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Sotomayor aides pressed colleges to buy more copies of her books for events, report says – USA TODAY
- Sotomayor aides pressed colleges to buy more copies of her books for events, report says USA TODAY
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Vaccine expert says anti-vaxxers ‘stalked’ him after Joe Rogan pressed him to debate RFK Jr. – The Hill
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ASEAN, G20 summits: As US, China meet, rest of world is pressed to pick a side
Editor’s Note: A version of this story appeared in CNN’s Meanwhile in China newsletter, a three-times-a-week update exploring what you need to know about the country’s rise and how it impacts the world. Sign up here.
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World leaders are converging in Phnom Penh this weekend for the first in a series of international summits in Southeast Asia over the coming week, where divisions between major powers and conflict threaten to overshadow talks.
The first stop is the Cambodian capital where leaders from across the Indo-Pacific will meet alongside a summit of Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) leaders, followed next week by a meeting of the Group of 20 (G20) leaders in Bali and of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in Bangkok.
The stacked diplomatic line-up will be a test of international appetite for coordination on issues like climate change, global inflation and rising food prices on the back of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and economic recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic – and the first time that all three events are being held in person since the outbreak began in 2020.
Sharp geopolitical divisions of the type not seen in decades loom over this political calendar, as the war in Ukraine has radically transformed Russia’s relationship with the West, the top two global economies US and China remain locked in intensifying competition, and the rest of the world is pressed to pick a side.
Whether Russian leader Vladimir Putin will make any appearance during the stretch of diplomatic dates remains uncertain. Both US President Joe Biden and Chinese leader Xi Jinping are expected to attend two of the summits in Southeast Asia – a region that has long been ground-zero for influence-jockeying between Beijing and Washington.
Xi is re-emerging on the world stage after years without travel during the pandemic, having secured a norm-breaking third term in power, while Biden heads east fresh from a better-than-expected performance by his party in the US midterm elections. Both would be expected to pitch their country as a stronger partner and more responsible global actor than the other.
The two will meet face-to-face on Monday on the sidelines of the G20, their first in-person encounter since Biden’s election, the White House said on Thursday. Beijing on Friday confirmed Xi’s travel plans to the G20 and APEC summits, and said he would hold bilateral meetings with Biden and several other leaders.
Talks between the two could help to avert an escalation of tensions between the powers. But for the leaders meeting during the string of summits in coming days, cinching robust agreements on tackling global issues – already a tough bargain at the best of times – will be a challenge.
Even the most regional of the meetings, the ASEAN summit of Southeast Asian leaders – which kicked off in Phnom Penh on Friday and is slated to address strengthening regional stability as well as global challenges – will reflect fractured world politics, experts say.
But unlike the other major meetings, which may be more squarely focused on the fallout from the war in Ukraine, ASEAN leaders are entering the summit and related meetings this weekend under pressure to address a spiraling conflict within their own bloc: as Myanmar remains in turmoil and under military rule nearly two years after a brutal coup ousted the democratically elected government.
Differences between Southeast Asian countries on how to handle that conflict, compounded by their criss-crossing allegiances with great powers – and a reticence from the bloc to appear to take sides between the US and China – will all impact how much the group can agree on and what it can accomplish across the gamut of summits, experts say.
“Normally this season would be very exciting – you have three major world summits in Southeast Asia – Phnom Penh, Bali and Bangkok,” said Thitinan Pongsudhirak, director of the Institute of Security and International Studies at Chulalongkorn University’s Faculty of Political Science in Bangkok.
“But (ASEAN) is very much divided on Russian aggression, on the Myanmar coup crisis, on China’s belligerence in the South China Sea and so on, and this means that ASEAN is in bad shape,” he said.
At a United Nations vote last month, seven of the 10 ASEAN countries, including the Myanmar representative who is not backed by the ruling military, voted to condemn Russia’s annexation of four regions of Ukraine, while Thailand, Laos, and Vietnam abstained.
But ASEAN as a bloc has also taken a step to tighten ties with Kyiv at this week’s events, signing an amity and cooperation treaty with Ukraine in a ceremony with Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba in Phnom Penh on Thursday.
The bloc aims to use consensus among its states as its strength when it brings larger world players to the table, for example in its adjacent East Asia Summit that brings together 18 Indo-Pacific countries, including Russia, China and the United States, and also meets this weekend.
“If ASEAN cannot get its house in order, if ASEAN cannot rein in a rogue member like the Myanmar military regime, then ASEAN loses its relevance,” Pongsudhirak said. “On the other hand, if ASEAN is united, if it can muster commitment and resolve … it can have a lot of pulling power.”
Nearly two years since the military coup crushed Myanmar’s fledgling democracy, rights groups and observers say freedoms and rights in the country have deteriorated sharply; state executions have returned and the number of documented violent attacks by the ruling military junta on civilian infrastructure, including schools, has surged.
Numerous armed rebel groups have emerged against the ruling military junta, while millions of people have resisted its rule through forms of civil disobedience.
The weekend’s summits in Phnom Penh will pull the conflict back into international focus, as Southeast Asian leaders try to find a path forward, after Myanmar’s ruling junta failed to implement a peace plan negotiated in April of last year. The country remains part of ASEAN, despite calls from rights groups for its ejection, but has been barred from sending political-level representatives to key events.
ASEAN foreign ministers held a last-ditch attempt to hash out a strategy late last month, with Cambodian Foreign Minister Prak Sokhonn, who chaired the meeting, stressing in a statement afterwards that the challenges were down to “the complexity and difficulty of Myanmar’s decades-long protracted conflicts, which has been further exacerbated by the current political crisis.”
