with Meadows]. There was so much in my role there that I would have to make him aware of. This was probably one of the many thing that I did bring to his attention because that was my normal course of business,” Ornato testified.

Committee: “— is your testimony that you just weren't aware of that and don't know whether you passed that along to Mr. Meadows?”

Ornato: “No, sir. Let me explain.... | completely grasp what you're saying on who he was and what he was doing. | would've passed that to Mr. Meadows based upon who [Tarrio] was. | would not have known who submitted him to come into the White House. | would not have known any of that, as that all gets disseminated through the service to run background checks. So they would've brought that to us, or to me, on that. | wouldn't have known that information. But | would've addressed this with Chief of Staff Meadows based upon not just the media attention but due to the gravity of who the person was, absolutely.”

Notably: Later in the interview, Ornato testifies that Meadows would have been briefed on “the potential for groups to clash, the pro and the anti groups on the Washington Monument” on Jan. 6.

“I would have tallked to Chief of Staff Meadows on that,” he said.

  • Ornato also had trouble recalling whether he was aware of Elmer Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the Oath Keepers who was recently convicted of seditious conspiracy. On Dec. 17, he received a forwarded link to a story about Rhodes with the headline “Right-wing militant leader pledges violent support for Trump dictatorship."
    • “| don't remember that general subject coming to my attention. | just remember from reviewing the documents of the ones that -- dozens of groups on there, | believe the Oath Keepers is on there. But! don't remember it being pulled out as a specific topic of conversation,” Ornato testified.
  • It is notable in his exchanges with the committee that Ornato had left the Secret Service to take on the role at the White House but testified that he still had access to his Secret Service-issued cell phone.  He testified that he was taken of some of the listservs for internal emails however. He also testified that he didn’t know the meaning of “ALCON,” common shorthand for “ALL CONCERNED” that is used in bulletins among intelligence and military services
  • On Dec. 24, Ornato received a bulletin from the Protective Intelligence Division citing the open-source TheDonald.win message board. The bulletin highlighted warnings of people defying local gun laws when coming to D.C. on Jan. 6. The message highlighted stated: “'Armed and ready, Mr. President': Demonstrators urged to bring guns, prepare for violence at January 6th "Stop the Steal’ protest in D.C."
  • Ornato said he didn’t discuss TheDonald.win with Dan Scavino, the top Trump White House aide who often handled and monitored the former president’s social media. If Scavino would have seen the threatening messages, he would have gone straight to the Secret Service anyway, Ornato said, not him. When asked if he could recall a time Scavino did go to the Secret Service directly about similar material, he couldn’t recall. 
  • Ornato testified that he was not part of any conversation where messages on social media from around Dec. 26 about Proud Boys and Oath Keepers marching on Washington while armed, setting up chokepoints on bridges, or taking over the White House, were discussed. Since he wasn’t with the Secret Service officially, he testified that these details may not make it to him. But he had regular contact with Bobby Engel, the head of the president’s security detail. Ornato was not aware whether Engel had received these notifications. 

In a critical exchange, the committee noted to Ornato that it had uncovered an email that was forwarded to him on Dec. 28 listing all of the demonstrations happening in D.C. that day. The events were listed with a note stating: “There is no indication of civil disobedience.” Ornato affirmed that he received this email. This prompted investigators to sharply question him. 

Committee: So the emails that we showed you prior to this were new emails that we had not shown you before. Obviously, we had shown you this before in the prior interview, and it led to the question about your awareness and lack thereof about the thedonald.win.

Is there any explanation or can you reconcile for us how this is pushed up to you, but the other, frankly, more specific and detailed information about the potential for violence was not pushed up to you?

Ornato: I don't know, ma'am.

  • In a particularly jarring exchange, Ornato tells the committee he also has no memory of a 12-minute long phone call with Bobby Engel on the morning of Jan. 6. He couldn’t recall if Engel had discussed armed rallygoers, potential security threats, or if there were sufficient magnetometers during the call though the magnetometer issue was something Ornato admitted was a discussion on Jan. 5 with Engel and other Secret Service officials. Phone records show the 12-minute call was the longest call logged in Ornato’s White House-issued phone that day. The call was initiated by Engel only 10 minutes after records show Engel had been copied on a message about plate carriers, pepper spray, CB walkie-talkies and people in the front row of the rally carrying plexiglass riot shields.

Committee: “That's the predicate for the question. It's just kind of hard to believe that you don't recall anything about a conversation when that was what was going on around the Ellipse and the White House that morning.

Ornato: Sir, | don't recall that conversation taking place.

