The New Yorker - USA (2022-01-31)

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THENEWYORKER,JANUARY31, 2022 23


profit that does opposition research.
Project Veritas’s chief legal officer sent
The New Yorker a statement saying that
O’Keefe’s “schedule does not permit
such extracurricular activities” as Crowd-
sourcers. But, in a PowerPoint presen-
tation on the effort, in 2019, Thomas
said that “James O’Keefe wanted to head
up” a part of the group aimed at “pro-
tecting our heroes.” The purpose of
Crowdsourcers, she said, was nothing
less than saving America. “Our house
is on fire!” she went on. “And we are
stomping ants in the driveway. We’re
not really focussed on the arsonists who
are right around us!”
Last year, Project Veritas asked the
Supreme Court to hear its challenge to
the Massachusetts ban on surreptitiously
taping public officials. The Court turned
down Project Veritas’s petition, as it does
with most such requests. Nevertheless,
David Dinielli, a visiting clinical lec-
turer at Yale Law School, told me that
Ginni Thomas’s proclaimed political
partnership with O’Keefe, and her
awarding of a prize to him, appeared to
be unethical. “That’s what the code of
conduct is supposed to control,” he said.

G


inni Thomas has held so many
leadership or advisory positions at
conservative pressure groups that it’s
hard to keep track of them. And many,
if not all, of these groups have been in-
volved in cases that have come before
her husband. Her Web site lists the Na-
tional Association of Scholars—the
group that has filed an amicus brief in
the lawsuit against Harvard—among
her “endorsed charities.” The group’s
brief claims that the affirmative-action
policies used by the Harvard admissions
department are discriminatory. Though
the plaintiffs have already lost in two
lower courts, they are counting on the
Supreme Court’s new conservative su-
per-majority to side with them, even
though doing so would reverse decades
of precedent. Peter Wood, the president
of the N.A.S., is another Impact Award
recipient. So, too, is Robert George, a
legal scholar at Princeton who, accord-
ing to the N.A.S.’s Web site, serves with
Ginni Thomas on its advisory board.
(He says that he has “not been active”
on the board.) He received a “Lifetime”
Impact Award from Ginni Thomas in
2019, and recently filed an amicus brief

before the Supreme Court, in support
of Mississippi’s ban on nearly all abor-
tions after fifteen weeks of pregnancy.
In April, 2020, when Ginni Thomas
was serving as one of eight members on
the C.N.P. Action board, it was chaired
by Kelly Shackelford, the president and
C.E.O. of First Liberty, a faith-based
litigation group that is currently involved
in several major cases before the Court.
Last week, to the surprise of many ob-
servers, the Court agreed to hear a case
in which First Liberty is defending a
football coach at a public high school
in Washington State who was fired for
kneeling and praying on the fifty-yard
line immediately after games. Richard
Katskee, the legal director of Americans
United for Separation of Church and
State, who is defending the school board,
told me that the case was “huge,” and
could overturn fifty years of settled law.
Shackelford’s group is also the co-initi-
ator of another case before the Court:
a challenge to a Maine law prohibiting
the state from using public funds to pay
parochial-school tuition for students liv-
ing in areas far from public schools. In
addition to these cases, First Liberty has
filed lawsuits that challenge COVID-19
restrictions on religious grounds—an
issue that has come before the Court—
and Ginni Thomas and Shackelford
have served together on the steering
committee of the Save Our Country
Coalition, which has called COVID-19
health mandates “unconstitutional power
grabs.” In a phone interview, Shackel-
ford told me that he couldn’t see why
Ginni Thomas’s work with him posed
a conflict of interest for Justice Thomas.
“It’s no big deal, if you look at the law
on this,” he said. It would be different,
he argued, if there were a financial in-
terest involved, or if she were arguing
First Liberty’s cases before the Court
herself—but, he said, “almost everyone
in America is connected through six de-
grees of separation.”
Another of Ginni Thomas’s fellow-
directors on the C.N.P. Action board in
2020 was J. Kenneth Blackwell, a for-
mer Ohio secretary of state who is tied
to one of the most consequential gun
cases currently under consideration by
the Supreme Court. In 2020, he was on
the National Rifle Association’s board
of directors, and at the time the gun
group’s official affiliate in New York was

challenging the state’s restrictions on
carrying firearms in public spaces. Ear-
lier this term, the Court heard a related
challenge, and a decision is expected
later this year. (Blackwell didn’t respond
to an interview request.) Meanwhile,
the Web site friendsofnra.org currently
boasts that a winner of its youth com-
petition had the opportunity to meet
with “the wife of current Supreme Court
Justice Clarence Thomas.”

F


or lawyers involved in cases before
the Supreme Court, it can be deeply
disturbing to know that Ginni Thomas
is an additional opponent. In 2019, David
Dinielli, the visiting lecturer at Yale
Law School, was a deputy legal direc-
tor of the Southern Poverty Law Cen-
ter, which had submitted an amicus
brief in a gay-rights case before the
Court. He told me he was acutely aware
that Ginni Thomas and other mem-
bers of the Council for National Pol-
icy loathed the Southern Poverty Law
Center, which tracks right-wing hate
groups. In 2017, C.N.P. Action directed
its members to “commit to issuing one
new post on Facebook and Twitter each
week about the Southern Poverty Law
Center to discredit them.” In Thom-
as’s leaked 2018 speech to the Council
for National Policy, she denounced the
S.P.L.C. for calling the Family Research
Council—which is militantly opposed
to L.G.B.T.Q. rights—a hate group.
For Dinielli, the idea that a Justice’s
spouse belonged to a group that had
urged its members to repeatedly attack
his organization was “counter to every-
thing you’d expect if you want to get a
fair shake” before the Court. He ex-
plained, “These activities aren’t just po-
litical. They’re aimed at raising up or
denigrating actors specifically in front
of the Supreme Court. She’s one step
away from holding up a sign in front
of her husband saying ‘This person is
a pedophile.’”
Dinielli went on, “The Justices sit lit-
erally above where the lawyers are. For
these people to do the job they were
tasked with, they have to maintain that
level. But this degrades it, mocks it, and
threatens it.” He warned, “Since the
Court doesn’t have an army, it relies on
how it behaves to command respect.
Once the veneer cracks, it’s very hard to
get it back.” 
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