But observers have low expectations for a tougher line, at least while Cambodia chairs the bloc, and are already looking to next year when Indonesia assumes leadership in 2023.
Addressing the “ongoing crisis” will be a focus for Biden in talks with Southeast Asian leaders as he attends ASEAN summits over the weekend, the White House said on Tuesday. Since the coup, the Biden administration has launched targeted sanctions against the military regime and held meetings with the opposition National Unity Government.
China, on the other hand, has shown support to the ruling military junta and would be unlikely to back tough action, observers say. A months-long inquiry into the situation in Myanmar released by an international team of lawmakers last month accused Russia and China of “supplying both weapons and legitimacy to an otherwise isolated regime.”
That, too, could have an impact on outcomes this weekend, according to political scientist Chong Ja Ian, an associate professor at the National University of Singapore.
“Because of Russian and (Chinese) support for the junta, any efforts toward a solution by ASEAN would require some form of engagement with them, whether this is to get buy-in or even just non-opposition,” Chong said.
The crisis in Myanmar is not the only area where US and China division may loom over the ASEAN summits, even as issues like China’s aggression in the South China Sea – where Beijing asserts territorial claims that conflict with those of several Southeast Asian countries – may be of lesser importance this year.
ASEAN will hold its usual side summits with both the US and China respectively, as well as other countries, and China’s number two leader, the economy-focused Premier Li Keqiang arrived earlier this week as Xi’s representative.
As Southeast Asian leaders seek to shore up their economic stability, they are likely to raise concerns about the impact of US-China competition on the region, its trade and supply chains, for example in the wake of a US export ban on semi-conductors to China, according to Chong.
“ASEAN states are going to try and find some way to navigate all this, and will be looking to both Beijing and Washington to see what sort of leeway they can provide,” he said.
Ginni Thomas pressed Wisconsin lawmakers to overturn Biden’s 2020 victory
The new emails show that Thomas also messaged two Republican lawmakers in Wisconsin: state Sen. Kathy Bernier, then chair of the Senate elections committee, and state Rep. Gary Tauchen. Bernier and Tauchen received the email at 10:47 a.m. on Nov. 9, virtually the same time the Arizona lawmakers received a verbatim copy of the message from Thomas. The Bernier email was obtained by The Post, and the Tauchen email was obtained by the watchdog group Documented and provided to The Post.
Thomas sent all of the emails via FreeRoots, an online platform that allowed people to send pre-written emails to multiple elected officials.
“Please stand strong in the face of media and political pressure,” read the emails sent Nov. 9, just days after major media organizations called the presidency for Biden. “Please reflect on the awesome authority granted to you by our Constitution. And then please take action to ensure that a clean slate of Electors is chosen for our state.”
Neither Thomas nor her lawyer, Mark Paoletta, responded to requests for comment. A Supreme Court spokeswoman did not respond to a message seeking comment from Clarence Thomas.
Ginni Thomas’s political activism is highly unusual for the spouse of a Supreme Court justice, and for years it has raised questions about potential conflicts of interest for her husband. She has said that the two of them keep their professional lives separate.
But scrutiny of the Thomases intensified this year after The Post and CBS News obtained copies of text messages that Ginni Thomas exchanged with Mark Meadows, then President Donald Trump’s White House chief of staff, in the weeks following the 2020 election. Thomas repeatedly urged Meadows to keep fighting to overturn the election results. After Congress certified Biden’s victory Jan. 6, 2021, she expressed anger at Vice President Mike Pence, who had refused to intervene to keep Trump in office. “We are living through what feels like the end of America,” Thomas wrote to Meadows four days later.
Thomas was also in touch during the post-election period with John Eastman, the pro-Trump lawyer who once clerked for her husband, and whose role in the effort to overturn Biden’s win has drawn scrutiny from both the Justice Department and the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot. In early December 2020, Thomas invited Eastman to speak at a meeting of Frontliners for Liberty, which she described as a group of grass-roots activists, according to an email that Eastman published online.
The agenda for the meeting has not been publicly disclosed. But a federal judge ruling on which records had to be turned over in response to a subpoena from the committee wrote that the agenda shows Eastman discussed “State legislative actions that can reverse the media-called election for Joe Biden.” U.S. District Judge David O. Carter ordered Eastman to give congressional investigators emails related to Thomas and meetings of her Frontliners group, finding that the meetings “furthered a critical objective of the January 6 plan: to have contested states certify alternate slates of electors for President Trump.”
The House committee asked Thomas to sit for a voluntary interview in June. The committee also sought a broad range of documents from her, including any related to plans to overturn the election and all communications with members of Congress and their staff and Justice Department employees, according to a copy of the request published by the conservative Daily Caller.
At the time, Thomas indicated she would comply. “I can’t wait to clear up misconceptions. I look forward to talking to them,” Thomas told the Daily Caller, her former employer.
Less than two weeks later, on June 28, Paoletta told the committee that while Thomas remained willing to sit for an interview, he did not believe there was “sufficient basis” for her to do so.
In a letter obtained by The Post, Paoletta — a longtime close associate of the Thomases — described Ginni Thomas’s text messages to Meadows as “entirely unremarkable” and said they do not suggest she had any role in the attack on the Capitol. He cast her invitation to Eastman as simply an invitation to speak, not an endorsement of his views or “any indication of a working relationship.” He also said she played no role in organizing the email campaign to Arizona lawmakers and did not draft or edit the form letters she sent.