  • Ornato said he could not recall having a conversation with Bobby Engel on Jan. 6 about expectations for Trump’s movements after his speech and whether he would go to the Capitol. This conflicts with the testimony the committee said it received from Engel. Engel said Ornato was in the office. He also came up short when asked if he remembered any conversation about Trump being moved to the Capitol with security.
    • Ornato: “From my prior interview with you, | believe it was Cassidy Hutchinson and | had texted, and Cassidy had mentioned that before he got on stage he mentioned to the Chief of Staff that he wanted to go to the Capitol. And my response was -- there was no plan for it, so my response was it wasn't happening, it's not safe to do so because there's no security assets in place, and that he would -- to go ahead and pass it to Bob Engel because it's --  I said I believe Bobby -- and she said, Engel or Peede? And | said Engel, because that's Bob Engel's call as the special agent in charge. And I'm not at the venue, as we've said, so it's between Robert Engel and it's between Chief of Staff Meadows, but it's his call on security.”
  • Ornato testified that he passed a note to Meadows about two Capitol police who were injured and left unconscious after bulletins about it had already started to circulate He wouldn’t have raised alerts about potential weapons or issues with magnetometers, he said, because that wasn’t an issue Meadows wouldn’t typically deal with for events. But police fighting to defend the Capitol, he felt, was significant enough. When he passed the note to Meadows, Meadows was in the White House dining room with Trump. He couldn’t recall whether the TV was on. He had “tunnel vision” on Meadows, he said.
  • Ornato said anyone who assaulted police should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. The committee notably asked him if he felt that way about those officers who had testified to the committee and were vocal about Jan. 6, like former Metropolitan Police Department Officer Michael Fanone or the late U.S. Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick. Sicknick died on Jan. 7 after fending off the mob the day before. He suffered multiple strokes and the coroner’s office described his death as “natural causes.” The committee also asked whether he would have any words for Sicknick’s mother.
    • “Sir, | haven't spoken with them. |don't know them. |'m very sorry for the loss, like I'm sure the country is,… And | don't believe there should be a loss of life ever, especially in an attack, especially on law enforcement. So, you know, | would mourn with the country in that loss.”
    • When asked whether he would have conveyed any of those feelings in real time during the attack after learning of the severity of the assault on police, Ornato said he didn't realize how bad it was at the time.
  • Ornato confirmed reporting that now-Vice President Kamala Harris was in fact at the DNC headquarters in Washington when a pipe bomb was discovered there. Another was placed at the RNC headquarters. Both were placed on the night of Jan. 5. In that vein, it remains altogether unclear why Harris was even allowed into the DNC building on Jan. 6.

Ginni Thomas

Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, the right-wing activist wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, appeared before the committee on September 29, 2022. She did not testify under oath. For more than 100 pages, her testimony overwhelming takes the position that her outreach to White House officials like Mark Meadows was wholesome and the byproduct of her concerns over fraud in the 2020 election. To that end, however, she was unable to provide the committee with any specific instances of fraud that alarmed her. 

“I can't say that I was familiar at that time with any specific evidence. | was just hearing it from news reports and friends on the ground, grassroots activists who were inside of various polling places that found things suspicious. So I don't know. I was not an expert of the fraud and irregularities that were starting to be talked about,” she testified. 

  • Thomas said at the top of her interview with the committee that she still had concerns about fraud in the 2020 election today. When pressed by Rep. Jamie Raskin on what those concerns might be, and especially in light of the more than 60 federal and state courts rejecting allegations of election fraud, she was cagey before her lawyer promptly stepped in to refocus questions. 
    • “Right. There seems to be a lot of people still moving around, identifying ways that there were -- we'll see. We'll see what happens. | don't know specific instances. But certainly, | think we all know that there are people questioning what happened in 2020, and it takes time to develop an understanding of the facts,” Thomas said. 
  • Thomas said too that most of her views on election fraud were based on things she had heard, not evidence she reviewed herself. Among all the literature she has consumed about the outcome of the election, she testified that she had not read the report, “Lost, Not Stolen” penned by a litany of prominent conservative professors, lawmakers, lawyers, and others.
  • Thomas threaded the needle carefully when discussing her text messages to Mark Meadows, Trump’s chief of staff. Text messages obtained by the committee showed Thomas sending Meadows a flurry of missives in the days and weeks after the election and the insurrection at the Capitol. She pushed conspiracy theories about rigged voting machines and, as she labeled it in her interview with the committee, she “emoted” regularly when chatting with Meadows about the desperate need to keep Republicans, and Trump, in power. In a Jan. 10 text, Thomas told Meadows she was “disgusted” with then-Vice President Mike Pence.
    • “Right, I appreciate your question. I believe looking back, that I was frustrated that I thought VIce President Pence might concede earlier than what President Trump was inclined to do. And I wanted to hear Vice President Pence talk more about the fraud and irregularities in certain states that I thought was still lingering,” she said. “And so, I was frustrated with the vice president for not sounding the same, in the same thematic way.” 
    • When it came to Jan. 6, however, she said, she wasn’t “focused on the Vice President’s role on Jan. 6” but only hoped there would be a “robust discussion” of state fraud that had surfaced. Pence “probably” did all he could that day she said.
  • Thomas also said that her husband, Justice Clarence Thomas, was unaware she was exchanging messages with Meadows. He didn't learn about it, she claimed, until March when it was reported in the press. Curiously, Thomas also claimed her husband wasn’t interested in politics and knew little of her political activism. But during her testimony, she appeared to contradict herself saying that she did have at least one conversation with him about the 2020 election. 

