Tangle - The Ginni Thomas texts.

Episode Date: March 29, 2022

The conservative activist and wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas caused a stir last week when her text messages about January 6th became public. Plus, an important update in Ukraine.You can read today's podcast here.You can subscribe to Tangle by clicking here or drop something in our tip jar by clicking here.Our podcast is written by Isaac Saul and produced by Trevor Eichhorn. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75.Our newsletter is edited by Bailey Saul, Sean Brady, Ari Weitzman, and produced in conjunction with Tangle’s social media manager Magdalena Bokowa, who also created our logo.--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/tanglenews/message Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Based on Charles Yu's award-winning book, Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight.

Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. From executive producer Isaac Saul, this is Tangle. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, and welcome to the Tangle Podcast, a place where you get views from across the political spectrum, some independent thinking without all that hysterical nonsense you find everywhere else. I am your host, Isaac Saul, and on today's episode, we are going to be talking about Ginny Thomas, Clarence Thomas, and some of the stuff going on at the Supreme Court right now. It's actually pretty interesting. As always, though, before we jump in, we'll start off with some quick hits.

First up, a federal judge ruled on Monday that former President Trump and John Eastman, a lawyer who advised him on how to overturn the 2020 election, quote, more likely than not, end quote, committed felonies, including obstructing the work of Congress. In a 9-0 ruling, the House's January 6th Select Committee voted to advance contempt charges on Dan Scavino and Peter Navarro, two top Trump aides. The referral now goes to the full House for a vote. Number three, the White House released a $5.8 trillion budget for fiscal year 2023, including a 20% tax on households with a net worth of over $100 million and an increase in military and police spending. Number four, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed a parental bill rights dubbed the Don't Say Gay Bill by critics into law. Number five, a Russian oligarch and Ukrainian peace negotiators suffered suspected poisoning after a meeting with Russian negotiators in Kyiv last month. New questions about the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and her alleged

role in trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election. Virginia Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, texted Mark Meadows, then White House chief of staff, to President Donald Trump 29 times. There were 29 text messages exchanged between Meadows and Ginny Thomas in the weeks and days after the 2020 election. This one that was sent after the January 6th attack. It reads, we are living through what feels like the end of America. Most of us are disgusted with the VP and are in a listening mode to see where to fight with our teams.

Those who attacked the Capitol are not representative of our great teams of patriots for DJT. Amazing times. The end of liberty. The conservative activist and wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas caused a stir last week when her text messages about January 6th became public. The messages were leaked to the press after Mark Meadows, the former chief of staff to President Trump, handed over 9,000 pages of documents to the January 6th committee, including the text. This is part of Congress's investigation into the events at the Capitol that day. In the text Thomas sent to Meadows, she repeatedly urged him to use his power to overturn the vote.

I can't see Americans swallowing the obvious fraud, she said. Just going with one more thing with no freaking consequences. We just caved to people wanting Biden to be anointed. Many of us can't continue the GOP charade. According to the Washington Post, who originally reported on the text, on November 10th, 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's standing for America's constitutional governance at the precipice. The majority knows Biden and the left is attempting the greatest heist of our

history. When Meadows wrote to Thomas on November 24th, the White House chief of staff invoked God to describe the effort to overturn the election. This is a fight of good versus evil, Meadows wrote to her. Evil always looks like the victor until the king of kings triumphs. Do not grow wary and well-doing. The fight continues. I've staked my career on it. Well, at least my time in D.C. on it. At another point, Thomas Message Meadows, quoting a far-right website, that the Biden crime family and ballot fraud co-conspirators, elected officials, bureaucrats, social media censorship mongers, fake-stream media reporters, etc.,

are being arrested and detained for ballot fraud right now and over coming days and will be living in barges off Gitmo to face military tribunals first edition. Thomas also referenced messages she sent to Jared, presumably Jared Kushner, Trump's son-in-law and top advisor. Thomas had attended the January 6th Stop the Steal rally, but says she left before Trump spoke. John Eastman, whose memo describing how Trump could overturn the 2020 election became national news, and he clerked for Clarence Thomas and is said to have communicated with Ginny Thomas in the days following the election. In January of 2022, when the Supreme Court rejected Trump's request to block the transfer of White House records to the January

