Leaked Emails Show Justice Clarence Thomas's Wife Pushing Travel Ban

By Betsy Woodruff, The Daily Beast

16 February 17

In leaked emails, Ginni Thomas asked for advice on how to organize in favor of Trump’s travel ban. But by doing so, she may have inadvertently made it harder for the executive order to survive the Supreme Court.

ustice Clarence Thomas’s wife is organizing in support of President Donald Trump’s agenda. And it might make her husband’s life a little complicated.

In an email sent to a conservative listserv on Feb. 13 and obtained by The Daily Beast, Ginni Thomas asked an interesting question: How could she organize activists to push for Trump’s policies?

“What is the best way to, with minimal costs, set up a daily text capacity for a ground up-grassroots army for pro-Trump daily action items to push back against the left’s resistance efforts who are trying to make America ungovernable?” she wrote.

“I see the left has Daily Action @YourDailyAction and their Facebook likes are up to 61K,” she continued.

She then linked to a Washington Post story about the group.

“But there are some grassroots activists, who seem beyond the Republican party or the conservative movement, who wish to join the fray on social media for Trump and link shields and build momentum,” she wrote. “I met with a house load of them yesterday and we want a daily textable tool to start… Suggestions?”

Neither Ginni nor Clarence Thomas returned requests for comment. The group she referred to, Daily Action, encourages people who oppose Trump’s agenda to make a phone call every day on relevant issues—including the travel ban. Thomas, on the other hand, has characterized former acting Attorney General Sally Yates as part of a “subversive alt-government” trying to undermine the president and make America “ungovernable” in a recent Daily Caller article. Yates drew ire from the right when she refused to have DOJ lawyers defend the president’s travel ban.

And that travel ban could end up before the Supreme Court. Last week, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ruled against Trump’s travel ban. And a federal judge in Virginia on Monday issued a preliminary injunction against the ban, blocking its enforcement in the Commonwealth.

It isn’t clear yet if the Justice Department lawyers defending Trump’s ban will appeal the 9th Circuit ruling to the Supreme Court. But if that happens, then Thomas’s activism could be an issue, according to legal experts.

Heidi Li Feldman, a professor at Georgetown Law School and expert on legal ethics, told The Daily Beast that the email could be grounds for lawyers challenging Trump’s travel ban to ask Justice Thomas to recuse himself from the case—a move that could doom the executive order.

“You can imagine circumstances easily where such conduct on the part of the spouse of a Supreme Court justice would lead to a non-frivolous disqualification motion,” she said.

Feldman added that just being politically active wouldn’t be enough—after all justices’ spouses aren’t barred from engaging in electoral politics, and Thomas’s activism has drawn scrutiny before. The difference here, Feldman said, was Thomas’s apparent support for specific activism on specific issues that could come before the court.

“It’s pretty egregious,” Feldman said. “It’s pretty clear that it’s quite partisan and in context, given the date of the email and that the tool is meant to rebut activity on the left—what has the left been really active on? The executive orders. So minimally, I would say the author of the email is thinking of that executive action.

“It’s so specific, it’s so narrowly tailored,” she said.

“I was taken aback,” she added.

Supreme Court justices don’t have outside oversight on their decisions regarding whether or not to recuse themselves from cases. So if Thomas decides he’s impartial, that’s it.

It wouldn’t be the first time Thomas recused himself from a case involving issues related to his family. In 1996, Thomas recused himself from United States v. Virginia. The case that involved enrollment at the Virginia Military Institute, and his son was attending there at the time. More recently, though, Thomas declined to recuse himself from a Supreme Court case on the Affordable Care Act, which his wife vocally opposed.

And some legal experts who spoke with The Daily Beast said Thomas wouldn’t necessarily have to recuse himself from cases involving the travel ban.

“It’s an important principle: Just because you’re married to somebody doesn’t mean you share all their views,” said Charles Wolfram, a legal ethics expert and emeritus law professor at Cornell.

“As a matter of common sense, it seems to me it’s just silly for her to be emailing in this fashion,” he added.

And Norm Eisen, a Brookings Institution scholar who formerly helped the Obama administration’s ethics initiatives, said that the email sounds related to the travel ban.

“Given the timing of this email, the liberal example that Mrs. Thomas’s email cites, and the nature of the matters that are in the news, one must read this email as effectively asking, ‘What is the best way to set up a daily text capacity for ground-up grassroots army for pro-Trump daily action including to defend the muslim ban executive order cases?’” he said. “It’s reasonable to read the email that way. So there you have her talking about doing meetings and doing activism relating to an issue that is quite likely to be before the court.

