The U.S. Supreme Court’s Jan. 19, 2022, order in Trump v. Thompson was as brief as it was significant. By a vote of 8-1, with Justice Clarence Thomas as the lone dissenter, the court refused a request by former President Donald Trump to block congressional investigators from gaining access to messages that Trump claimed were still covered by executive privilege. Those messages, between and among Trump administration officials during their final days in office, shed needed light on the origins of the Trump-fueled U.S. Capitol riot and insurrection, which had taken place one year earlier in Washington, D.C.
Significant but not surprising. The current president, the duly-elected Joe Biden, had waived any executive privilege claims over the Trump team’s material in the hope he could save time for members of a House Select Committee as they go about investigating the riot and insurrection. At that point, Trump’s legal case was so weak that even the most conservative justices in a century couldn’t come up with a good-faith argument to make it a winner. Everyone, that is, except for Justice Thomas, whose wife, Virginia, is an ardent supporter both of the former president and baseless conspiracy theories about the 2020 election.
Thomas dissented, though he didn’t say why. We know, however, thanks to an extraordinary story that broke Thursday, that Virginia Thomas was relentlessly texting Trump White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows from November 2020 until the date of the Capitol riot, urging Meadows and others to pursue baseless election-fraud charges and other stunts to try to overturn the results of Biden’s presidential victory. At one point, Virginia Thomas appeared to reference her husband, the sitting Supreme Court justice, making both of them potential fact witnesses in a case and a cause that may end up back before the justices before too long.
There have been plenty of scandalous Supreme Court rulings in its long history, but there has never…