In an interview, Bernier, the Wisconsin lawmaker, said it would have been appropriate for the state legislature to consider decertifying the 2020 results in the weeks following the election if evidence had emerged of significant voter fraud. “But as we went through the process and the legal challenges were made and discounted by the judicial system, there was nothing proven as far as actual voter fraud,” she said.
Bernier said she had not realized that Thomas was among the thousands of people who emailed her after the election, but she said Thomas “has a First Amendment right to speak her mind.”
“I was married for 20 years. I took on some identity of my husband, but I had my own mind,” Bernier said. “Just because you’re married to someone doesn’t mean that you’re a clone.”
Tauchen did not respond to messages seeking comment.
Thomas’s Nov. 9 email was one of thousands sent via the FreeRoots platform that inundated Bernier and Tauchen’s offices in the weeks after the election, records show.
The Wisconsin State Journal reported in January 2021 that of more than 10,000 pages of emails received during that period by Bernier and state Rep. Ron Tusler (R), then the chair of his chamber’s elections committee, the majority were “mass-generated form letters making nonspecific claims about alleged irregularities, a right-wing fraud-finding effort and a clip from Fox’s Sean Hannity show.”
The fact that Thomas sent one of the FreeRoots emails to Bernier has not been previously reported. “Please do your Constitutional duty!” read the subject line of the message she sent.
According to the records disclosed by Bernier’s office to The Post, Thomas was the fourth of more than 30 people who sent that particular form email Nov. 9 and 10. The first sender of that email, three hours before Thomas, was a person named Stephanie Coleman, according to the records.
A woman named Stephanie Miller Coleman is the widow of one of Clarence Thomas’s former clerks. She was listed as the co-administrator, with Thomas, of a private Facebook group for Frontliners. The page listing the group’s administrators is no longer publicly visible.
Coleman did not respond to a message seeking comment.
Ginni Thomas’s communications with key players in the effort to overturn the election have led to calls for her husband to recuse himself from cases related to the 2020 election and attempts to subvert it. Clarence Thomas has given no indication that he intends to do so.
This year, eight Supreme Court justices declined Trump’s request to block congressional investigators from gaining access to White House records that might shed light on the events of Jan. 6, 2021. Thomas was the only justice to dissent, siding with Trump.
Jacqueline Alemany contributed to this report.
White House pressed on Biden’s pledge to go to war with Big Oil, as he now blames them for inflation
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One of President Biden’s top economic advisers was pressed Friday on his campaign pledge to go to war with the American oil industry as he now calls on them to produce more and self-reduce their “exorbitant profits.”
During a brief gaggle, Biden told reporters that if “you just base it on what a barrel of oil costs then actually it should not be this high … they’re making exorbitant profits.”
“They could drill, but they’re not doing it,” he said. “I think we’re going to be in a position where –” he began to conclude before first lady Jill Biden appeared, and he turned away.
Biden economic adviser Jared Bernstein told Fox News on “The Story” Friday that Biden has indeed reached out to oil executives as he seeks cooperation: “He is fighting for the middle class at the pump and that’s exactly what he should.”
ALASKA GOVERNOR SAYS BIDEN SEARCHING FOR OIL ‘ANYWHERE ON THE PLANET EXCEPT AT HOME’
President Biden has blamed Putin and others for inflation and high gas prices.
(Drew Angerer/Getty)
However, the adviser was later pressed on Biden’s past pledges to confront the oil industry, including an exchange with a woman in New Castle, N.H., where he said, “Kiddo, I want you to just take a look at my eyes – I guarantee you we’re going to end fossil fuels and I’m not going to cooperate…”
In a debate, Biden pledged to end subsidies for the industry, drilling on federal lands or offshore areas, adding “…no ability for the oil industry to continue to drill, period.”
On the first day of his administration, he also ended the Keystone XL pipeline, which would have transported oil from Alberta, Canada to Port Arthur, Texas.
BIDEN CALLED OUT OVER WARNING TO BIG OIL AS ENERGY SECRETARY EXERCISES STOCK OPTIONS
A sticker of President Joe Biden is placed on a gas pump at an Exxon Station
(Photo by RJ Sangosti/MediaNews Group/The Denver Post via Getty)
“The policies that have led to that — We have not built a new refinery in this country since 1970. It goes back a long way on the war against this industry – So now the president is saying do more, refine more, get more product to the market,” Fox News host Martha MacCallum said.
Citing a response to the administration from Chevron, MacCallum reported the oil industry wants sensible retraction of recently-imposed regulations on their work so that they can produce more in the United States and bring down costs that way.
Chevron said in a statement the Biden administration had been messaging its intent to place “obstacles” in the way of its mission to provide for global energy needs.
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Bernstein replied Biden rightly wants to negotiate with energy executives, while also keeping his eye on what the administration considers the future of American energy – green power.
“I think when it comes to policy, we’ve got to walk and chew gum at the same time. We have to make sure that these companies have the support they need right now,” Bernstein said. “And frankly, the fact that they’re pumping more than they ever had before and they have so many leases available to them, suggests that they have the ability to pump more.”
He added that people who don’t believe the green energy sector is the right way to ostracize foreign “petro-states” and their “toxic impact on global politics” are not paying proper attention.
Trump pressed, threatened Pence to overturn election, panel hears
WASHINGTON, June 16 (Reuters) – Former President Donald Trump pressured his vice president, Mike Pence, to overturn his 2020 election defeat despite being told repeatedly it was illegal to do so, aides to Pence told the congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol on Thursday.