6th committee, Justice Thomas was the only justice to vote in favor of the request. That same month, Jane Meyer published a piece in the New Yorker alleging that Clarence Thomas had ruled in cases where Ginny Thomas had direct financial entanglements. Previously, Ginny Thomas has tried to create some distance from her husband. Like so many married couples, she said, we share many of the same ideas, principles, and aspirations for America, but we have our own work and separate careers and our own ideas and opinions too. Clarence doesn't discuss his work with me, and I don't involve him in my work. Now, many Democrats are calling for Thomas to recuse himself from any Supreme Court case regarding the January 6th riots at the Capitol, and Representative Ilhan Omar,

the Democrat from Minnesota, has even suggested he should be impeached. Impeachment of a Supreme Court justice has only been attempted once in 1804 and it failed. Only one justice, Abe Fortas, has ever been forced to step down. He resigned in 1969 after alleged financial conflicts. Recusals, however rare, have happened. Justice Antonin Scalia recused himself in a case about the Pledge of Allegiance because he had delivered a speech criticizing the litigants' arguments weeks before it arrived before the court. Justice Thomas recused himself from a 1996 case involving a military academy that his son attended. Justice Stephen Breyer recused himself from a case that had been heard by his brother, Charles, also a judge on a lower court. Justice Brett Kavanaugh recused himself without explanation from a case tied to a family member in 2021. And just last week, nominee Katonji Brown-Jackson said sheugh recused himself without explanation from a case tied to a family member in 2021.

And just last week, nominee Katonji Brown-Jackson said she'd recused herself from a case involving Harvard admissions where she went to college and is on the board of overseers. In a moment, we're going to hear some reactions from the right and the left about this and then my take. All right, first up, we'll start with what the right is saying. The right says the left is inventing a new standard to box Thomas out of the court one liberal justices never follow. They argue that Ginni Thomas is the victim of a smear campaign. Some say that no spouse of any justice has ever been targeted in this way. Mark Paoletta said the legacy media and liberals are demanding a new standard for recusal that has no place in the law or past practice. Many judges are married to people who work in politics and public policy, and they frequently

decide cases on which their spouses have opined, he wrote. The recusal statute requires judges to recuse if their families could financially gain from a decision or if a reasonable observer might question their impartiality. D.C. Circuit Judge Nina Pillard, for example, voted not to rehear a case rejecting President Trump's refusal to produce his tax returns in response to a congressional subpoena. That was exactly what her husband, the ACLU's litigation director, advocated in an article reviewing the lower court decision. Ninth Circuit Judge Stephen Reinhart, a liberal icon, participated in a case even after his wife, the chief of an ACLU chapter, commented on the lower court opinion. Her ACLU chapter even submitted a brief to the district court. Reinhart defended his decision not to recuse, writing his

wife's views are hers, not mine, and I do not in any way condition my opinions on the position she takes regarding any issues. Ethics experts defended Reinhardt's decision, Paoletto pointed out. The Supreme Court has long rejected this, quote, marriage penalty. In light of the growing number of judges' spouses and family members practicing law, the Supreme Court issued a statement of recusal in 1993 signed by seven justices. Applying the recusal statute's criteria, the policy says a justice should not recuse because of a family member who is not involved with the current litigation and who cannot receive compensation from the case's outcome. The Wall Street Journal editorial board said the messages certainly aren't flattering than

Ms. Thomas, who has long been active in her conservative political circles. They show that, distraught by the election results, she indulged in some of the nuttier election fraud theories when the Trump campaign was challenging the results in court, the board wrote. Mrs. Thomas suggests that lawyer Sidney Powell be the lead and the face of the Trump legal team. Ms. Powell is being sued for defamation by a voting machine company for peddling falsehoods. There is no evidence that voting machines were manipulated to change the votes in 2020. Even the Trump team dumped Ms. Powell as it concluded she had no evidence. Mrs. Thomas has admitted to attending the January 6th Stop the Steal rally, but says she left early and there's no evidence to date that she played a role in organizing the rally that became a riot. All of which raises the questions of why these messages have leaked.

