Damning Audio Exposes Ginni Thomas’s Real Thoughts on Supreme Court

A right-wing religious rights group is fighting Supreme Court reform, and Ginni Thomas, the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas, is secretly one of its top supporters.

The First Liberty Institute has a budget of $25 million per year and calls itself “the largest legal organization in the nation dedicated exclusively to defending religious liberty for all Americans.”

On July 31, the head of the institute, litigator Kelly Shackleford, held a private call with his organization’s top donors and read out an appreciative email from Thomas, according to ProPublica, which obtained a recording.

“YOU GUYS HAVE FILLED THE SAILS OF MANY JUDGES. CAN I JUST TELL YOU, THANK YOU SO, SO, SO MUCH,” Thomas’s email read in all caps, Shackleford said. Shackleford added that Thomas also recently met with a First Liberty Institute staffer.

“Great to meet through the meetings today,” Thomas wrote, according to Shackleford. “I cannot adequately express enough appreciation for you guys pulling into reacting to the Biden effort on the Supreme Court.”

“Many were so depressed at the lack of response by R’s and conservatives” to recent court-reform proposals, Thomas’s email reportedly continued.

Shackleford told the donors that he saw the email as proof that judges who “can’t go out into the political sphere and fight” appreciated the organization’s efforts.

“It’s neat that, you know, those of you on the call are a part of protecting the future of our court, and they really appreciate it,” Shackleford said.

Later, Shackleford attacked liberal Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan, who supports enforcing ethics reforms on the court, as “treasonous” and “disloyal” and said that an ethics code would “destroy the independence of the judiciary.”

The conference call came days after President Biden announced his support for Supreme Court reforms, including term limits for the court’s justices and a binding code of conduct. Shackleford attacked these and other proposals in the call, calling them “a dangerous attempt to really destroy the court, the Supreme Court” led by “people in the progressive, extreme left” who were “upset by just a few cases.”

Shackleford and Thomas seem to ignore the fact that her husband’s ethical lapses spurred the calls for judicial reform, particularly the many gifts the justice received from conservative megadonor Harlan Crow that he failed to disclose, including luxury vacations and the renovation of the home where Thomas’s mother lives. 

Ginni Thomas, for her part, is a longtime conservative activist who played a suspicious role in the January 6 Capitol riot and efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election in favor of Donald Trump. This latest revelation seems to indicate that she and her husband have no remorse for their ethically questionable behavior.

Senator Lindsey Graham desperately wants Donald Trump to stop hurling lame insults at Kamala Harris. 

In a New York Times op-ed published Tuesday, the South Carolina Republican urged the former president to see the error of his shallow ad hominem attacks.

“Every day that the candidates trade insults is a good day for her because it’s one less day that she has to defend the failures of the Biden-Harris administration,” Graham wrote. “Far more worthwhile for Mr. Trump is his record of success. The road to the White House runs through a vigorous policy debate, not an exchange of barbs.” 

He then laid out the arguments he would use in a debate, comparing Trump’s policies favorably to Harris’s. 

Graham spent a significant portion of his word count bashing Harris, using a pared-down version of the Trump campaign’s talking points, for instance blaming her administration’s federal spending for booming inflation, although it’s not entirely clear that those two things are connected. 

Graham called immigration the “cornerstone of her portfolio” and criticized Harris for her too-little-too-late support for an aggressive bipartisan border bill—ignoring the fact that Trump had ordered congressional Republicans to kill the measure.

Graham also criticized Harris for doubling back on hydrofracking, and being the “last person in the room” with President Joe Biden before he put the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan into action. 

Trump also has been attacking Harris for these issues, but it’s been buried in the torrent of other meaningless comments about bacon and windmills, false claims that Harris had been the leader of the “defund the police” movement, and gratuitous self-praise for being a “great speaker.” And all of that was just in one day. 

While Trump’s avid fans may enjoy his ridiculous comments, Graham seemed not so impressed. 

To be sure, he also spent inches praising Trump, painting him as the strongman on the international stage, though recent descriptions show he was more like a kid whose lunch got taken for nothing. But laced into Graham’s argument was a strong criticism that Trump needs to get serious if he actually wants to win a debate—not just triumph by default.  

Will Trump take any of this to heart? Outlook not so good. Earlier this month, Graham remarked that Trump “the provocateur, the showman, may not win this election.” Trump responded with a harsh dismissal of his longtime ally, saying, “Look, I like Lindsey. I don’t care what he says, OK?”

Perhaps Lindsey is hopeful that while Trump doesn’t listen to him, maybe he does read the Times? Not likely? Yeah, I didn’t think so either. 

“Average Joe” J.D. Vance has “no doubt” that he and Donald Trump are going to be elected in November—even as polls show that Vice President Kamala Harris’s “politics of joy” are overtaking them on the national stage.