Members of the Democratic-led House of Representatives select committee said Trump continued his pressure campaign even though he knew a violent mob of his supporters was threatening the Capitol as Pence and lawmakers met to formally certify President Joe Biden’s victory in the November 2020 election.
The nine-member committee has used the first three of at least six public hearings this month to build a case that Trump’s efforts to overturn his defeat amounted to illegal conduct, far beyond normal politics.
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Trump has repeatedly denied wrongdoing, while repeating his false accusations that he lost the election only because of widespread fraud that benefited Democrat Biden. Trump and his supporters – including many Republican members of Congress – dismiss the Jan. 6 panel as a political witchhunt.
The certification vote on Jan. 6 had become a focus for Trump, who saw it as a last-ditch chance to retain the presidency despite his loss at the polls.
Marc Short, who was Pence’s chief of staff, said in videotaped testimony that Pence told Trump “many times” that he did not have the authority to stop the vote certification in Congress as the Republican president sought.
Gregory Jacob, an attorney for Pence, said the main proponent of that theory, attorney John Eastman, admitted in front of the president two days before the attack that his plan to have Pence halt the procedure would violate the law.
Eastman had argued that Pence could reject results from certain states if he thought they were illegitimate, giving Republicans in those states an opportunity to declare Trump the victor despite the actual vote count.
Advisers to Pence told the committee that idea had no basis in law.
“It is breathtaking that these arguments even were conceived, let alone entertained by the president of the United States,” former U.S. Appeals Court Judge J. Michael Luttig, an informal Pence adviser, said.
Trump is widely expected to run for president again in 2024, and committee members and witnesses warned that he would not accept defeat no matter the actual outcome.
Michael Luttig, advisor to former U.S. Vice President Mike Pence and a former U.S. federal judge, testifies during the third of eight planned public hearings of the U.S. House Select Committee to investigate the January 6 Attack on the United States Capitol, on Capitol Hill in Washington, U.S. June 16, 2022. REUTERS/Sarah Silbiger
“Today almost two years after that fateful day in January 2021, that still, Donald Trump and his allies and supporters are a clear and present danger to American democracy,” Luttig said.
The committee showed an email Eastman sent to Trump’s attorney, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, asking for a presidential pardon. Eastman never received one.
‘HANG MIKE PENCE’
The hearing featured several chilling clips of some of the thousands of Trump supporters who descended on the Capitol after a rally in which Trump repeatedly criticized Pence, chanting for Pence to be pulled out of the building or hanged.
Trump tweeted at 2:24 p.m., while the attack was going on, that Pence did not have the “courage” to stop the count.
“It felt like he was pouring gasoline on the fire by tweeting that,” Sarah Matthews, a Trump White House staffer, said in video testimony.
Representative Pete Aguilar said a witness had told the Federal Bureau of Investigation that the Proud Boys, one of the right-wing groups participating in the Capitol attack, said the group would have killed Pence if they been able to get to him.
Committee members said Trump’s comments against Pence incited the crowd.
The committee displayed photos of Pence sheltering in place during the riot. Jacob, who was with Pence during the attack, said he refused to leave and that he did not want to give the demonstrators the satisfaction of forcing him from the building. “The vice president did not want to take any chance that the world would see the vice president of the United States fleeing the U.S. Capitol,” he said.
The attack on the Capitol delayed certification of the election for hours, injured more than 140 police officers and led to several deaths.
Even after police had suppressed the attack and reclaimed the Capitol, Eastman continued to press Pence’s team to overturn the vote.
“I implore you one last time, can the Vice President, please do what we’ve been asking him to do these last two days – suspend the Joint Session, send it back to the States,” Eastman wrote to Jacob at 11:44 p.m. in an email released by the committee.
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Reporting by Patricia Zengerle, Richard Cowan and Doina Chiacu; Additional reporting by Katherine Jackson; Editing by Andy Sullivan and Alistair Bell
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Ginni Thomas pressed 29 Arizona lawmakers to help overturn Trump’s defeat, emails show
New documents show that Thomas indeed used the platform to reach many lawmakers simultaneously. On Nov. 9, she sent identical emails to 20 members of the Arizona House and seven Arizona state senators. That represents more than half of the Republican members of the state legislature at the time.
The message, just days after media organizations called the race for Biden in Arizona and nationwide, urged lawmakers to “stand strong in the face of political and media pressure” and claimed that the responsibility to choose electors was “yours and yours alone.” They had “power to fight back against fraud” and “ensure that a clean slate of Electors is chosen,” the email said.
Among the lawmakers who received the email was then-Rep. Anthony Kern, a Stop the Steal supporter who lost his reelection bid in November 2020 and then joined U.S. Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Tex.) and others as a plaintiff in a lawsuit against Vice President Mike Pence, a last-ditch effort to overturn Biden’s victory. Kern was photographed outside the Capitol during the riot on Jan. 6 but has said he did not enter the building, according to local media reports.
Kern did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday. He is seeking his party’s nomination for a seat in the Arizona state Senate and has been endorsed by former president Donald Trump.
On Dec. 13, the day before members of the electoral college were slated to cast their votes and seal Biden’s victory, Thomas emailed 22 House members and one senator. “Before you choose your state’s Electors … consider what will happen to the nation we all love if you don’t stand up and lead,” the email said. It linked to a video of a man urging swing-state lawmakers to “put things right” and “not give in to cowardice.”
