Ginny Thomas, the controversial wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, says her actions on behalf of Donald Trump and other conservative reasons do not affect her husband's work. In an interview with the Washington Free Beacon, a conservative website, she says, that while the couple "share many of the same ideals, principles and aspirations for America ... we have our own separate careers, and our own views and There are opinions too."
In interviews published Monday, she said that when she attended a January 6 rally to protest the election of President Biden, she was in the afternoon before Donald Trump took the stage and rioted in the U.S. She had left before entering the Capitol.
"I was disappointed and disappointed that there was violence following a peaceful gathering of Trump supporters on the Ellipse," she told the Free Beacon.
The interview was apparently an attempt to tackle critical articles by Mrs Thomas that have recently been published in The New York Times and The New Yorker describing her broadly conservative political activities. This has led some to suggest that her husband, Justice Thomas, should distance himself from issues in which his wife has played a major role. They range from his activities on behalf of Trump to his speeches condemning the Affordable Care Act.
Critics say Justice Thomas should recuse himself from participating in cases that touch, even campaign, publicly spoken issues by his wife. For example, in January, the Supreme Court rejected Trump's attempt to block congressional subpoenas for White House records relating to the certification of the 2020 presidential election and events related to the January 6 riots. The vote was 8-to-1, with Justice Thomas the lone dissident. In her interview with Free Beacon, Mrs Thomas said that she and her husband do not discuss Supreme Court cases "unless [the Court's] opinion is public – and even then, our discussions have always been very general and public information." limited to."
The Code of Judicial Conduct for Judges of the United States, written by the American Judicial Convention, applies to lower court judges, but does not, at least technically, apply to Supreme Court justices. Although judges usually strive to conform to the Code, compliance is not mandatory, and to date the High Court has resisted establishing its own code of conduct.
There is, however, a federal recidivism statute that applies to the Supreme Court. It requires judges to dissociate themselves from participating in any case that presents a financial conflict involving close family members. In pursuing that statute, Supreme Court justices and their spouses are required to file annual financial disclosure forms.
In 2011 Justice Thomas amended his financial disclosure statements for the years 2003 to 2007. The revised forms disclosed that over a four-year period, the conservative Heritage Foundation had paid $680,000 to his wife. The retrospective revision came after Common Cause reported that his wife's salary had been omitted for those years.
"Not his failure to disclose his income to the court, but his outspoken advocacy, is hurting," says NYU law professor Stephen Gillers, author of a leading textbook on legal ethics. "We've never judged anything like this since 1790. It's in-your-face behavior and she doesn't care." The damage, says Gillers, is to the court itself, and its reputation.