“Even if it’s unlikely to trigger a recusal under the standards that the Supreme Court has previously applied, I do think it raises an eyebrow,” he added.

Loving America and Resisting Trump: The New Patriotism

By Frida Berrigan, TomDispatch

16 February 17

While preparing to walk in New York City -- or, as it turned out, given the staggering crowds, to stand in one spot for long periods -- in support of the Women’s March (which would set protest records nationally), I had a specific urge. I wanted to carry the flag. I’m talking about the stars and stripes, the one that “o’er the ramparts” flew.  Although I could indeed have gotten my hands on a flag, I had no idea how to get a pole for it and I certainly wasn’t going to drape it over my shoulders. In its own way, it was a ridiculous idea, given that, at almost 73, I probably would only have lasted a few spare minutes actually carrying a flag on a pole.

Still, the idea meant something to me for a simple enough reason: this country is mine. I’ve always loved it even when -- as in the Vietnam era -- I was so angry with it for what it was doing; even when, as in these last 15 years, I disagreed with just about everything its leaders did in the world.  In the end, I’m rooted here in ways that go right to the heart of things.

My grandfather was an immigrant.  A runaway, he made it to this country in steerage class with only a few cents in his pocket, initially sharing a bed behind a stove with someone who used it when he didn’t.  It was a typical story -- though, sadly, perhaps far less typical if Donald Trump (in the great tradition of American nativism) has anything to do with it.  Though he died when I was quite young, I was deeply proud of him and of what he did and how he got here. My grandmother was the daughter of immigrants. She helped make me who I am. Thanks in part to her, I’ve always felt a deep responsibility for this country -- both for what it is and especially for what it isn’t. This website, TomDispatch, is an expression of that. For the last 15 years, it’s focused regularly on “what it isn’t,” a body of work I consider my late-in-life service to this country.

Here’s the thing with that flag.  It’s a potent symbol, it's mine, and I’ll be damned if I’ll give up the most crucial symbols of my country to Donald Trump.  So I have my version of patriotism that’s bone deep in me, but I must admit that I’m moved by TomDispatch regular Frida Berrigan’s version of it as well.  Her particular embrace of this country makes me want to say to those so much younger than me and in despair: don’t let Donald Trump make you reject what’s basic and best about America.  Do that and, despite yourself, you’ll be aiding and abetting the crimes of the Trump regime (which will be plentiful in the years to come). Tom

-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch

Loving America and Resisting Trump
The New Patriotism

o reality has inexorably, inescapably penetrated my life.  It didn’t take long. Yes, Donald Trump is actually the president of the United States. In that guise, in just his first weeks in office, he’s already declared war on language, on loving, on people who are different from him -- on the kind of world, in short, that I want to live in. He’s promised to erect high walls, keep some people in and others out and lock up those he despises, while threatening to torture and abuse with impunity.

Still, a small personal miracle emerges from this nightmare. It turns out that, despite growing up an anarchist protest kid who automatically read Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States alongside the official textbooks, I love this country more each day.  So I find myself eternally upset about our new political reality-show, about a man so thin-skinned he lashes out at everything and so insulated in his own alt-reality that no response to him seems to matter.

Above all, I am so mad. Yeah, I’m mad at all those people who voted for Trump and even madder at the ones who didn’t vote at all. I’m mad at everyone who thinks the sum total of their contribution to the political well-being of this country is voting every two or four years. I’m mad at our corporate-political system and how easily distracted people are. I’m steaming mad, but mostly at myself.  

Yep, I’m mad at myself and at the Obamas. They made empire look so good! Their grace and intelligence, their obvious love for one another and the way they telegraphed a certain approachability and reasonableness. So attractive! They were fun -- or at least they looked like that on social media. Michelle in the karaoke car with Missy Elliot singing Beyoncé and talking about global girls' education! Barack and a tiny Superman at a White House Halloween party. Michelle, unapologetically fierce after Trump’s demeaning Access Hollywood comments came to light. I loved those Obamas, despite my politics and my analysis. I was supposed to resist all his efforts at world domination through drones and sweeping trade deals and instead I fell a little bit in love, even as I marched and fasted and tried to resist.

Falling in Love With My Country

Now, we have a new president. And my love is gone, along with my admiration, my pride, and my secret wish to attend a state dinner and chat with the Obamas over local wine and grass-fed beef sliders.

What’s not gone, though, what’s strangely stronger than ever, is my love for this country.