Speaker of the House Russell “Rusty” Bowers and Rep. Shawnna Bolick, the two recipients previously identified, told The Post in May that the outreach from Thomas had no bearing on their decisions about how to handle claims of election fraud.
But the revelation that Ginni Thomas was directly involved in pressing them to override the popular vote — an act that would have been without precedent in the modern era — intensified questions about whether her husband should recuse himself from cases related to the 2020 presidential election and attempts to subvert it. Ginni Thomas’s status as a leading conservative political activist has set her apart from other spouses of Supreme Court justices.
Ginni Thomas did not respond to requests seeking comment for this report. She has long insisted that she and her husband operate in separate professional lanes.
A spokeswoman for the Supreme Court did not respond to questions for Clarence Thomas.
The Post obtained the emails under Arizona’s public records law, which — unlike the laws in some other key 2020 swing states — allows the public to access emails, text messages and other written communications to and from state lawmakers.
In March, The Post and CBS News obtained text messages that Ginni Thomas sent in the weeks after the 2020 election to Mark Meadows, then Trump’s chief of staff. The messages showed Thomas spreading false claims and urging Meadows to keep fighting for Trump to remain in the White House.
“That conflict of interest just screams at you,” said Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.), who serves on the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, on MSNBC in response to The Post’s May report revealing the emails to Bolick and Bowers.
Schiff pointed to Clarence Thomas’s decision not to recuse when Trump went to the Supreme Court to try to block the House committee from getting access to his White House records. The high court declined to block the release of those documents. Thomas, siding with Trump, was the only justice to dissent.
“Here you have the wife of a Supreme Court justice,” Schiff said, trying to “get Arizona to improperly cast aside the votes of millions. And also, to add to it, her husband on the Supreme Court, writing a dissent in a case arguing against providing records to Congress that might have revealed some of these same e-mails.”
After the May article, Mark Paoletta — a longtime ally of the Thomases who, as a member of the George H.W. Bush administration, played a role in the confirmation of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court — confirmed that Ginni Thomas signed the emails, but he sought to minimize her role.
“Ginni signed her name to a pre-written form letter that was signed by thousands of citizens and sent to state legislators across the country,” Paoletta wrote on Twitter on May 20. He described Thomas’s activities as “a private citizen joining a letter writing campaign” and added, sarcastically, “How disturbing, what a threat!”
The letter-writing campaigns were organized on FreeRoots.com, which advertised itself as a platform to amplify grass-roots advocacy across the political spectrum. A Post review of its archived webpages shows that it was heavily used in late 2020 by groups seeking to overturn the presidential election results.
One of those groups was Every Legal Vote, which organized the campaign to send the message that Ginni Thomas sent on Nov. 9. In those first days after the Nov. 3 election, Every Legal Vote described itself online as a “labor of love by American citizens, in partnership” with the nonprofit United in Purpose, according to webpages preserved by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. United in Purpose, which harnesses data to galvanize conservative Christian voters, in recent years hosted luncheons where Thomas presented her Impact Awards to right-wing leaders.
On Dec. 14, 2020, Biden electors in Arizona cast their votes, after the election results were certified by Secretary of State Katie Hobbs (D) and Gov. Doug Ducey (R).
Trump electors met in Arizona that day and signed a document declaring themselves the state’s “duly elected and qualified Electors.” One of them was Kern, the outgoing state representative.
Kern was among more than a dozen lawmakers who signed on to a letter to Congress that same day calling for the state’s electoral votes to go to Trump or “be nullified completely until a full forensic audit can be conducted.”
The lawmakers’ letter was an exhibit in Kern and Gohmert’s lawsuit asking a federal court to rule that Pence had the “exclusive authority and sole discretion” in deciding which electoral votes to count for a given state. The plaintiffs asked the Supreme Court to intervene after the case was dismissed in lower courts. The day after the Jan. 6 insurrection, the court declined in an unsigned order.
Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court justice, pressed Arizona lawmakers to help reverse Trump’s loss, emails show
Just days after media organizations called the race for Biden in Arizona and nationwide, Thomas urged the lawmakers to “stand strong in the face of political and media pressure.” She told the lawmakers the responsibility to choose electors was “yours and yours alone” and said they have “power to fight back against fraud.”
Thomas sent the messages via an online platform designed to make it easy to send pre-written form emails to multiple elected officials, according to a review of the emails obtained under the state’s public records law.
The messages show that Thomas, a staunch supporter of Donald Trump, was more deeply involved in the effort to overturn Biden’s win than has been previously reported. In sending the emails, Thomas played a role in the extraordinary scheme to keep Trump in office by substituting the will of legislatures for the will of voters.
Thomas’s actions also underline concerns about potential conflicts of interest that her husband has already faced — and may face in the future — in deciding cases related to attempts to overturn the 2020 election. Those questions intensified in March, when The Post and CBS News obtained text messages that Thomas sent in late 2020 to Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, pressing him to help reverse the election.
The emails were sent to Russell “Rusty” Bowers, a veteran legislator and speaker of the Arizona House, and Shawnna Bolick, who was first elected to the chamber in 2018 and served on the House elections committee during the 2020 session.
“Article II of the United States Constitution gives you an awesome responsibility: to choose our state’s Electors,” read the Nov. 9 email. “… [P]lease take action to ensure that a clean slate of Electors is chosen.”
Thomas’s name also appears on an email to the two representatives on Dec. 13, the day before members of the electoral college met to cast their votes and seal Biden’s victory. “Before you choose your state’s Electors … consider what will happen to the nation we all love if you don’t stand up and lead,” the email said.