Committee: And then you responded [to Mark Meadows] just a few minutes later, ‘Thank you. Needed that, this plus a conversation with my best friend just now. I will try to keep holding on.’” 

And you sent that message at a little before 11 p.m. on the 24th. 

Do you recall who you were referring to when you said you had just had a conversation with your best friend?

Thomas: It looks like my husband. 

Committee: Do you remember what you talked to Justice Thomas about that made you feel better and allowed you to, ‘keep holding on’?

Thomas: I wish I could remember, but I have no memory of the specifics. My husband often administers spousal support to the wife that’s upset. So I assume that’s what it was. I don’t have a specific memory of it. 

Committee: What makes you think now, as you read, that you’re referring to your husband when you say, ‘my best friend’? 

Thomas: Because that’s what I call him and he is my best friend. Mark is getting pretty close though.

Rudy Giuliani

Rudy Giuliani served as Trump’s personal attorney and spearheaded the fake elector bid central to the former president’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election. He was first retained by Trump as his personal lawyer in 2018.

Giuliani appeared under subpoena for his deposition on May 20, 2022. He frequently invoked attorney-client privilege when facing questions from investigators. Giuliani said he had expected from long before the election that it would be rigged against Trump, echoing much of the same propaganda he peddled religiously in public view in 2020. What first triggered him, he said, was a public remark from Hillary Clinton in August of that year. She anticipated that Republicans would make an issue of absentee and mail-in voting and urged now-President Joe Biden not to concede until every ballot was accounted for.

  • Giuliani: “And | was very suspicious of Hillary's comment that you shouldn't concede no matter what the vote is. That triggered in my mind, given my evaluation of her character, which is a person who is unscrupulous, that she was telling Biden, we got a plan to get you through, so don't worry even if you're five or six points behind, or more.”
  • The former president’s personal attorney also expressed strong opinions about Bill Stepien, Trump’s campaign manager. When Stepien testified before the committee he told them he was part of “Team Normal,” or among the few people on the campaign or in the White House who knew and understood that Trump had lost the election and had informed Trump of this fact to no avail. Then there was “Team Giuliani,” which included Sidney Powell, Jenna Ellis and others on the so-called “Kraken” beat. Giuliani, who already has a history of unloading on Stepien publicly, told the committee he was shocked Trump ever selected him. Giuliani appeared to corroborate Stepien’s testimony that he avoided Giuliani and wanted to stay away from the craziness he brought to the table. Giuliani said when Stepien dealt with him directly, he “seemed to be somewhat frightened” of him. 
  • Giuliani’s grasp of the Constitution or how electoral laws actually function remained tenuous in his interview as he spoke at length about the unfair judges or hearings he felt Trump received when litigating the election outcome. He misspoke often, confusing or misstating the role of the House of Representatives with state electors and vice versa.
  • According to testimony from Christina Bobb, another Trump campaign attorney, Senator Lindsey Graham once urged Giuliani to show him proof, any proof, even a small amount of concrete proof that voter fraud was widespread. “Just show me five dead voters,” Graham said, and he would “champion that.” When Giuliani testified before the select committee, he said that information was “impossible to verify” because they couldn’t obtain the voter list.
  • Giuliani also insisted that his remark on the stage at the Ellipse on Jan. 6  about having ‘trial by combat’ wasn’t meant to provoke violence. (“Let's have trial by combat! I'm willing to stake my reputation. The President is willing to stake his reputation!”)
    • ”I wanted the two machines, a legitimate machine, and the Dominion machine, put up against each other and both count the votes, and if their machine works properly, I'll apologize, but if it doesn't, they'll go to jail. And that -- and that thing was taken out of context like | was trying to provoke violence. And, as the judge noted, no one even got upset about it when I said it. They probably didn't even understand what | was talking about.”
  • The former New York City mayor was also admittedly nervous when broaching questions from investigators about discussions he, Sidney Powell, Patrick Byrne, Michael Flynn, Trump, and others had about potentially seizing voting machines through executive order in mid-December 2020. Telling the committee he didn’t want to violate attorney-client privilege over the “very sensitive” matter, he still managed to badmouth Powell.
    • “I’ve had a very bad experience with Sidney, because she started out as part of our team and she would make allegations, then she wouldn't give us the basis for it. Then our team would have to go out and try to defend it as best we could. And then it would turn out to be exaggerated, not necessarily false but unsupported,” he said.
    • At the meeting at the White House on Dec. 18, Powell provided Giuliani with 12 affidavits that she said proved international interference in the voting machines and would justify getting the military involved. Giuliani testified that he didn’t agree with that conclusion and that the affidavits were the product of “one source” that Powell had “found a way of repeating 12 different times through other people.”
      • “And I said, I know, Mr. President, you are reluctant to use the military, but this -- I mean, this doesn't even come close. Plus, I think some of these affidavits could be seen as, you know, false affidavits because they're tricky… So I told the President that he could not -- he couldn't possibly sign these. And I said, this would be, number one, this may be the only thing that I know of that you ever did that could merit impeachment. You've been innocent up until now, why don't you stay that way? And he said, well, if you tell me that, no,I don't want to do it.’”
  • The meeting at the White House that night erupted into a fierce argument. Giuliani said Mark Meadows and Michael Flynn started in on each other causing things to “become really nasty” but he couldn’t recall specifically what they fought over. 
    • “I remember Mark saying, ‘That’s really unfair, General, I supported you when only 12 people were supporting you and I believed you, I still believe in you, but it’s really unfair you’re saying that. would have to guess at what it was. So don't -- you know, it was -- sort of the argument was -- |'m going to categorically describe it as you guys are not tough enough. Or maybe I'd put it another way, you're a bunch of pussies. Excuse the expression, but that's -- I'm almost certain the word was used.”