There's no reason to make them public now, and maybe never if they are tangential to what happened on January 6th. As a private citizen, Mrs. Thomas can believe all the crank theories she wants, and she has the right to participate in politics even as the spouse of a justice. The leak may have been an act of revenge against Mrs. Thomas for signing a letter from conservative activists in December 2021 that objected to the creation of the January 6th committee and called on the House GOP to expel committee members Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger from their conference. The leak's timing suggests another purpose is to damage

Justice Thomas as the Supreme Court is preparing to hand down major decisions on gun and abortion rights. In American Greatness, Horace Cooper said another leftist smear attempt falls flat. Never before has the spouse of a justice been targeted in this way, Cooper wrote. In fact, in Washington, it used to be verboten to go after the spouse of any Washington figure. In recent years, she has worked with the conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation, as well as helping build Turning Point USA into one of the strongest conservative groups for young Americans in the nation. Now, the left wants to impute her beliefs to her husband and his role as an associate

justice of the Supreme Court and argue that he must recuse himself from any case in which she is even given the slightest opinion. Can you imagine Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg being asked to recuse herself from any tax cases that come before the Supreme Court because her husband was a noted D.C. tax attorney, he asked. Although it is common for the left to take an embellished narrative and run with it, there has been absolutely no evidence to support the claim that Thomas had any involvement with any of the criminal acts charged after January 6th. But articles from the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, and Market Watch have engaged in a coordinated attack against Thomas. This totally unworkable recusal

standard has been trotted out solely because Justice Thomas is the most influential member of the Supreme Court, but it is for his commitment to the Constitution and its precepts that he is now the most widely known and highly regarded member of the Court. All right, so that's it for what the right is saying, which brings us to the left's take. Some on the left argue that it isn't the text messages, but Thomas's activism that is the main concern. Others say the court is responsible for navigating even a perceived threat to impartiality. Many argue that Thomas's ruling in the National Archives case is concerning. James Downey said the texts themselves aren't the issue. The problem lies in a late November message to Meadows

in which Thomas refers to a reassuring conversation with her, quote, best friend. It's hard not to read that as a reference to her husband, who once described their partnership as equally yoked, Downey wrote. Based on Charles Yu's award-winning book, Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. Even Senator Rob Portman, the Republican from Ohio, admitted,

if a case comes before Thomas that's exactly on point, that might be an issue where he would think about recusal. Of course, such a case already has come before the court. In January, Thomas was the lone dissenter when the high court rejected former President Donald Trump's efforts to block the release of administration records related to January 6th. Did Thomas dissent knowing or suspecting that his wife's text messages might be among those records? Second, what, if any, other 2020 election cases did the Thomases discuss, and what was the extent of Ginni Thomas' lobbying of the Trump administration, Downey asked. This isn't the first time ethical boundaries have been questioned when it comes to the Thomases. As the New Yorker's Jane Meyer reported in January, Ginni Thomas received $200,000 in 2017 and 2018

from a group asking the high court to uphold Trump's Muslim travel ban, which Justice Thomas voted to do in June 2018. In 2011, the justice amended his financial declarations after previously failing to disclose $680,000 his wife was paid by the Heritage Foundation several years before. The Washington Post editorial board said she is now a problem for the court. Ms. Thomas flooded Mr. Meadows' phone with bizarre far-right conspiracy theories about ballot watermarks, secret military operations, and the possibility

of locking up Democrats and journalists on barges off Guantanamo Bay, the board wrote. This raises questions about Justice Thomas' refusal to recuse himself from cases involved in January 6th. In one text, Ms. Thomas talked about having a conversation with her, quote, best friend, apparently about the election fight. Did Ms. Thomas influence her husband's thinking? Did Justice Thomas decline to recuse because he did not want to reveal the depth of his wife's involvement? Justice Thomas was the only member of the court who voted against turning over White House communications to the committee. Unfortunately, Ms. Thomas has abused the good faith others have offered her husband, pushing the limits of the ethical gray areas these considerations create, the board said.