I didn’t love the United States under Jimmy Carter or Ronald Reagan or Bush the First. I was a kid and they were names on protest banners and headlines in the news. My parents were the Catholic peace activists Liz McAlister and Phil Berrigan, and I grew up in an anarchist collective of Christian resisters. My parents and their friends went to jail repeatedly and resolutely. We demonstrated, rallied, and railed at every institution of power in Washington. Those presidents made the adults around me angry and agitated, so they scared me.

I didn’t love the United States under Bill Clinton either -- I was young and in college and opposed to everything -- nor under George W. Bush. I was young and in New York City and still opposed to almost everything.

I started calling myself a “New Yorker” three years after moving there when, on a sunny Tuesday morning, airplanes became weapons, tall towers fell, and 3,000 people died. I emerged from my routine subway ride at 14th Street, unaware and unscathed, to stand still with the rest of the city and watch the sky turn black. I spent the rest of that day in Manhattan with friends trying to reach my parents and following the news, as we all tried (and failed) to come to grips with the new reality. Once the bridges reopened, we walked home to Brooklyn that evening, terrified and shell-shocked.

9/11 provided the rationale for sweeping changes in Washington. War by fiat, paid for in emergency supplementals that circumvented Congressional processes; a new Department of Homeland Security (where did that word “homeland” even come from?); a proliferation of increasingly muscular intelligence agencies; and a new brand of “legal” scholarship that justified both torture and indefinite detention, while tucking secret black sites away in foreign countries. All this as the United States went to war against “terrorism” -- against, that is, an idea, a fringe sentiment that, no matter how heavily weaponized, had been marginalized until the United States put it on the map by declaring “war” on it.

The U.S. then invaded and occupied big time, including a country that had nothing to do with the terrorists who had attacked us, and we’ve been at war ever since at a heavy cost -- now inching toward $5 trillion. Conservative estimates of how many people have been killed in the many war zones of what used to be called the Global War on Terror is 1.3 to 2 million. The number of U.S. military personnel who have lost their lives is easier to put a number to: more than 7,000, but that doesn’t count private contractors (aka mercenaries), or those (far more difficult to quantify) who later committed suicide. Now, President Trump has begun adding to this bloody death toll, having ordered his first (disastrous) strike, a Special Operations raid on Yemen, which killed as many as 30 civilians, including children, and resulted in the death of an American Navy SEAL as well.

September 11th was a long time ago. But I finally fell in love with my country in the days following that awful attack. I saw for the first time a certain strain of patriotism that swept me away, a strain that says we are stronger together than alone, stronger than any blow that strikes us, stronger in our differences, stronger in our unities. I’m talking about the kind of patriotism that said: don’t you dare tell us to go to Disney World, Mr. President! (That was, of course, after George W. Bush had assured us that, while he made war, our response as citizens to 9/11 should be to “get down to Disney World in Florida.  Take your families and enjoy life, the way we want it to be enjoyed.”)

Instead of heeding that lame advice, some of us went out and began to try to solve problems and build community. I had read about it in books -- the labor movement of the 1920s and 1930s and the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s -- but I hadn’t seen it myself, hadn’t been a part of it before, and I fell in love.

Of course, the drumbeat for war started instantly in Washington and was echoed throughout the nation, but many of us -- the intended victims of that attack -- said “our grief is not a cry for war.” We circled around the victims’ families; we reminded America that it wasn’t only lawyers and hedge-fund managers who died that day, but cooks and couriers and homeless people and undocumented immigrants, too.

We pulled people from the rubble.  We made the “pile” a place of sacred memory long before a huge monument and gift shop were erected there.  We honored the first responders who died, we stood up for Muslims and Arabs and all those whom ignorance scapegoated.  We marched against war in Afghanistan and then in far vaster numbers against war in Iraq.  We called for an international police response to those acts of terrorism -- that weapon of the weak, not the powerful -- instead of the unilateral, militarized approach adopted by the Bush administration. We celebrated, and saw as a strength, New York’s incredible diversity. We made art and music and poetry. We prayed in all languages to all the names of God.

The Donald, a One-Man 9/11

I guess I’ve been thinking about September 2001 again because, only weeks into his presidency, Donald Trump already seems like a one-man 9/11. He’s ridden roughshod over business as usual without even a geopolitical crisis or calamity as an excuse -- and that’s not so surprising since Trump himself is that calamity.

With a razor-thin mandate, considerable bluster, and a voracious appetite for alt-facts (lies), he’s not so much tipping over the apple cart as declaring war on apples, carts, and anything else beginning with the letter A or C.

