HomeCrime3 reasons Clarence Thomas may vote for Trump's immunity

3 reasons Clarence Thomas may vote for Trump’s immunity

Clarence Thomas.

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas (via YouTube/Library of Congress).

Now that the U.S. Supreme Court has put Donald Trump’s bid for immunity from prosecution over the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol on its calendar, calls for Justice Clarence Thomas to recuse himself from the case have intensified.

But the reasons that underlie the frenzy to remove Thomas from the case are more complex than a simple assumption that the conservative justice would, as he has in past disputes, vote in favor of Trump.

Here is a closer look at some reasons Thomas might be particularly inclined to find that the former president should be immune from criminal prosecution.

1. The Ginni effect

Ginni Thomas, the justice’s conservative activist wife, is not just aligned with Trump’s rhetoric: She has close ties to Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

From reports that she called Joe Biden’s victory the “greatest Heist in our History,” to her support of Sidney Powell as “the face” of efforts to overturn the election results, to her admission that she attended the “Stop the Steal” rally for Trump, Ginni Thomas has raised her voice in fervent support of Trump as winner of the 2020 election.

Though she has denied having any role in the planning of Jan. 6 events as well as the widely-circulated rumors that she paid for buses to transport others, she admitted to sending messages to then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows about efforts to overturn the election results.

In one of the texts Ginni Thomas later regretted sending, she urged Meadows to “Release the Kraken and save us from the left taking America down.”

Ginni Thomas also raised questions about the Trump legal team’s choice to distance itself from Powell’s costly false claims about Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic.

Under American Bar Association rules, judges must disqualify in any proceeding in which they have “a personal bias or prejudice” about facts in dispute, or when the judge’s spouse has “more than a de minimis interest that could be substantially affected by the proceeding,” or has an economic interest in the outcome of the proceeding.

Certainly, whether Ginni Thomas’s relationship to the events of Jan. 6 and any corresponding immunity for Trump is close enough as to require her husband’s recusal would require thorough analysis. However, “more than a de minimis interest” is a very, very low standard. Given public outcry over Ginni Thomas’s close ties to the insurrection, it is indisputable that a ruling in Trump’s favor would raise serious questions about the justice’s bias or impropriety.

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