This extraordinary profile of Clarence and Ginni Thomasโhe a Supreme Court justice, she among other things an avid supporter of the January 6 insurrectionโis a masterclass in everything from mustering archival material to writing the hell out of a story:
There is a certain rapport that cannot be manufactured. โThey go on morning runs,โ reports a 1991 piece in the Washingtonย Post.ย โThey take after-dinner walks. Neighbors say you can see them in the evening talking, walking up the hill. Hand in hand.โ Thirty years later, Virginia Thomas, pining for the overthrow of the federal government in texts to the presidentโs chief of staff, refers, heartwarmingly, to Clarence Thomas as โmy best friend.โ (โThatโs what I call him, and he is my best friend,โ she later told theย House Select Committee to Investigateย theย January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol.) In the cramped corridors of a roving RV, they summer together. They take, together, lavish trips funded by an activist billionaire and fail, together, to report the gift. Bonnie and Clyde were performing intimacy; every line crossed was its own profession of love. Refusing to recuse oneself and then objecting, alone among nine justices, to the revelation of potentially incriminating documents regarding a coup in which a spouse is implicated is many things, and one of those things isย romantic.
โEvery year it gets better,โ Ginni told a gathering of Turning Point USAโoriented youths in 2016. โHe put me on a pedestal in a way I didnโt know was possible.โ Clarence had recently gifted her a Pandora charm bracelet. โIt has like everything I love,โ she said, โall these love things and knots and ropes and things about our faith and things about our home and things about the country. But my favorite is thereโs a little pixie, like Iโm kind of a pixie to him, kind of a troublemaker.โ
A pixie. A troublemaker. It is impossible, once you fully imagine this bracelet bestowed upon the former Virginia Lamp on the 28th anniversary of her marriage to Clarence Thomas, this pixie-and-presumably-American-flag-bedecked trinket, to see it as anything but crucial to understanding the current chaotic state of the American project. Here is a piece of jewelry in which symbols for love and battle are literally intertwined. Here is a story about the way legitimate racial grievance and determined white ignorance can reinforce one another, tending toward an extremism capable, in this case, of discrediting an entire branch of government. No one can unlock the mysteries of the human heart, but the external record is clear: Clarence and Ginni Thomas have, for decades, sustained the happiest marriage in the American Republic, gleeful in the face of condemnation, thrilling to the revelry of wanton corruption, untroubled by the burdens of biological children or adherence to legal statute. Here is how they do it.
A couple of weeks ago, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy handed over 41,000 hours of surveillance footage from the right-wing domestic terrorist assault on the U.S. Capitol to Tucker Carlson, who managed to find a few minutes of relatively calm moments to produce a ludicrous "look, no insurrection" report that ignored the fact that 140 officers were assaulted that day. โ Read the rest
In the final six months of the Trump presidency, the federal government executed 13 people. In January 2021, the same month he incited an insurrection at the Capitol, Trump oversaw three executions in just four days. Thereโs really no other way to put it: Trump was eager for the state to kill people on his watch. Two Rolling Stone reporters detail the unprecedented stretch of executions:
It was Sessionsโ successor, Barr, who took the concrete step in July 2019 of ordering the Federal Bureau of Prisons to resume executions.ย
Barr wrote proudly of the decision in his bookย One Damn Thing After Another: Memoirs of an Attorney General, published about a year after the Trump presidency ended, devoting a whole chapter โ โBringing Justice to Violent Predatorsโ โ to the blitz of federal executions. Not a shocking move from a man who, while George H.W. Bushโs attorney general in the early 1990s, praised the death penalty in a series of official recommendations, claiming that it works as a deterrent, โpermanently incapacitate[s] extremely violent offenders,โ and โserves the important societal goal of just retribution.โ (Without a hint of irony, he added, โIt reaffirms societyโs moral outrage at the wanton destruction of innocent human life.โ)
Trump, of course, was not so keen to engage with the subject intellectually.ย The sum total of his discussions of the death penalty with his top law-enforcement officer, Barr says, was a single, offhand conversation. After an unrelated White House meeting, Barr was preparing to leave the Oval Office when, he says, he gave Trump a โheads-upโ that โwe would be resuming the death penalty.โ Trump โ apparently unaware of his own AGโs longstanding philosophy on capital punishment โ asked Barr if he personally supported the death penalty and why.
Trumpโs lack of interest in the details had grave repercussions for the people whose fates were in his hands. According to multiple sources inside the administration, Trump completely disregarded the advice of the Office of the Pardon Attorney, an administrative body designed to administer impartial pleas for clemency in death-penalty cases and other, lower-level offenses. And Barr says he does not recall discussing any of the 13 inmates who were eventually killed with the president who sent them to the death chamber.ย
That means Trump never talked with Barr about Lisa Montgomery, a deeply mentally ill and traumatized person who became theย first woman executed by the federal government since 1953. Or Wesley Ira Purkey, whose execution was delayed a day by a judge who ruled that his advancing Alzheimerโs disease had left Purkey unaware of why he was being executed. (The Supreme Court reversed that ruling the next day.) Or Daniel Lewis Lee, Dustin Lee Honken, Lezmond Charles Mitchell, Keith Dwayne Nelson, William Emmett LeCroy Jr., Christopher Andre Vialva, Orlando Cordia Hall, Alfred Bourgeois, Corey Johnson, and Dustin John Higgs.
And it means Trump never spoke with Barr about Brandon Bernard.