with. and that is the possibility that justice thomas completely ignores all of this and follows mitch mcconnell s advice from the senate floor yesterday, and refuses to recuse from anything. no matter how many ginni thomas s emails and texts come out in the eventual case of thank you lawrence. i don t think it s i think it s certain, nearly certain, that justice thomas will not recuse himself from any case involving the january six committee, or the election. to recuse now, i think he will see it as an admission that he shouldn t have sat in the earlier cases. so he s going to stay, and he knows he s appointed for life and he knows that no one on the supreme court can get him to back down. so he s the final arbiter of
confirmation. disappear. our first guest tonight, jane mayer has reported extensively in the new yorker about the disappearance of ethical standards in clarence thomas work as a supreme court justice thanks to repeated and now extreme conflicts of interest presented by justice thomas s wife. jane mayer most extensive reporting on the conflict is that virginia thomas presents to her husband, is ginni thomas a threat to the supreme court? the article was not written this week, after bob woodward and robert costa s revelations about ginni thomas s text messages to the last trump chief of staff, mark meadows, urging the illegal overturning of a residential election. the article was written to four months ago. it was written before we knew
you about this. you raise the question very dramatically in your reporting two months ago before we knew the existence of these text messages. what do these text messages at the story? lawrence, first of all, thank you for having me on. it is great to be with you. i think what we have seen in a granular way is just how fringe the ideology is of ginni thomas and how she uses her husband to enter with people high up in the trump administration, could basically berate the chief of staff in this case over and over. these messages are relentless. saying that he has to act, that he has to overturn biden s victory. you see her in action in this. you see much more closely how
going to be that seems a bit farfetched. also, you can see in these text that she talks about, she mentions to meadows and one of them that she is just talk to which she describes as her best friend. which seems very much like coded language for clarence thomas. because they describe each other as each other s best friends. so, it seems possible that he would understand that she s deeply involved in this. and it s not just from the texts. you could see that there are fights where clarence thomas has a lister with his former court clerks and this issue of what to do about the election came up, ginni thomas was apparently vocal about it and created a ruckus on that. her she has said that she was there. and she s gone to facebook and sort of cheered on the protests. there are million red flags
the client was frank daphne, clarence thomas was sitting on that particular case, ginni thomas was earning over $20,000 from francophonie. none of this was disclosed at the time. these are really serious conflicts. and if you talk to the most revered experts and judicial experts, they are shocked right now. the problem is, as you said, there s no mechanism really for requiring a justice to recuse other than potentially an impeachment which is a far out possibility. but the damage that gets done by this sort of thing undermines the credibility of the court and respect for the court. it s exactly the kind of thing that chief justice roberts has said that he s wrong worried about. and clarence thomas has said himself that he worries the justices may be seen as just political. well, what could be more