The Supreme Court is now in the middle of the Jan. 6 insurrection. Congress needs to respond

Posted on (Updated by Joan McCarter

The Jan. 6 committee is reportedly preparing to call Supreme Court spouse Ginni Thomas to talk about just how deeply involved she was in the effort to help Donald Trump have a coup. Thomas told the Daily Caller, “I look forward to talking to them,” and that she wants to “clear up misconceptions.” Okay then.

The committee now says she’s going to get that opportunity. That’s one step closer to Congress taking seriously the threat that Thomas and her spouse, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, pose to the republic.

A report in The New York Times Thursday combined with The Washington Post story put Ginni Thomas in the thick of John Eastman’s coup-plotting. There are emails between the two. There’s Eastman telling a pro-Trump lawyer and Trump campaign officials that he was aware of a “heated fight” within the Supreme Court: “For those willing to do their duty, we should help them by giving them a Wisconsin cert petition to add into the mix.”

RELATED STORY:  Trump attorneys claimed Supreme Court justices were considering joining scheme to overturn election

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Now, that could be Eastman lying about the situation in order to keep the team fighting for Trump or from some other reason—that’s law professor Steve Vladek’s interpretation. Or it could have been Ginni working Eastman up with tales from the inside to keep him happy.

Regardless, it is the spouse of a sitting Supreme Court justice in the thick of a coup attempt. We don’t know where Clarence Thomas is in all this. We do know that he was the lone justice who wanted to keep the White House records around Jan. 6 away from the committee. Maybe now we have new information as to why he wanted that.

What we also know now, thanks to Thursday’s Jan. 6 committee hearing, is that Eastman (who was a Thomas clerk back in the day) knew that what he was promoting was illegal and told Trump so on Jan. 4, two days before the insurrection.

Eastman knew what he was pushing—with help from Ginni Thomas—was illegal. Following that to its logical conclusion, with the revelations of the last 24 hours, how does the committee not subpoena Ginni Thomas?

Furthermore, how do President Joe Biden, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer not demand that Clarence Thomas resign? How do the House and Senate Judiciary Committees not turn their attention to Clarence Thomas and investigating just what Clarence and Ginni Thomas were cooking up together?

Here’s what retired federal judge J. Michael Luttig, a true conservative hero who was on George W. Bush’s short list for the Supreme Court, said: ”Donald Trump and his allies and supporters are a clear and present danger to American democracy. [...] I don’t speak those words lightly.”

Those allies and supporters include Supreme Court Clarence Thomas. The danger is coming from the highest court in the land and Congress has to deal with that. It’s time to begin the investigations leading to an impeachment of Clarence Thomas. No, this Senate would not convict with 50 Republicans, but after the work of the Jan. 6 committee and all of these revelations, they need to be forced to vote to protect him. They need to be making the case against Clarence Thomas, and then they need to start real work of reforming and expanding the Supreme Court.

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2020 was an election theft dry run for Republicans. Next time, they could succeed

Posted on by Joan McCarter

Every election starting now and into the foreseeable future is going to be the most important election of our lifetime. Until the Republican Party as we currently know it is ground to dust, scorched, and the earth on which it stands is salted, the threat of white nationalistic fascism will remain. Right now, in 2022, Republicans are running explicitly on undermining representative democracy, from the smallest local positions up through the state legislatures and all the way to Congress. They are converging behind the Big Lie and promising that they are going to fix it so that they don’t lose any more elections. So that Donald Trump (or his stand-in) will take the 2024 election.

They’re not even trying to be subtle about it—it’s explicit in so many campaigns for governor, attorney general, and secretary of state in plenty of battlegrounds, including the states that Trump tried to contest in 2020.

