Thomas scrutiny intensifies after latest revelations

Justice Clarence Thomas faces mounting ethical questions after reports of his wife’s aggressive effort to help overturn former President Trump’s electoral defeat have intensified scrutiny over the justice’s refusal to step aside from related cases before the Supreme Court. In the weeks following the 2020 election, Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, the justice’s wife, reportedly exchanged dozens of text messages with then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows that appeared to show her strategizing over how to bypass the will of American voters to install Trump for a second White House term despite his loss to President Biden, an outcome she described as an “obvious fraud” and “the greatest heist of our history.”

The latest development, reported Thursday by The Washington Post and CBS, comes a week after Ginni Thomas revealed in an interview that she had participated in the pro-Trump “Stop the Steal” rally that preceded the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol. During roughly the same post-election time frame, Clarence Thomas declined to recuse himself from numerous pro-Trump legal challenges that contested the 2020 results. And earlier this year, he cast the lone dissenting vote from a Supreme Court ruling that cleared the way for the House committee probing the Jan. 6 insurrection to obtain Trump White House records. “Today's revelations mean that now, beyond any doubt, Justice Thomas must recuse from any Supreme Court cases or petitions related to the Jan. 6 Committee or efforts to overturn the election,” Gabe Roth, executive director of the left-leaning court-reform advocacy group Fix The Court, said after the Thursday report. “Ginni’s direct participation in this odious anti-democracy work, coupled with the new reporting that seems to indicate she may have spoken to Justice Thomas about it, leads to the conclusion that the justice's continued participation in cases related to these efforts would only further tarnish the court’s already fading public reputation,” he said.