Justice Thomas must recuse himself whenever his wife has a financial stake in a case. The New Yorker's Jane Meyer reported that Ms. Thomas took more than $200,000 from right-wing activist Frank Gaffney's Center for Security Policy as Mr. Gaffney asked the court to uphold Mr. Trump's Muslim ban, which Justice Thomas voted to do. Justice Thomas must also recuse himself from the cases that could substantially affect his wife in other ways. That includes litigation regarding the January 6th committee, which is examining Ms. Thomas's communications. In the New York Times, Jesse Wegman said Ginny and Clarence

Thomas have done enough damage. Perhaps Justice Thomas was not aware of his wife's text message campaign to Mr. Meadows at the time, but it sure makes you wonder, doesn't it? And that's precisely the problem. We shouldn't have to wonder. The Supreme Court is the most powerful judicial body in the country, and yet, as Alexander Hamilton reminded us, it is neither the sword nor the purse as a means to enforce its rulings. It depends instead on the American people's acceptance of its legitimacy, which is why the justices must make every possible effort to appear fair, unbiased, and beyond reproach. That may seem naive, particularly in the face of the crippling assaults on the court that Mitch McConnell and his Senate Republicans have carried

out over the past six years in order to secure a right-wing supermajority that often resembles a judicial policy arm of the Republican Party, starting with their theft of a vacancy that was President Barack Obama's to fill and continuing through the last second confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett while millions of voters were already in the process of casting Mr. Trump out of office. And yet, the public's demand for basic fairness and judicial neutrality is not only proper but critical to the court's integrity as the justices who ever nominated them are well aware. Alright, that's it for what the left and right are saying, which brings us to my take.

So today is one of those fateful days where I can say neither side is really articulating my own view here. So a few things out of the gate. For starters, Justice Thomas's dissent in the case where Trump tried to block the National Archives from handing over documents was not unexpected. He has long been a staunch believer in executive privilege, and his ruling fell in line with other rulings he's made. There's no evidence, circumstantial or otherwise, that it was because of anything to do with his wife. It would have been odd if he didn't dissent in that case. Furthermore, Ginny Thomas's texts to Meadows were apparently discovered from the documents Meadows handed over to Congress, not, as far as we know, from documents that may have existed in

the National Archives trove. Second, it's important to understand that there is no replacement for a recused justice on the Supreme Court. Unlike the lower courts, recusal has ground-shifting consequences for SCOTUS, so it isn't a one-to-one comparison. Third, suggesting impeachment here, as Representatives Omar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez now have, is over the top. It's comical, really. It's the kind of thing that makes conservatives view them the same way many liberals view someone like Representative Madison Cawthorn. It makes them appear to be unserious members of Congress with little understanding of precedent. No Supreme Court justice is ever going to get impeached, nor should they, for their spouse's political activism. Finally, I'm not going to spend much time on Ginny here, but suffice it to say her

political views are not just frightening but outlandish. In just the few text messages we have from her, it's clear she has at times subscribed to just about every single discredited conspiracy about election fraud out there, from watermarks to the nonsense Sidney Powell was trafficking. It's a scary thought to me that someone as smart as she is, operating in such an elite Washington, D.C. circle, seems to be so susceptible to these theories in the days after the election, especially given how obviously untrue many of them were in real time. So, with all that out of the way, the defenses from Team Thomas have also bordered on laughable.

Just as ridiculous as it was to believe Hunter and Joe Biden never discussed each other's work, it's equally ridiculous to believe that Clarence and Ginny Thomas don't talk about her activism or what is happening at the court. Of course they do. Their careers are deeply linked, and anyone who believes that they don't talk about this stuff is simply too naive or partisan to look at this honestly. Paoletta is right to point out that many past spousal conflicts have been ignored by the court, even when the conflict was as serious as a spouse's firm literally filing a legal brief. But just because it's happened

before doesn't mean it should continue. As often as these conflicts have been ignored, they've also been navigated. Remember, the court's responsibility is to prevent even the appearance of a conflict of interest, let alone a tangible one, and the aforementioned examples of recusals are proof of plenty of justices having had the good sense to avoid that appearance. Not only that, but plenty of spouses have done the opposite of what Ginny Thomas did. Ruth Bader Ginsburg's husband spent a lot more time teaching after she became a justice. John Roberts' wife retired from practicing law entirely and joined an anti-abortion group instead. Which brings me to my view. On a technical level, it is true that from a rules and precedent perspective, there is no reason Thomas should

