Donald Sherman of the government watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) wrote a new opinion article for HuffPost in which he argued for the firing of Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, from her role on a board overseeing a trust fund associated with the Library of Congress.
Ginni was selected for that spot by Donald Trump when he was still president. Elsewhere, though, she was part of the push to undo the results of the last presidential election and secure another term for Trump, despite the well-documented integrity of Joe Biden’s win. She participated in letter-writing campaigns targeting state legislators, and she was texting with the White House chief of staff about ambitions of stopping Biden from taking office. Ginni’s access to that top official obviously wasn’t ordinary for just anybody hoping to promote that cause.
“The Trust Fund Board oversees gifts to the Library and determines investment policy for the fund valued at more than $200 million,” Sherman wrote. “Ginni Thomas’s efforts to undermine democracy makes her unfit for any government role, especially one with a role overseeing “the nation’s oldest federal cultural institution” and research arm of Congress… [More] of Trump’s ethically challenged [rogues] gallery should be removed to protect our democracy.” Sherman also spotlighted Joseph Cuffari, who is serving as inspector general, which is an oversight role, for the Department of Homeland Security and Louis DeJoy, who, although not directly appointed by Trump, took over the leadership of the U.S. Postal Service while Trump was in office and generally aligned himself outside of those official duties with Trump’s politics.
DeJoy has faced criticism for delays in the rates of mail delivery, including as the country turned en masse to mail-in voting for 2020, although there apparently wasn’t any evidence mail problems upended the election. Cuffari, meanwhile, has faced complaints for the delay before key leaders in Congress obtained information about issues with collecting evidence, in the form of text messages, from the Secret Service covering a period around the riot at the Capitol back in 2021.
Meanwhile, concern about Ginni and Clarence has mounted. There were protests near a residence of theirs around the time the U.S. Supreme Court voted to overturn Roe v. Wade and the legal protections that case, in its outcome, provided for abortion. Despite Ginni’s personal interest in certain proceedings around the 2020 election and attempts to challenge it concluding a certain way, Clarence hasn’t recused himself, instead remaining involved in the cases. Talk about reforms for the Supreme Court has varied from a code of ethics to expanding the number of Justices.
Image: Gage Skidmore/ Creative Commons