“What we’re seeing right now is unprecedented,” Joanna Lydgate, co-founder and CEO of States United Action, told CNN’s Rod Brownstein. “To see candidates running on a platform of lies and conspiracy theories about our elections as a campaign position, to see a former President getting involved in endorsing in down-ballot races at the primary level, and certainly to see this kind of systemic attacks on our elections, this spreading of disinformation about our elections—we’ve never seen anything like this before as a country.”

RELATED STORY: Republican state legislators are laying the groundwork to overturn the next election

Brownstein reports on a study released last week—commissioned by the groups States United Democracy Center, Protect Democracy, and Law Forward—which determined that 13 states have already approved laws to make sure there will be partisan control over election administration, laws to intimidate election administrators, and laws requiring audits of the 2020 election, as if that is a thing. That’s beyond the orgy they’ve been having for the past decade with voter suppression laws, which hasn’t ended either. Thirty-three states have another 229 bills related to denying the results of the last election, and to limiting the electorate and predetermining the outcome of future elections.

“Taken separately, each of these bills would chip away at the system of free and fair elections that Americans have sustained, and worked to improve, for generations,” the groups concluded. “Taken together, they could lead to an election in which the voters’ choices are disregarded and the election sabotaged.”

“In the leadup to the 2020 election, those who warned of a potential crisis were dismissed as alarmists by far too many Americans who should have seen the writing on the wall,” Jessica Marsden, counsel at Protect Democracy, told Brownstein in an email. “Almost two years later, after an attempted coup and a violent insurrection on our Capitol, election conspiracy theorists—including those who actually participated in January 6—are being nominated by the GOP to hold the most consequential offices for overseeing the 2024 election.”

“It’s all connected,” Lydgate said. “The playbook is to try to change the rules and change the referees, so you can change the results.”

They’ve got a very powerful referee on their side in the form of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

A casual observer might reasonably conclude that Ginni and Clarence Thomas are working in tandem to lay the groundwork for the next coup—with Ginni taking up the politics and Clarence handling the legal side. The symmetry between their work is remarkable. https://t.co/wUh5TiHk4q pic.twitter.com/tooRedMQJk

— Mark Joseph Stern (@mjs_DC) May 23, 2022

Thomas won’t recuse himself from any of these cases, and as of now, a Democratic Congress doesn’t seem particularly interested in trying to force him to via the threat of investigation and impeachment.

“What’s past is prologue, and what was done sloppily in 2020 is being mapped out by experts for 2024,” Slate’s Stern and Dahlia Lithwick write. “It didn’t work in 2020 because the legal and political structures to support it weren’t in place at the time. Those pieces are being put into place as we type this.” That’s the story Brownstein is also trying to get to Democrats and the rest of the traditional media—anyone who will listen and can do something about it.

There are answers. There are ways to fix this. They start with electing enough Democrats to state offices to make sure the damage the fascists can do is limited. We can also elect enough Democrats to the House and to the Senate to make the two Republican-friendly, obstructionist Democratic senators irrelevant.

Then it’ll be a matter of convincing that Democratic majority and a Democratic president that none of this is blogger hysteria, but a very real threat to our freedoms that has everybody else’s hair on fire. Saving our representative democracy means expanding and reforming the court.

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Clarence and Ginni Thomas take center stage at House hearing on Supreme Court ethics

Posted on by Joan McCarter

The federal judiciary is on tap for the House Wednesday—specifically, the topic of reforming the federal judiciary. The House has a raft of suspension bills (legislation that doesn’t require the regular rules process on the floor) it will run through, including the bipartisan Courthouse Ethics and Transparency Act, which the Senate already passed in February. While that’s happening, the Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Courts will hold a hearing on Supreme Court ethics, or lack thereof.

That’s the juicy part of the day, with lawmakers spurred on by the disclosure of Ginni Thomas’ text messages showing the depth of her involvement in trying to promote a coup. As the spouse of a wildly partisan political activist, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas at the very least should have recused from any cases related to the 2020 election and Donald Trump. Which of course he did not. This hearing will examine the lack of Supreme Court ethics and Congress’ role in dealing with that, including impeachment.

A memo obtained by The Hill from subcommittee chair Rep. Hank Johnson (D-GA) and sent to members ahead of the hearing outlines the existing codes of conduct that apply to other federal judges and summarizes legislative proposals that would extend the code to Supreme Court justices. As of right now, they’re exempt from it and are expected to discipline themselves—which, in Thomas’ case, doesn’t happen. The memo also outlines Congress’ impeachment authority as one of the tools at their disposal.

“Threats or inquiries of impeachment as a means of regulating the conduct of Supreme Court justices have had varying effects,” the memo said. Just one justice in the nation’s history has been impeached by the House, Samuel Chase in 1804. He was not convicted by the Senate. In 1969, Justice Abe Fortas resigned over an impeachment threat. The current crop of Republican justices pretty much thumb their nose at the idea of ethics, in contrast to the newest justice-designate, Ketanji Brown Jackson, who has preemptively recused herself from an affirmative action case before she’s even been officially seated on the court.

