Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS), chair of the House committee investigating January 6, is under scrutiny for going after Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, another example of his years-long effort to discredit the Court’s most conservative member.
While Thompson is attempting to frame his attack as being about Ginni, sources in D.C. cannot but note that the man leading the charge has evinced decades of hostility toward Thomas, even calling Justice Thomas an “Uncle Tom” in the past.
Specifically, some speculated that the “House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol” — led by Thompson — is focusing on Ginni as a conduit to achieve a larger purpose: to force Thomas to recuse himself from nearly every major issue before the Court.
Ginni is a conservative grassroots activist, having founded the Tea Party-affiliated political advocacy nonprofit Liberty Central in 2009, as well as being a vocal supporter of President Donald Trump.
What has particularly sparked the committee’s interest, however, was — long before the riots started — supporting attendees of Trump’s January 6 Save America rally at the Ellipse outside the White House.
Like many conservative Republicans, Ginni seemed to have unanswered questions about the 2020 election and showed up for what was intended to be a peaceful protest. As Breitbart News reported, “Ginni’s opponents tried to tie her earlier comments to the riot, despite her public statements opposing the violence.”
Ginni maintains she “played no role” in planning the January 6 rally but said she attended to support Trump and left well before chaos descended on the Capitol Building.
Another focus of the committee are text messages from Ginni to former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows regarding challenging 2020 election results.
Citizens United’s documentary Rigged shows how Mark Zuckerberg’s Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) was able to spend “money on a Democrat-focused get-out-the-vote effort all under the guise of pandemic ‘election safety.’” Much of that was not widely known in January 2021.
Another reason the left targets Ginni is she has highlighted connections between the Democrat party — including people such as Hillary Clinton and Vice President Kamala Harris — and George Soros, as well as Biden family corruption.
In essence, the argument from the left is that Ginni’s work with activist organizations that take positions on certain issues requires Thomas’s recusal from cases regarding those issues, such as abortion or election integrity. Further, any income she receives ought to be viewed as marital income, and is, therefore, inextricably linked the Justice’s jurisprudence.
But Ginni’s work is far less controversial than the left would have Americans believe.
As former Attorney General Ed Meese and Ken Blackwell point out, “What does Ginni do? She brings leaders and groups together to collaborate and share information and explore ways to synchronize messaging for greater impact.”
“Her focus is on coalition-building, and working in the public affairs space to maximize impact of messaging for clients and causes she believes in,” they state, continuing:
The situation might be different if Ginni were engaged in litigation, such as arguing before a court or having her name appear on legal briefs, but she does not touch the courtroom arena. No matter how strongly she feels about a matter, she steps back if it moves toward litigation, even before it reaches the Supreme Court.
Attacks on Ginni do not appear to be about her at all. Instead, the left argues her political activism — which does not directly involve legal issues, despite her being a lawyer — requires Justice Thomas’s recusal from many issues before the Court. In other words, some conservatives argue that Ginni is being used to advance a decades-long crusade against Clarence Thomas.
After all, once Ginni’s text messages were revealed, congressional Democrats overtly called for the recusal and even removal of Thomas from the Supreme Court.
“Judges are obligated to recuse themselves when their participation in a case would create even the appearance of a conflict of interest. A person with an ounce of commonsense could see that the bar is met here,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) said, adding that “[Clarence] Thomas’s conduct on the Supreme Court looks increasingly corrupt.”
Justice Thomas, aside from being likely the most popular Justice among conservatives, is also well-known for having one of the most contentious confirmation processes in American history, led by then-Senate Judiciary Committee chair Joe Biden (D-DE).
Supporters of the justice insist that the left’s hatred of Justice Thomas has always had a racial undertone, stemming from an animosity toward black conservatives. Conservatives say that liberals believe, in the words of Biden himself, if a black person does not toe the party line, they “ain’t black” — or, in other words, black conservatives are inconvenient to the narrative of the radical left and must, therefore, be destroyed.
Thompson, who is himself black, has made statements similar to Biden’s in what many conservatives say is the Democrat establishment’s inability to accept the existence of black conservatives. He also has a history of attacking Thomas along racial lines with language that many consider beyond the pale.
Rep. Bennie Thompson (Screenshot)
In 2014, Thompson was speaking on a New Nation of Islam radio station when he called Justice Thomas an “Uncle Tom” — a racist trope, derived from the Harriet Beecher Stowe novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, used by the left to describe black conservatives as zealously subservient and overeager to win the approval of white people.
“It’s almost to the point saying this man doesn’t like black people, he doesn’t like being black,” Thompson continued.
After facing criticism, Thompson doubled-down on his attack, saying that “for some,” it is a racially charged term, “but to others, it’s the truth.” He was allowed to use the racist trope because, he said, “I’m black.”
Breitbart News reached out to fellow January 6 Committee member Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY), asking if she believes Thompson’s comments about Thomas are relevant to the committee’s attacks on Ginni as well as if she would condemn the use of the racist trope.
Cheney’s office did not respond.
During his tirade on the New Nation of Islam show, Thompson also asserted how any criticism of then-President Barack Obama was racist.
“When a black man comes with an idea [for Obamacare] there’s something wrong with it,” he said. “Again, it’s race creeping into the picture.”
Responding to criticism of government expansion, he explained the answer must be that “now all of a sudden, government is the worst thing in the world since a black man became president.”
“Thompson, Biden, and the broader left have reserved the utmost hostility for Clarence since his nomination to the Supreme Court and have sought his downfall by any means necessary,” Blackwell told Breitbart News exclusively.
“While there remains zero evidence of impropriety from Clarence, Ginni’s activities have become the new line of attack in a decades-long witch hunt to destroy one of the most consequential conservatives in the country, who just happens to be black.”
“This is the Cancel Culture taken to a level that threatens our institutions of government,” as Meese and Blackwell put it. “What began years ago as the politics of personal destruction has metastasized into attempts to delegitimize a distinguished and senior member of the best-functioning branch of the federal government by smearing his wife for making a private-sector career out of her principles and patriotism, and doing it in a manner that avoids an appearance of impropriety by not engaging in her husband’s realm of responsibility.”
Breccan F. Thies is a reporter for Breitbart News. You can follow him on Twitter @BreccanFThies.