Channel the donations

Virginia Thomas the conflict of interest:

A little-known conservative activist group led by Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, collected nearly $600,000 in anonymous donations to wage a cultural battle against the left over three years, a Washington Post investigation found.

The previously unreported donations to the fledgling group Crowdsourcers for Culture and Liberty were channeled through a right-wing think tank in Washington that agreed to serve as a funding conduit from 2019 until the start of last year, according to documents and interviews. The arrangement, known as a “fiscal sponsorship,” effectively shielded from public view details about Crowdsourcers’ activities and spending, information it would have had to disclose publicly if it operated as a separate nonprofit organization, experts said.

So that means she deliberately concealed the conflict of interest. How…interesting.

The funding is the first example of anonymous donors backing her activism since she founded a conservative charity more than a decade ago. She stepped away from that charity amid concerns that it created potential conflicts for her husband on hot-button issues before the court.

And proceeded to subterfuge in order to go on with her “activism” but in secret this time.

In reality I think it’s not altogether fair that a spouse married to a senator or justice or similar can’t operate independently, but at the same time I think the issue is real so we’re stuck with the unfairness.

Of course Virginia Thomas is also a trumpy lunatic, so there’s that.

In 2020, she privately pressed White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows to pursue efforts to overturn the presidential election, and she sent emails urging swing-state lawmakers to set aside Joe Biden’s popular-vote victory in awarding electoral votes.

That is she tried to help overthrow the government. That goes quite a bit beyond spousal conflict of interest.

Ginni Thomas has long maintained that she and her husband keep their careers separate. “I can guarantee that my husband has never spoken to me about pending cases in the court. It’s an ironclad rule in our house,” she told congressional investigators last year who were examining the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. “Additionally, he’s uninterested in politics, and I generally don’t discuss with him my day-to-day work in politics.”

Which totally works as long as you define politics as “that which does not interest Clarence Thomas.”

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