Markos and Kerry talk Ukraine and speak with Wisconsin Democratic Party chair Ben Wikler on how hitting back at Republicans helps win elections

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The memo makes it clear that this hearing is about the Thomases and the increasing calls for action  “following the reporting about text messages between the spouse of an associate justice and the then-White House Chief of Staff.”

“The Supreme Court has long operated as though it were above the law. But, Justice Clarence Thomas’ refusal to recuse himself from cases surrounding January 6th, despite his wife’s involvement, raises serious ethical—and legal—alarm bells,” vice chair of the subcommittee Rep. Mondaire Jones (D-NY), said ahead of the hearing. “The need for strong, enforceable ethics laws is clearer than ever. We have to do more to hold the Court accountable and restore public trust through a binding code of ethics and recusal.”

“Recent reports that the text messages of a justice’s spouse urging the overturning of a free and fair election may have been at issue in a case in front the Supreme Court—but that the justice did not recuse himself from the case—is just the latest and particularly egregious example in an unfortunately long list of illustrations as to why Supreme Court justices need to follow a formal code of ethics,” Johnson told The Hill. “I have been calling for this sort of reform for years, and I am encouraged to see a large, bipartisan majority of the public in favor of this long overdue legislation.”

Republicans, and particularly Senate Republicans, are unlikely to agree because it’s their justices behaving badly. It is, however, important for Democrats to keep pushing that point and to keep up the drumbeat for reform. The threat of some kind of action from Congress—a SCOTUS code of ethics, court expansion, impeachment—is at this point the only leverage that exists against the rogue Supreme Court majority.

The legislation they will pass Wednesday (a slightly different version passed 422-4 in December) will help some toward that effort. It also demonstrates that even the most hardcore partisan Republicans—in this case the bill’s sponsor, Sen. John Cornyn—recognize that there has to be at least the gloss of accountability for the Supreme Court. The bill toughens financial disclosure requirements for federal judges, including Supreme Court justices. They will have to make financial holdings and stock trades publicly available online, in the interest of disclosing conflicts of interest that would warrant judges recusing themselves from related cases.

As it currently stands, the parties involved in a case can request to see the judge’s financial disclosures, as can members of the public, but the judges themselves get to decide how much information they release and when. They have sole discretion in redacting information and can take all the time they want to fulfill requests.

The legislation is a result of a report last fall in the Wall Street Journal that found more than 130 judges broke the law by hearing cases in which they had a financial interest instead of recusing themselves. The Journal found 685 lawsuits that were decided by judges with a financial stake, with the potential fallout of hundreds of cases being overruled.

When the Journal alerted the judges to these violations, “56 of the judges […] directed court clerks to notify parties in 329 lawsuits that they should have recused themselves. That means new judges might be assigned, potentially upending rulings.” Most of the judges gave lame excuses or played dumb. “I had no idea that I had an interest in any of these companies in what was a most modest retirement account,” said Judge Timothy Batten Sr. of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia, who owned JPMorgan Chase stock and ruled favorably for the bank in several cases.

Under this legislation, everyone in the judiciary branch will have to follow disclosure requirements like those that apply to lawmakers, reporting within 45 days all stock trades of more than $1,000. The Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts will have to create an online database, searchable and publicly accessible, of judicial financial disclosure forms and will have to get those forms into the database within 90 days from when they’re filed. The new law will apply to Supreme Court justices as well as federal appellate, district court, bankruptcy, and magistrate judges. The database has to be online within six months of President Joe Biden signing the bill.

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The Supreme Court can’t be untouchable. Congress needs to investigate Thomas

Posted on (Updated by Joan McCarter

The Washington Post’s Paul Waldman is absolutely right: “The controversy over Virginia ‘Ginni’ Thomas, Clarence Thomas, and the Jan. 6 insurrection is demonstrating one profound difference between Democrats and Republicans: how they view the value of making a stink.”

Three years on, the ridiculous and entirely made-up Hunter Biden story is still a thing, more a thing than Donald Trump extorting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to try to get “dirt” on Biden. Because Republicans keep feeding it—because they know it will work.

Meanwhile, the spouse of a sitting U.S. Supreme Court justice was involved up to her eyebrows in the effort to overthrow the Congress and keep Donald Trump in office. The Donald Trump who was doing Vladimir Putin’s bidding in trying to withhold arms from Ukraine. Arms that Ukraine has desperately needed in its defense against Russia. That’s a pretty big thing! All definitely worth making a stink about. But thus far, Democratic leadership in Congress is not. The most they’ve done so far is say they think Thomas should recuse himself from any Jan. 6-related cases. Ineffectively.