It included a link to a video of a man delivering a message meant for swing-state lawmakers, urging them to “put things right” and “not give in to cowardice.”
“You have only hours to act,” said the speaker, who is not identified in the video.
By December, the claim that legislators should override the popular vote in key states and appoint Trump’s electors was also being pushed publicly by John C. Eastman, a former law clerk to Clarence Thomas, and Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer.
Trump allies argued that pandemic-era changes in election administration and supposedly widespread fraud meant that elections had not been conducted in accordance with state legislatures’ directions, and that under the U.S. Constitution the results therefore could be cast aside. Many legal experts have called those arguments unpersuasive and anti-democratic, and no state legislature complied. Efforts to persuade state lawmakers to name new electors are among the issues under examination by the congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection.
Courts turned back dozens of lawsuits filed by Trump and his allies in an attempt to challenge the 2020 election outcome, and there is no evidence of voting-machine manipulation or other widespread fraud.
Ginni Thomas did not respond to requests for comment.
A spokeswoman for the Supreme Court did not respond to messages seeking comment from Clarence Thomas.
Ginni Thomas has insisted that she and her husband have kept their work separate, but her political activism has set her apart from other Supreme Court spouses. About a decade ago, she and Stephen K. Bannon — who later became chief strategist in the Trump White House — were among the organizers of Groundswell, a group formed to battle liberals and establishment Republicans. Groundswell dedicated itself to “a 30 front war seeking to fundamentally transform the nation,” according to emails uncovered by Mother Jones at the time. “Election integrity” was among the topics discussed in the group’s first months, the emails show.
Thomas’s influence in Washington grew during the Trump presidency as her views moved into the GOP mainstream. Clarence and Ginni Thomas had lunch with Trump at the White House in 2018, then attended a state dinner the following year. Also in 2019, she and fellow right-wing activists attended a White House luncheon, where the New York Times reported that they told Trump his aides were blocking their preferred candidates for administration appointments.
Over those same years, at annual luncheons, Thomas handed out “Impact Awards” to right-wing figures. Recipients have included Meadows, then a congressman chairing the hard-right Freedom Caucus, Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe and Fox News host Sean Hannity.
Thomas is a member of the Council for National Policy, a network of prominent conservative activists, some of whom helped press claims of election fraud. She recently said she attended the pro-Trump rally at the Ellipse in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021.
Thomas sent the emails via freeroots.com, a website meant to give political organizers an efficient means of conducting email campaigns. The email address of the sender in Thomas’s emails is displayed as “Ginni Thomas.”
A representative of FreeRoots did not respond to a message seeking comment.
The Nov. 9 email carried the subject line, “Please do your Constitutional duty!” In addition to pushing the lawmakers to appoint legislators, the email asked for a meeting to discuss pursuing an “audit” of the vote.
Under the U.S. Constitution, states appoint presidential electors “in such manner” as the legislatures direct. Historically, some state legislatures appointed electors directly, but in the modern era states have delegated that responsibility to voters. In urging Arizona lawmakers to “choose” electors after Biden had already prevailed, Thomas’s messages claimed lawmakers could intervene in that process.
The records obtained by The Post do not show any response from Bowers, whose refusal to help overturn Biden’s victory in Arizona made him the target of a recall campaign. When Trump’s legal team pressed to replace Biden electors with Trump electors, Bowers released a public statement explaining that they were asking legislators to do something forbidden by state law.
“As a conservative Republican, I don’t like the results of the presidential election. I voted for President Trump and worked hard to reelect him,” it said. “But I cannot and will not entertain a suggestion that we violate current law to change the outcome of a certified election.”
A spokesman for Bowers told The Post that hundreds of thousands of messages were sent to the speaker’s office in the post-election period. “Speaker Bowers did not see, much less read, the vast majority of those messages, including the form email sent by Mrs. Thomas,” said the spokesman, Andrew Wilder.
Bolick is married to Clint Bolick, an associate justice of the Arizona Supreme Court, who worked with Clarence Thomas early in his career and has said he considers the justice a mentor.
Shawnna Bolick wrote back to Ginni Thomas on Nov. 10, 2020, “I hope you and Clarence are doing great!” She gave Thomas guidance on how to submit complaints about any of her experiences with voter fraud in Arizona.
Bolick, who is now seeking the Republican nomination to be Arizona’s secretary of state, told The Post that she received tens of thousands of emails in the months after the election and responded to Thomas in the same way she responded to everyone else.
Thomas replied: “Fun that this came to you! Just part of our campaign to help states feel America’s eyes!!!”
In the reply, Thomas’s personal email address is visible, and it matches an address she has used previously, The Post confirmed. Under her message is an unusual tag line that has appeared in other emails that are confirmed to have been sent by Thomas, including in 2021 to the staff of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R): “Sent from Ginni’s iPhone, a by-product of entrepreneurial free market capitalism. Competition, hard work, innovations and lack of government interference make great things possible! God bless America!”
Thomas was then serving on the board of CNP Action, the political advocacy arm of the Council for National Policy. CNP Action was using its influence in Republican circles at the time to try to keep Trump in office. On Nov. 13, 2020, CNP Action held a workshop entitled “Election Results and Legal Battles: What Now?” featuring, among other speakers, Cleta Mitchell, according to an agenda obtained and published by the left-leaning watchdog group Center for Media and Democracy. Mitchell, a lawyer, assisted Trump in his efforts to overturn Biden’s victory in Georgia.
