After a cryptically sudden admission into a D.C.-area hospital last week, arch-conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was discharged Friday — days after the deadline of his initially predicted 48-hour stay — into a full-blown political scandal and calls for his resignation from the bench.
A court spokesperson said Thomas had been experiencing “flu-like symptoms” — not COVID — and had been treated for an infection. But furor over his role as a Supreme Court justice exploded during his hospital stay, following the publication of newly obtained text messages from Thomas’s wife Ginni to former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows last year. In the messages, Ginni Thomas emphatically urges Meadows — often with deeply QAnon-immersed terminology — to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. In one message, initially obtained by ABC News and The Washington Post, Ginni Thomas claimed that:
Biden crime family & ballot fraud co-conspirators (elected officials, bureaucrats, social media censorship mongers, fake stream media reporters, etc) are being arrested & detained for ballot fraud right now & over coming days, & will be living in barges off GITMO to face military tribunals for sedition.
In another, she implored Meadows to “Help This Great President stand firm, Mark!!!”
“You are the leader, with him, who is standing for America’s constitutional governance at the precipice,” she continued. “The majority knows Biden and the Left is attempting the greatest Heist of our History.”
In part, these messages are just the latest in a long history of conspiracy-addled outbursts from Ginni Thomas, who has made little secret of her penchant for forcing her wildly inappropriate, offensive, and reality-adverse opinions into any number of sensitive issues. Still, the revelation that Thomas was actively whipping up support for former President Donald Trump’s seditious hopes while her husband was in a position to be ruling on that very subject is a chilling one — at the very least. What’s more, Justice Thomas was the sole Supreme Court vote against releasing a tranche of presidential documents — which we now know contained his wife’s communications therein — to the congressional committee investigating Trump’s Jan. 6 attempted coup, lending an distinct conspiratorial air to the question of whether the justice was deliberately using his position to protect his spouse. The more alarming consideration would be whether he was working with his wife to help Trump’s broader efforts to begin with.
The question of Thomas’s knowledge of — and potential involvement in — his wife’s seditious texting spree has prompted a number of Democrats to demand he either face impeachment, or voluntarily recuse himself from associated cases.
Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal also floated the possibility of whether Thomas would “voluntarily” appear before the Jan. 6 committee to clarify what, if any, role he had in his wife’s activities:
To date, Thomas has not publicly addressed his wife’s text messages. It seems unlikely, however, that Thomas would opt to voluntarily do anything that might put himself, his wife, and his position on the court in jeopardy. What’s more, if Democrats were serious about taking him to task for this obviously grotesque breach, they would be demanding a wholesale impeachment process, and not that he deign to agree to voluntarily do a minimal recusal on certain cases.
For now, then, it seems as if both Thomases will continue to do what they’ve always done: Work together, separately, in the service of a shared ultra-conservative agenda.