Speaking with Fox News’s Laura Ingraham on Tuesday, the Republican vice presidential pick—who might be best known for his uncanny ability to turn scripted, funny bits into uncomfortable moments that sit and stay with people—brushed off his dismal favorability ratings.

“How do you go to the undecideds at this point, this shrinking pool of people, and convince them that not only are you serious—and you’re seriously smart, but you’re a regular person, I’ve known you for a long time—you’re really fun, you’re really funny, versus the giggle and vibe show that seems to work for a lot of women voters out there?” prompted Ingraham, comparing the Trump-Vance strategy to the Harris-Walz ticket.

“You know, Laura, my approach to this is just to get out there and meet as many people as possible, and I know this is Donald Trump’s approach too,” Vance said. “That’s what I’m going to keep on doing, Laura. I don’t put much stock in the polls, even the polls that show us ahead, and there are a lot of those these days.”

Except, polls seem to consistently show that Harris has either pulled even with Trump or edged ahead.

And actually going out and meeting the American people hasn’t gone so well for Vance. Last week, the Ohio senator had a disastrous P.R. stunt at a donut shop in Valdosta, Georgia, where he couldn’t accomplish one normal human interaction with any of the bakery’s employees. On Thursday, Vance was intermittently booed by a large crowd at the International Association of Fire Fighters conference.

“What I put stock in is the wisdom of the American people, and the fact that if we go out there, make our case, don’t hide behind a teleprompter but get out there and meet people, the American people are going to elect me and Donald Trump,” Vance continued. “I have no doubt about that.”

The son of the late Republican Senator John McCain has criticized Donald Trump for his campaign event at Arlington National Cemetery, and announced he plans to vote for Kamala Harris in November.

1st Lt. Jimmy McCain, a 17-year military veteran, told CNN that he changed his voter registration weeks ago from independent to Democrat, and called Trump’s cemetery visit a “violation.”

“It just blows me away,” McCain said. “These men and women that are laying in the ground there have no choice” whether they wanted to be in Trump’s campaign video or photographs.

“I just think that for anyone who’s done a lot of time in their uniform, they just understand that inherently—that it’s not about you there. It’s about these people who gave the ultimate sacrifice in the name of their country,” McCain added.

McCain also told CNN that he “would get involved in any way I could” to help Harris’s campaign, making him the first McCain family member to leave the Republican Party, even as his mother, Cindy, and sister Meghan have criticized Trump. (In response to her brother’s interview, Meghan McCain said she isn’t voting for Harris or Trump.)

The Republican presidential nominee and convicted felon infamously said that John McCain was “not a war hero” because he was captured during the Vietnam War, and he remained at odds with the Arizona senator until McCain’s death in 2018.

The younger McCain told CNN that Trump’s seeming disrespect for veterans stems from the former president’s lack of military service.

“Many of these men and women, who served their country, chose to do something greater than themselves. They woke up one morning, they signed on the dotted line, they put their right hand up, and they chose to serve their country,” McCain said. “And that’s an experience that Donald Trump has not had. And I think that might be something that he thinks about a lot.”

Harris has secured endorsements from several Republicans opposed to Trump, including elected officials in Arizona, as well as 200 former staffers who worked for President George W. Bush, the late Senator McCain, and Utah Senator Mitt Romney. Meanwhile, Trump’s high-profile endorsements from outside of his party seem limited to people like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and former Representative Tulsi Gabbard.

Last month’s tiff between Donald Trump and Joe Rogan over the podcaster’s mock endorsement of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was, apparently, no biggie.

In an interview with Lex Fridman released Tuesday, Trump attempted to brush off the “bit of tension.”

“I don’t think there was any tension,” Trump said. “I’ve always liked him, but I don’t know him. I only see him when I walk into the arena with Dana and I shake his hand. I see him there and I think he’s good at what he does, but I don’t know about doing his podcast. I guess I’d do it but I haven’t been asked and I’m not asking them. I’m not asking anybody.”

Still, Trump insisted that he “likes” Rogan, even if he’s “sort of liberal.” His endorsement of Kennedy—whom Trump described as a “different kind of guy”—supposedly didn’t bother him.

That’s a starkly different tone from the one the Republican presidential nominee took in the immediate aftermath of Rogan’s Uno-reverse endorsement of Kennedy, in which he posted to Truth Social that he was looking forward to Rogan getting “booed” at a UFC tournament.

Attacking Rogan, one of the most popular podcasters in the country with independents and people on the right, was an eyebrow-raising decision for the waning candidate. Trump has rushed to pander to younger audiences in recent weeks in an effort to recoup the younger vote, hitting a youth podcast circuit that included speaking with comedian Theo Von and livestreamer Adin Ross.