because, he said, Ginni is “volatile” and
becomes “edgy” when challenged. He
added, “The best word to describe her
is ‘tribal.’ You’re either part of her group
or you’re the enemy.”
Ginni Thomas has her own links to
the January 6th insurrection. Her Web
site, which touts her consulting acu-
men, features a glowing testimonial
from Kimberly Fletcher, the president
of a group called Moms for America:
“Ginni’s ability to make connections
and communicate with folks on the
ground as well as on Capitol Hill is
most impressive.” Fletcher spoke at two
protests in Washington on January 5,
2021, promoting the falsehood that the
2020 election was fraudulent. At the
first, which she planned, Fletcher
praised the previous speaker, Repre-
sentative Mary Miller, a freshman Re-
publican from Illinois, saying, “Amen!”
Other people who heard Miller’s speech
called for her resignation: she’d de-
clared, “Hitler was right on one thing—
he said, ‘Whoever has the youth has
the future.’” At the second protest, not
far from the Trump International Hotel,
Fletcher declared that, when her chil-
dren and grandchildren one day asked
her, “Where were you when the Re-
public was on the verge of collapse?,”
she would answer, “I was right here,
fighting to my last breath to save it!”
Vivian Brown, who returned a call
to Moms for America, said that she
would not discuss Fletcher’s testimonial
for Ginni Thomas or clarify whether
Fletcher had been Thomas’s business
client. But the record suggests that the
two have been political associates for
more than a decade. A program from
Liberty XPO and Symposium, a 2010
convention that has been described as
the “largest conservative training event
in history,” indicates that Fletcher and
Thomas co-hosted a Remember the La-
dies Banquet. A list of other speakers at
the symposium includes Stewart Rhodes,
the founder of the Oath Keepers, an ex-
tremist militia group. Rhodes was ar-
rested earlier this month and charged,
along with ten associates, with seditious
conspiracy for allegedly plotting to halt
the congressional certification of Biden’s
electoral win by storming the Capitol.
(Rhodes has pleaded not guilty.)
Another organizer of the January 6th
uprising who has been subpoenaed by
the congressional committee, Ali Alex-
ander, also has long-standing ties to
Ginni Thomas. Like Fletcher, Alexan-
der spoke at a rally in Washington the
night before the riot, leading a chant of
“Victory or death!” A decade ago, Alex-
ander was a participant in Groundswell,
a secretive, invitation-only network that,
among other things, coördinated with
hard-right congressional aides, journal-
ists, and pressure groups to launch at-
tacks against Obama and against less
conservative Republicans. As recently
as 2019, Ginni Thomas described her-
self as the chairman of Groundswell,
which, according to documents first pub-
lished by Mother Jones, sees itself as wag-
ing “a 30 front war seeking to funda-
mentally transform the nation.” As Kar-
oli Kuns, of the media watchdog Crooks
and Liars, has noted, several Ground-
swell members—including Steve Ban-
non and Sebastian Gorka, the fringe
foreign-policy analyst—went on to form
the far-right flank of the Trump Ad-
ministration. (Both Bannon and Gorka
were eventually pushed out.) According
to Ginni Thomas’s biography in the
Council for National Policy’s member-
ship book, she remains active in Ground-
swell. A former participant told methat Thomas chairs weekly meetings.
Norman Eisen, a senior fellow at the
Brookings Institution who, between
2009 and 2011, served as the special coun-
sel and special assistant to the President
for ethics and government reform, told
me that “it is hard to understand how
Justice Thomas can be impartial when
hearing cases related to the upheaval on
January 6th, in light of his wife’s docu-
mented affiliation with January 6th in-
stigators and Stop the Steal organizers.”
He argues that “Justice Thomas should
recuse himself, given his wife’s interests
in the outcome of these cases.”
Gillers, of N.Y.U., and other legal
scholars say that there is little chance of
such a recusal. Justice Thomas has re-
cused himself at least once before, from
a 1996 case involving a military acad-
emy that his son was attending. But, as
Eisen observed, though Ginni Thom-
as’s activism has attracted criticism for
years, Clarence Thomas has never ac-
knowledged it as a conflict of interest.R
ecusals on the Supreme Court are
extremely rare, in part because sub-
stitutes are not permitted, as they are
for judges on lower courts. Yet several
other Justices have stepped aside from“Until I’ve had my coffee, I’m only capable of talking about coffee.”