It seems almost that random and chaotic. In these weeks, he’s shown a particular appetite for upending convention, saying screw you to just about everyone and everything, while scrapping the rules of decorum and diplomacy. With a sweep of his pen and a toss of his hair, he takes away visas, nullifies months of work by advocates for refugees, and sends U.S. Special Forces off to kill and be killed. With a few twitches of his thumbs he baits Mexico, disses China, and throws shade at federal judges. With a few ill-chosen words about Black History month (comments that would have been better written by my 10 year old), he resurrects Frederick Douglass, disparages inner cities, and slams the “dishonest” media again (and again and again). His almost-month as president can be described as busy and brash, but it barely hides the banality of greed.

Flying Our Flag

Sure, Donald Trump’s a new breed, but perhaps in the end our resistance will make him the aberration he should be, rather than the new normal. So many of his acts are aimed at demeaning, degrading, demonizing, and denigrating, but he’s already failing -- by driving so many of us to a new radical patriotism. I’m not the only one falling in love with this country again and this love looks like resistance -- a resistance that, from the first moments of the Trump era, has seemed to be almost everywhere you looked.

Even at his inauguration, a group of young people stood on chairs wearing matching sweatshirts spelling out R-E-S-I-S-T in big letters. They had positioned themselves in the inner ring of the Capitol and were loud and visible as Chief Justice John Roberts swore the new president into office. The environmental group Greenpeace greeted Trump’s White House with a daring banner drop from a crane across the street -- a huge, bright banner also emblazoned with RESIST. Pink woolen “pussy hats” were popularized by the Women’s March, a global event and possibly the largest demonstration in American history, one that rekindled our hope and strengthened our resolve on inauguration weekend. Now, those hats help us recognize and salute one another.

We’re working hard. We’re tying up the phone lines all over Capitol Hill, turning town halls into rowdy rallies for health care and human rights, shelling out money to support Planned Parenthood, the ACLU, the immigration lawyers fighting for people barred from the U.S. and the closest Black Lives Matter chapter. We’re getting organized, getting trained, getting prepared, and getting connected. And we’re doing it all with a sense of humor: the Bowling Green Massacre Victims Fund? Priceless!

We are, in short, resisting in old ways and new.

Given my background, it’s no surprise that I’m not a flag waver. While growing up, I learned a lot more about what was wrong with my country than about what was right with it. But I’m seeing so much that’s right about it in this new Trump era of engagement or, if you prefer, call it radical patriotism. I’m mad... I’m scared... I’m hopeful... I’m still in love -- more so than ever -- with this country Trump is trying to hijack.

I don’t live in a big city any more. I’m not a scrappy kid in my early thirties either. I’m a mother of three kids and a homeowner. I’ve sunk my roots in a small, struggling, stalwart community along Connecticut’s eastern shoreline and I’m planning to live here for the rest of my life.

New London is a community of 27,000 or so, poor and diverse.  It’s almost a majority-minority community, in fact. We’re home to three refugee families settled from Syria and Sudan. We have a good school system, getting better all the time. Every Wednesday, the chefs at the middle school up the street from my house cook a meal, open the cafeteria, and invite the whole community to eat dinner for five dollars per person. I went with my girls a couple of weeks ago for Cajun shrimp stew and white rice. The room was full and the mood was high. Young professionals and hipsters with kids ate alongside folks who had just stood in line for an hour and a half for a free box of food from the United Way across the street and gotten a free meal coupon as well for their troubles.

New London’s mayor held a press conference soon after in the lobby of City Hall where the heads of all the city departments asserted their support for immigrants and refugees in our community. The last city council meeting was standing room only as people pushed an ordinance to keep fracking waste out of our area.

The weekend after the inauguration, my husband and I raised a flagpole on the second story porch of our house and hung a rainbow peace flag from it. I look up at it every morning waving in the breeze and I’m glad I live here, in this country, in this moment of radical upsurge and a new spirit of patriotism.

I’m talking to my neighbors. I’m going to city council meetings. I’m writing letters to the editor of our local paper. I’m taking my Sudanese neighbors grocery shopping and to the post office. I’m loaded for bear (nonviolently, of course) if anyone tries to mess with them.

My kids are the anti-Trumps. “We went to the women’s march in Hartford, Mommy,” two-year-old Madeline shouts every time she hears the word woman. She knows enough to be proud of that. “Look, Mommy! They have a flag like ours!” says four-year-old Seamus with delight whenever he sees another rainbow, even if it’s just a sticker. He’s learning to recognize our tribe of patriots.

We’re engaged, we’re awake, we’re in love, and no one is taking our country from us.

Frida Berrigan, a TomDispatch regular, writes the Little Insurrections blog for WagingNonviolence.org, is the author of It Runs In The Family: On Being Raised By Radicals and Growing Into Rebellious Motherhood, and lives in New London, Connecticut.

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