That’s why Daily Kos and 16 other organizations have signed on to this Take Back the Court letter, demanding that Congress open a formal investigation into Clarence Thomas’ misconduct. We’ve written to Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) and Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY), the chairs of the Senate and House Judiciary Committees, “to request that the House and Senate Judiciary Committees open a formal investigation into Associate Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ misconduct in his handling of cases regarding the January 6 insurrection, the 2020 presidential election, and other cases involving his wife’s political activities.”

“Justice Thomas’ unethical conduct from the bench is within the purview of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees, and we urge the committees to investigate that conduct fully, in cooperation with the January 6 Select Committee as needed,” the groups write.

Even though Supreme Court justices have chosen not to abide by the same code of ethics that other all federal judges must adhere to, they are bound by a federal statute that bars them from hearing cases in which their “impartiality might reasonably be questioned,” or in which their spouse has “an interest that could be substantially affected by the outcome of the proceeding.”

Thomas has already violated that statute. He’s ruled in multiple cases surrounding the 2020 election and the insurrection—including being the lone dissenting vote requiring Trump to provide records to the Jan. 6 committee, records that may very well include communications from Ginni Thomas. “Justice Thomas clearly violated this provision when he refused to recuse himself from a case directly implicating his wife’s activities in support of the January 6 insurrection, and it is incumbent on Congress to respond,” the groups write.

Thomas’ rulings on cases in which his wife was directly involved go back at least two decades. In December 2000, the court heard Bush v. Gore, the only time in history in which the Supreme Court selected a president. While the case was pending, Ginni Thomas was collecting résumés for potential Bush administration positions. Twelve years later, he heard the challenge against the Affordable Care Act, NFIB v. Sibelius. Ginni was then heading up a group called Liberty Central, which was agitating for the law to be declared unconstitutional. Back then, a group of 74 members of Congress asked Thomas to recuse from the case. He did not. He heard the case and voted in dissent when the court upheld the law.

So we know how polite requests for recusal are going to pan out. Thomas is not going to recuse out of any sense of propriety or ethics. That’s abundantly clear. There’s only one way it happens and that would require a formal investigation.

It’s not just his refusal to recuse from cases, either, that raises ethics concerns aboutThomas. “Justice Thomas has repeatedly failed to disclose employers who paid his wife hundreds of thousands of dollars, as required by the Ethics in Government Act of 1978,” Take Back the Court points out. “This raises serious questions about what, if anything, Justice Thomas is trying to hide, whether any other undisclosed payments exist, and what possible judicial outcomes such hidden details relate to.”

“Allowing Justice Thomas to avoid scrutiny will surely cause the American people’s faith in our judicial system to deteriorate further—perhaps beyond repair. Americans know that Justice Thomas cannot act impartially in cases related to his wife’s political activities,” the groups write. “It’s up to your committees to ensure that he is held accountable for abusing his power and pretending otherwise.”

Nothing is going to happen to Thomas without Democrats kicking up a stink. An investigation into Thomas will sure stink for the Supreme Court, and for Chief Justice John Roberts, who seems to care about his legacy as much as anything else. Yes, it needs to happen.

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As momentum builds in Congress to do something about Thomas, impeachment needs to be an option

Posted on (Updated by Joan McCarter

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is a problem for the court, for the nation, and for democracy in general. That’s been true for decades, as long as his deep ties to the dark money swirling around the judiciary, and doesn’t even take into account the extremely partisan activities of his “best friend” and wife Ginni. Since those activities now include attempting to overthrow the government, the problem of Clarence Thomas just got a whole lot more glaring—and congressional leadership has been caught just a bit flat-footed.

Stepping into the void, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was the first to use the “I” word. “Clarence Thomas should resign,” she tweeted. “If not, his failure to disclose income from right-wing organizations, recuse himself from matters involving his wife, and his vote to block the Jan 6th commission from key information must be investigated and could serve as grounds for impeachment.”

By all means, the House should start talking about impeachment. That’s what Thomas deserves: the ultimate censure. That’s where to start: the maximum. There’s no real other leverage the other two branches have over the Supreme Court than pressure in the public eye and the threat of action. Chief Justice John Roberts has been aware enough about his personal legacy in his career thus far to make blowing up the Thomas scandal in public—and keeping it there with discussion of impeachment—a smart tactic.

Would the 50-50 Senate convict him? No, but that’s a valuable weapon for Democrats in the upcoming election. Republicans are protecting the Supreme Court justice who has refused to recuse himself from cases involving his wife’s efforts to overthrow the government.

The good news is that Democrats are inching toward something a little more concrete than demanding that Thomas recuse. That’s where they started. A group of House and Senate Democrats, spearheaded by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), wrote to the Supreme Court requesting that Thomas recuse himself from any future Jan. 6-related cases, as well as provide a “written explanation for his failure to recuse himself” in previous cases.