After that workshop, the group circulated guidance to focus efforts on legislators in Pennsylvania, Georgia and Arizona. “Demand that they not abandon their Constitutional responsibilities at a time such as this,” read the guidance, which was also first published by the Center for Media and Democracy. It said to push for new electors “in states where constitutional rights have been violated and evidence of substantial fraud has been established.”
The guidance advised visiting the website everylegalvote.com “to report fraud and take action.”
Visitors to the site could click a button and be taken to freeroots.com, according to webpages preserved by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. That landing page urged visitors to press the “take action” button to “email every swing House and Senate leader in one easy click.”
Because that landing page is no longer online, it is no longer possible to click through on the link. But language in Thomas’s first email aligns closely with language that appears in a preview when a FreeRoots link that was archived several days after that email is shared on messaging platforms.
The site everylegalvote.com initially said that it was produced in partnership with United in Purpose, a nonprofit group known for gathering and deploying data to galvanize conservative Christian voters. That organization has hosted the luncheons where Thomas presents her “Impact Awards.”
But the reference to United in Purpose was deleted within days. It was replaced with language identifying three “Founding Sponsors”: the Texas security firm Allied Security Operations Group, the Texas nonprofit group Liberty Center for God and Country and the online talk show “Economic War Room.”
Representatives of United in Purpose and the three sponsors of everylegalvote.com did not respond to messages seeking comment. All three sponsors have promoted election-fraud claims, according to previous Post reports.
In the month after the election, the Trump campaign and other Republicans filed dozens of lawsuits challenging the outcome. By early December, Eastman and Giuliani were telling lawmakers in key swing states won by Biden that they had the authority and even the obligation to disregard the vote and select their own electors.
“Your argument is that essentially we have a failed election that would require the legislature to step in and assign electors. Am I correct?” a Georgia senator asked Eastman during a Dec. 3 hearing.
The Dec. 13 emails repeated the claim that legislators could “choose” electors.
“As state lawmakers, you have the Constitutional power and authority to protect the integrity of our elections — and we need you to exercise that power now!” the email said. “Never before in our nation’s history have our elections been so threatened by fraud and unconstitutional procedures.”
The two-minute video it linked to, titled “A Word To Heroic Legislators,” has since been removed from YouTube for violating community guidelines. The video’s Web address, which is visible in the email, was included in a December 2020 newsletter written by activist Geoffrey Botkin, who appears to be the person featured in the video.
Botkin, who has published numerous podcasts and videos about the election and other matters, wrote in the newsletter that he had uploaded “A Word To Heroic Legislators” to another video hosting service. The video remains visible there.
“I’m asking you to stand up and lead heroically,” Botkin says in the video, urging lawmakers to appoint electors.
“We have to admit, legally and politically it’s way too late for other people to do it. Clever lawyers or the Supreme Court, they cannot now come to the rescue,” he continues. “This is a moment, a unique moment in American history, demanding that state legislators set America back on her foundations by using a power that you may never have known that you had — but you do have it.”
Botkin did not respond to a message seeking comment.
The video link and some of the language in the email match language that appears in an archived version of the landing page for a freeroots.com email campaign organized by Act for America, a group that has accused U.S. Muslim organizations of supporting terrorism and of trying to impose Islamic law across the country.
A representative of Act for America did not respond to requests for comment.
On Dec. 14, 2020, Biden electors in Arizona cast their votes, after the election results were certified by Democratic Secretary of State Katie Hobbs and Republican Gov. Doug Ducey. On that same day, Bolick was among dozens of Arizona lawmakers who signed on to a letter to Congress calling for the state’s electoral votes to go to Trump or “be nullified completely until a full forensic audit can be conducted.”
Bolick told The Post she signed on to that effort because she backed the idea of an audit, not because of any communication she received from Thomas.
Jacqueline Alemany and Alice Crites contributed to this report.
Biden’s Justice Dept. pressed for strong response to Buffalo massacre
“To what degree is the federal apparatus able to and interested in protecting Black people?” Hewitt said in an interview, recounting his conversation from Sunday. “This is, once again, a test.”
Investigators from the FBI, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and the Justice Department’s civil rights division are combing through evidence in Buffalo and online to piece together the scope of the mass shooting and the motivation for it. Payton Gendron, an 18-year-old White man, has pleaded not guilty to state charges of first-degree murder. He is scheduled to appear in court Thursday morning.
Though Justice officials will collaborate with and assist local authorities, federal prosecutors are also conducting a parallel investigation to determine whether to charge Gendron with a hate crime, a prospect that could add significant punishment, including the death penalty, legal experts said.
The federal investigation is expected to take weeks and could move at a more deliberate pace than the local probe, according to former Justice Department officials. Prosecutors must prove not only that Gendron carried out the shooting, but that he was motivated by a racist hatred of Black people — an effort that will be based on hundreds of pages of racist, white-supremacist musings he allegedly wrote and posted on the Internet.
Yet the Biden administration is facing demands to respond quickly and forcefully at a time when U.S. intelligence officials have cited domestic extremism and white nationalism as threats to national security. In remarks at the American Law Institute’s annual meeting Tuesday in Washington, Garland appeared to acknowledge the urgency, emphasizing that his department “is going to be relentlessly — and is relentlessly — investigating this as a hate crime and as a matter of racially motivated violent extremism.”