recuse himself. But legal experts also disagreed about whether Katonji Brown Jackson needed to recuse herself from the Harvard case, yet she did anyway because it was the right thing to do for appearances sake. My issue is that the rules and precedent are broken. Thomas should recuse himself from any cases related to January 6th because it's the proper thing to do to avoid even the appearance of a conflict of interest, which is the federal standard justices claim they try to follow. He should recuse himself because it would set a precedent for other justices to do the same. He should recuse himself because his wife obviously played a prominent role in the activism that led to the events of January 6th, and because at some point his attachment to

her is likely to cloud his judgment on any case related to that day if it comes before the court again. The fact that the Supreme Court justices have no codified ethics standards with which to navigate these moments is a travesty and a product of the court's own determination that it doesn't need them. Go figure. As Paoletta noted in his defense of the Thomases, the Supreme Court has made the rules about when a recusal should happen in the case of a spousal conflict, limiting it to spouses receiving compensation or being involved in litigation of the case. The obvious counterpoint is why on earth would we let the Supreme Court draft ethics codes for the Supreme Court? Of course justices want to narrowly define when a recusal is required.

That doesn't mean it's what's good for the court or the country. And this isn't a marriage penalty either. We're not asking Ginny Thomas to abandon her career. We're asking Clarence Thomas to recuse himself from a case, which is what we should be doing because the alternative, prohibiting spouses of justices from having prominent political careers, would be worse. So yes, we would be creating a new standard by holding Thomas' feet to the fire, and we should create that new standard. It is, frankly, bonkers that it doesn't exist already. Of course, a justice shouldn't be able to rule

over a case where their spouse or son or daughter or uncle or best friend is involved, especially financially. Of course, it's sheer nonsense that this hasn't always been the case. So why not start now? All right, that is it for my take, which brings us to our story that matters today because this podcast already got kind of long, so we're skipping our reader question. today because this podcast already got kind of long, so we're skipping our reader question. One day after peace negotiations, Moscow says it will drastically reduce military activity near Ukraine's capital of Kyiv to increase mutual trust and create the necessary conditions for further negotiations. Meanwhile, Ukraine proposed security guarantees from Israel, Turkey, and France in exchange for NATO neutrality and a pledge not to host foreign military or their bases. The news of the talks is quickly shifting the dynamic of the war, which some observers

believe Ukraine is winning. Even the expectation that the war may be coming to an end or approaching peace could move markets, oil prices, and create momentum for both sides to come to terms. The Washington Post has the latest and there is a link to it in today's newsletter. to come to terms. The Washington Post has the latest and there is a link to it in today's newsletter. Next up is our numbers section. The number of Americans who quit or changed jobs in February is 4.4 million. The number of job openings in the United States, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, is 11.3 million. The percentage of Americans who said they approve of the Supreme Court in a September 2021 Gallup poll is 40 percent. The percentage who said they disapprove is 53 percent. The decline in the percentage of Americans who have a favorable

view of the Supreme Court over the last three years is 15 percent, according to Pew. The percentage of Americans who say justices should not bring their own political views into rulings is 84%. All right, last but not least, our have a nice day story. This one's kind of silly, but I just really liked it. In Marquette, Michigan, city officials have decided to close a portion of a road every night to protect migrating salamanders. The city put barricades up in place after a former Northern Michigan student noticed vehicles were killing hundreds of migrating salamanders who were traveling from the interior of a local park to their breeding grounds

and crossing a road to get there. A special projects coordinator said, "'Protecting the blue-spotted salamanders migration "'is vital as they are an indicator species "'informing us about the health of our environment. The Mining Journal has the story about this blockage in the road and the town coming together to protect the salamanders. There's a link to it in today's newsletter. All right, everybody, that is it for our podcast. Before you go, please go check out that episode description and be sure to click around. There's

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edited by Bailey Saul, Sean Brady, Ari Weitzman, and produced in conjunction with Tangle's social media manager, Magdalena Bokova, who also helped create our logo. The podcast is edited by Trevor Eichhorn, and music for the podcast was produced by Diet75. For more from Tangleangle subscribe to our newsletter or check out our content archives at www.readtangle.com. We'll see you next time. becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+.