“[G]iven the recent disclosures about Ms. Thomas’s efforts to overturn the election and her specific communications with White House officials about doing so, Justice Thomas’s participation in cases involving the 2020 election and the January 6th attack is exceedingly difficult to reconcile with federal ethics requirements,” says the letter obtained by The Washington Post.

The lawmakers also called on Roberts to commit to creating “a binding Code of Conduct for the Supreme Court—the only court in the country not currently subject to a judicial code of ethics—that includes (1) enforceable provisions to ensure that the Justices comply with this Code and (2) a requirement that all Justices issue written recusal decision.” They ask that he do so by April 28.

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Which is a fine and appropriate next step, since Thomas will surely refuse to recuse. “He absolutely should recuse himself,” Jayapal told Politico. But, she added, “Clearly the Supreme Court is in need of ethics reforms.”

Jayapal is on the House Judiciary committee, so the ethics reform thing is another possibility. In fact, legislation to impose the Judicial Code of Ethics on the Supreme Court—which is currently exempt from it—would be a good concurrent step for Congress to be taking along with the public pressure campaign to get him to resign. That legislation exists in a bill written by Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) and should start moving through committee immediately.

After an ill-conceived dismissal of the issue on Monday by Judiciary Chair Dick Durbin, who suggested there’s no urgency to the Thomas problem, there’s now some momentum there. Durbin had a day to think it over and is now joining Warren in saying lawmakers need to act. Durbin told CNN’s Manu Raju that imposing the ethics code on the Supreme Court is “long overdue.” Warren told him the legislation should include limits on stocks and “rules about other kinds of personal conflicts.” The Senate Democrats are expected to discuss Murphy’s legislation in their conference luncheon Tuesday, Raju reports.

That’s all fine and needs to move apace. At the same time, House Democrats should not rule out pursuing impeachment, which has to initiate in that chamber. Once again, Ocasio-Cortez is pushing Democrats to go there. Remember, she said, that pushing for impeachment of Trump on his extortion of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was initially deemed “unrealistic,” and the “debate was fierce & opposition real.” But, she argues, “When we look back at the decision to impeach Trump over Ukraine today, could you imagine if the naysayers and those claiming to be ‘politically savvier’ won? WE would be explaining why we allowed it to happen instead of the Senate explaining why they acquitted.” That’s on the Senate Republicans.

“Subpoenas, investigations, and impeachment should absolutely be on the table. We shouldn’t have to think twice about that,” she concluded in the thread. “We must go where the facts take us. A failure to act puts the imperiling of democracy squarely on *our* shoulders. It’s our duty to defend it.”

Let the Senate lead on the code of ethics legislation. How are Senate Republicans going to argue about that? The House needs to start those investigations toward impeachment. Both chambers should also be talking now about legislation to expand the court, and to put pressure on President Joe Biden to join as well. If there’s going to be any change, any accountability at the court, it’s not going to come without a big public stink. It’s the only way it’s going to happen.

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Trump is prepping a massive purge of officials seen as disloyal

Posted on by Laura Clawson

Donald Trump continues his march to autocracy, planning his largest purge of government officials yet. And he’s getting outside help in assembling his enemies list, with a conservative activist network headed by Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, providing a stream of memos detailing how some administration officials have been insufficiently loyal to Trump.

The pieces are being put in place. Trump is getting ready to push the purge with a new head of presidential personnel—his former body man, Johnny McEntee, who was fired by then-White House chief of staff John Kelly in 2018. And Groundswell, the Ginni Thomas group, helped push former national security adviser H.R. McMaster out of office, and is not remotely done, Axios reports.

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More recently, a memo targeted Jessie Liu, the former U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C., who was nominated for a Treasury Department position only to have the nomination pulled. Liu’s offenses against Trump included signing off on a sentencing filing asking for jail time for former national security adviser Michael Flynn and not having former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe indicted—in other words, Liu dared to prosecute a former Trump official whom Trump didn’t want prosecuted and didn’t prosecute one whom Trump did want prosecuted.

That’s not the only such memo going after a specific Trump appointee—whether potential or already on the job—and pushing Trump to purge those who aren’t fully on board with Trump’s corruption and narcissism. 

Given that Trump’s moods change constantly and his actions offend anyone with even a teeny shred of integrity, that could leave a lot of jobs to fill. Never fear, though: Groundswell has another list of appropriately Trumpy potential appointees ready to go. That list includes former Sheriff David Clarke for a top Homeland Security job, and Fox News’ favorite former Secret Service officer, Dan Bongino, for something in Homeland Security or counterterrorism.

Donald Trump is personally corrupt and dedicated to abuse of power. But he’s not operating alone—if he was, Republicans would have put limits on him long ago. Groundswell—a group that, it cannot be emphasized enough, is headed by the wife of a Supreme Court justice—shows that Republicans aren’t just failing to rein Trump in; they’re encouraging him to make the government more ruthlessly partisan, to place loyalty above competence at every turn.