As he often does, Garland reminded his audience that the Justice Department was founded in 1870, during Reconstruction, with the primary charge to protect Black Americans from the Ku Klux Klan and other white-supremacist groups. “Preventing hate crimes is a moral obligation of every American if we expect to continue to live in a democracy,” he said. “And that is what we intend to do.”
Garland announced the federal investigation within hours of the attack on Saturday at a Tops Friendly Markets store located in a predominantly Black neighborhood in Buffalo. In a statement, he called it a “senseless, horrific shooting.”
Former Justice officials said the department has traditionally let local authorities take the lead in investigating, and ultimately prosecuting, such cases, serving as a backstop to bring federal charges if local prosecutors fail to win a conviction.
But experts said pressure has mounted in recent years — particularly since the mass social justice protests in 2020 — for the federal government to take a leading role that will send a deterrence message and signal to the country that extremism and racial hate are not to be tolerated.
In February, the Justice Department won a hate-crimes conviction against three White men who already had been sentenced to life in prison for killing Ahmaud Arbery, a Black man, in Georgia in 2020. And federal prosecutors also successfully tried three former Minneapolis officers on charges of violating the rights of George Floyd, a Black man who died in police custody in 2020.
“The Department of Justice is moving much more aggressively on these cases,” said former Justice official Jonathan Smith, now the executive director of the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs. “It’s a different moment, and they’re responding to the real demands by communities and the urgency in these hate-driven incidents. It’s not out-of-step with the whole administration’s posture that domestic terrorism is one of the greatest threats to public safety.”
In New York, Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) said Wednesday that “domestic terrorism is the most significant threat we face as a state” and signed an executive order creating new domestic terrorism units for the state counterterrorism division and state police. She also called on lawmakers to pass legislation closing gun law loopholes.
Garland, similarly, created a new Justice Department unit this year that is focused solely on domestic terrorism, an acknowledgment that the issue is taking on greater urgency.
In their phone conversation this weekend, Hewitt said, Garland pledged a whole-of-government response and pointed to the White House’s release last summer of a National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism. President Biden traveled to Buffalo on Tuesday, meeting the families of victims and calling white supremacy “a poison.”
“Their response has been important,” said Maya Wiley, president of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, who has spoken with several senior Justice officials since the shooting. “They are making clear that they understand just how significant, outrageous and devastating this crime is. I believe this is a hate crime, and it’s not their job to bring charges before an investigation is done. But they are treating this for what it represents and the fear and trauma it is inducing across the country, not just in the community in Buffalo.”
Legal experts said federal prosecutors are most likely to pursue charges under Section 249 of Title 18, the U.S. criminal code, which allows for the federal prosecution of crimes motivated by race, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation or disabilities. The maximum sentence in such cases is life in prison.
Benjamin Wagner, who served as U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of California from 2009 to 2016, said Justice also could consider a case under Section 245, which offers broad civil rights protections in federally protected activities — including interstate commerce, which prosecutors could define as shopping at a grocery store filled with goods from outside New York. A conviction under that section would allow prosecutors to seek the death penalty.
Such a scenario could present Garland with a complicated decision. Last year, under pressure from civil rights groups, he announced a moratorium on federal executions while the department undertakes a review of death-penalty policy changes made by the Trump administration. That review is ongoing. The memo does not, however, specify whether the department would seek new death sentences during that time.
The Justice Department has defended existing federal death sentences when they have been challenged in court, including for a gunman who killed nine Black parishioners at a Charleston, S.C., church in 2015 and the surviving Boston Marathon bomber. In both cases, the death sentences were pursued during the Obama administration.
“If I had to guess, I think they would go for the death penalty,” Wagner said, citing the desire by federal authorities to be consistent with prior cases.
The document that authorities said was compiled by Gendron mentions several other convicted or accused mass killers, including Dylann Roof, the avowed white supremacist who said he carried out the Charleston attack in hopes of inciting a race war.
“It would be hard for the department to explain why it would want death charges against Dylann Roof and the Tree of Life synagogue shooter and didn’t bring it in this case,” said Georgetown University law professor Paul Butler, a former federal prosecutor. He was referring to the 2018 shooting massacre of 11 people at a synagogue in Pittsburgh.
“If the evidence is what’s been suggested in the media, we’re very likely to see the department seek death in this case,” Butler said. “It’s almost more of a problem for Garland if he doesn’t seek it.”
Yet Wiley, of the Leadership Conference, said the 230 organizations that make up her coalition remain staunchly opposed to death penalty cases based on concerns that racial minorities are disproportionally targeted.
Ed Chung, a former prosecutor in Justice’s civil rights division, said Section 245 has not been used frequently since the 2009 passage of the Shepard-Byrd Hate Crimes Prevention Act. Pursuing charges under that provision could be difficult, he said.
“I wouldn’t think DOJ would add that charge on simply to have a death penalty-eligible count in the indictment,” said Chung, a vice president for Vera, which advocates for ending mass incarceration.
In Buffalo, some community members have called Gendron’s alleged actions tantamount to a lynching of Black victims, leading to speculation that federal prosecutors could seek to try him under a federal anti-lynching law that Congress approved in March. But legal experts said that law would be applicable only if Gendron had conspired with at least one other person to commit the crimes. So far, no evidence has surfaced publicly to suggest that.
To Hewitt, of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, the most important goal of the federal role in the Buffalo case would be to achieve “moral clarity” in the face of another attack on Black people.
Time and again, he said, such attacks have “forced America to look at itself in the mirror. We’re at that time again.”
Mark Berman, Jacob Bogage and Joanna Slater contributed to this report.