(New York) At the time, the impartiality of Clarence Thomas was already questioned. But, while defending his integrity, the ultra-conservative judge of the Supreme Court of the United States had wanted to praise the community of spirit between him and his wife, Virginia, an activist and lobbyist for many causes.
Posted at 7:45 p.m.
“We are under the same yoke, and we like to be together because we like the same things. We believe in the same things, ”he said in 2011 to conservative lawyers during a confidential speech, a recording of which was given to a Politico journalist.
These days, Washington wonders how far the community of spirit goes between the Thomases. Without waiting for the answer to this question behind which perhaps a scandal is looming, lawyers and politicians are urging the 73-year-old judge to recuse himself from causes concerning the 2020 presidential election and its consequences.
“In light of new reports from many media outlets, Justice Thomas’ conduct on the Supreme Court appears to be increasingly corrupt,” Democratic Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden said last Friday.
He was referring to revelations by journalists Bob Woodward and Robert Costa that Virginia Thomas sent 29 fiery, even trippy, texts to former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, calling on him to help efforts to invalidate the results of the ballot of November 3, 2020.
The text messages are all the more remarkable as they reveal Virginia Thomas’ embrace of the craziest conspiracy theories surrounding the 2020 election, including those of the QAnon movement.
In a text dated November 5, 2020, for example, she quotes to Mark Meadows a passage from a text read on a far-right site: “The Biden crime family and the co-conspirators of the fraud […] are arrested and detained for voter fraud right now […] and will live on Guantánamo barges before being tried by military tribunals for sedition. »
She adds: “I hope it’s true. »
A clear conflict of interest?
Could it be that Virginia Thomas never spoke to her husband about her efforts with the White House to invalidate the results of the 2020 presidential election? One thing is certain, the tone of her text messages is that of a woman in the grip of a fear or a visceral hatred towards “the left that is sinking” her country.
It must be said that Virginia Thomas has never been a bon chic bon genre conservative. For years, she has evolved in the most radical areas of the American right, the one that saw in Barack Obama an agent of jihadism, who denounced the “deep state” in the wake of Steve Bannon and who saw the election of Joe Biden as outright theft.
Virginia Thomas is obviously entitled to her opinions, even the most questionable ones. But she is also connected to a host of organizations and individuals whose cases are being argued in the Supreme Court, from immigration to guns to affirmative action programs. Causes in which she believes, in addition to sometimes drawing financial benefits from them.
Last January, the weekly The New Yorker notably revealed that Virginia Thomas’ lobbying firm, Liberty Consulting, was paid $200,000 in 2017 and 2018 by a lobby group that submitted a brief to the Supreme Court defending Donald Trump’s controversial immigration order. Decree which was validated, by five votes against four. Clarence Thomas was part of this narrow majority.
Wasn’t this a patent conflict of interest that should have prompted the judge to recuse himself? According to federal law, “every judge, magistrate, or magistrate of the United States shall recuse himself from any cause in which his impartiality might reasonably be questioned.”
” My best friend ”
However, it is up to the judges of the Supreme Court to decide for themselves whether a given case requires that they recuse themselves. Confirmed in his post in 1991 despite allegations of sexual harassment from an ex-colleague, Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas only saw fit to do so once.
PHOTO ROBERT FRANKLIN, ASSOCIATED PRESS ARCHIVES
Clarence Thomas has served on the Supreme Court since 1991.
The cause, debated in the 1990s, involved the Virginia Military Institute, where his son Jamal was studying at the time.
Judge Thomas therefore never felt the need to recuse himself from other cases where he found himself in a situation of real, apparent or potential conflict of interest, including those concerning the 2020 presidential election and its consequences.
All this, even though his wife was part of a group that helped advance the “Stop the Steal” movement and played a mediating role between the organizers of the January 6, 2021 rally that preceded the assault on the Capitol.
In one of the cases, Clarence Thomas was the only one of nine Supreme Court justices to agree with Donald Trump. The latter wanted to prevent the transfer of presidential archives to the Congressional commission responsible for investigating January 6th. Are messages from his wife among these archives? We ignore it for the moment.
The 29 text messages revealed by the media last week were among the documents submitted by Mark Meadows to the January 6 commission before he ended his collaboration with it.
None of the messages mention the name of Clarence Thomas. But one of them arouses particular interest. Dated November 24, 2020, it is Virginia Thomas’ response to a text message from Mark Meadows assuring her that “evil always seems the victor until the King of Kings triumphs”:
” Thank you ! I needed this! This plus a conversation with my best friend just now… I’ll try to hold on. America is worth it! »
Clarence Thomas might just be that “best friend.” Does he still believe in the same things as his wife, as he said in 2011? If this is the case with regard to the 2020 presidential election, his refusal to recuse himself from causes related to this election could be considered a scandal.