Fani Willis’ Investigation Could Topple Not Only Trump But Clarence Thomas, Too

Two days ago we had yet another January 6 Committee bombshell. They’re coming so fast and furious these days that I sometimes feel like I’m on the planet Metaluna at the very end when it’s about to blow up. Where the action was last week, was directed not just at the Trump/Eastman emails, but Clarence Thomas’ role began to emerge out of the shadows. I am seriously wondering if his role, as requested by Eastman, to “cast legitimate doubt” on the Georgia election and enter a judicial stay, might not be part of what comes out of the wash in the Fani Willis investigation in Fulton County?

This is the best synopsis of the events of the eight incriminating Eastman emails from last week, from Heather Cox Richardson’s newsletter.

Yesterday morning, Kyle Cheney, Josh Gerstein, and Nicholas Wu of Politico reported more about the eight emails lawyer John Eastman, who wrote the memo outlining a plan by which then–vice president Mike Pence could steal the 2020 election for Donald Trump, tried to hide from the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol. The emails included discussions between Eastman, fellow Trump lawyer Kenneth Chesebro, and others about how to stop Congress from counting the certified 2020 electoral ballots on January 6, 2021.

In the emails, Chesebro urged arranging to get a case before Justice Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court so he could issue a stay that would cast doubt on the legitimacy of the election in Georgia. They should “frame things so that Thomas could be the one to issue some sort of stay or other circuit justice opinion saying Georgia is in legitimate doubt.” Thomas oversees the circuit court that includes Georgia, and he would “end up being key” to getting Biden’s victory overturned.

Eastman responded: “I think I agree with this.” Such a move by Thomas could “kick the Georgia legislature into gear.”

“Kick the Georgia legislature into gear?” And what might that mean, exactly? Strong arm and muscle them into accepting a fake slate of electors? Stop for a moment and consider this. It’s bad enough for Donald Trump to conceive a scheme like this, but he’s Donald Trump. This is how he thinks, like a mobster. And for a renegade band of faux conservative autocrats to take up on this illegal plan is not all that surprising either. But for a sitting justice of the Supreme Court to even consider involving himself in such a thing?

And it’s not unreasonable to believe that he considered it. We have cronyism par excellence taking place here, with Eastman approaching his old boss and mentor with this scheme. The more details we can find out, in a perfect world, about the Eastman/Thomas connection with Georgia the more we might really know about what went on in the last days of the attempt to steal the election. Fani Willis’ investigation might well be the turning point in this entire saga.

As a young lawyer, Eastman clerked for Thomas, and Dan Froomkin of PressWatchers noted that Eastman and others were in this same period of time writing to Thomas’s wife, Ginni, who was urging state legislators to overturn the election by submitting fake slates of electors.

Froomkin pointed to a New York Times article from June 15, 2022, which explained that on December 24, 2020, five days after Trump had announced a “protest” at the Ellipse to be held on January 6, Eastman wrote to Chesebro that Eastman had heard there was a “heated fight” among the Supreme Court justices about whether they should take up the election issue. Chesebro replied that the “odds of action before Jan. 6 will become more favorable if the justices start to fear that there will be ‘wild’ chaos on Jan. 6 unless they rule by then, either way.”

Time out again. The “odds of action” by the Supreme Court, “will become more favorable” if they start to fear that the MAGAs will go insane and burn down Washington, D.C. unless the justices decide to give them what they want and get involved? Now, granted, that’s a bit inflammatory, but “wild chaos” means what? What we saw on January 6 and worse?

So we seem to have a deliberate attempt to throw a court case to Justice Clarence Thomas, whose wife was urging the overthrow of the election, and to pressure the Supreme Court to act by creating chaos in the streets, all in order to keep former president Trump in the White House.

Read that sentence again. Or even a third time and let its full import sink in.  Yes, we did have what looks to be a “deliberate attempt” to get one justice, Clarence Thomas, to get involved in this court case. His job was to “cast doubt on the legitimacy of the Georgia election.” This is sheer cronyism, the old law clerk coming up with the plan and going to the Justice to execute it.

Alongside the cronyism was the fact of Trump’s desperation. He went nuts when he lost Georgia. He approached Raffensberger and other people, begging them to “find” him votes, as you well recall. Georgia was ground zero in this plan to topple the government and Clarence Thomas was a “key” figure, as he has been labeled since this past Thursday, in that plan.

It would be interesting if Fani Willis could prove that Clarence Thomas knew all about this corrupt scheme and did nothing. And he had to. There is no way Ginni Thomas was knee deep in all this and Clarence knew nothing. That is simply not a reasonable assumption to make.

It would also be interesting to see if Fani Willis can shed more light on how Trump just kept going with the Big Lie long after it was shown to him that it was all a lie.

“The emails show that President Trump knew that the specific numbers of voter fraud were wrong but continued to tout those numbers, both in court and to the public,” US District Judge David Carter wrote in his Oct. 19 opinion.

Carter specifically cited claims by Trump’s legal team in Dec. 4, 2021 court filing that election workers in Fulton County, where Atlanta is located, had improperly counted more than 10,000 votes cast by dead people, felons and unregistered voters.

Later that month, Eastman warned in a message that Trump had been made aware that “some of the allegations (and evidence proffered by the experts)” in that Georgia filing “has been inaccurate.”

Yet even after the message from Eastman, Trump and his team filed another legal complaint that had “the same inaccurate numbers,” the judge wrote. Trump under oath verified the complaint was true to the best of his knowledge.

The Willis investigation may be the thing to connect all the dots here. Clarence Thomas and Georgia are both key to Trump’s plan to stay in power. And so is Ginni Thomas, who acted as a liaison between various states and the White House in the last days leading up to January 6, pushing the slate of alternate electors scheme.

Back to the pressure on the Supreme Court to act under the threat of “chaos in the streets.” In plain English, the Supreme Court of the United States was being extorted to do something against its best judgement, (if indeed they engaged in a “heated fight”) or be held responsible for violence in Washington, which MAGA did deliver in some measure. People did die. Many are incarcerated. Many more will be as the cases go through the court system.

And the takeaway here is that Clarence Thomas still sits on the highest court in the land and so far Chief Justice John Roberts has been silent about all this. And by the by, have you heard one word of the testimony that Ginni Thomas provided to the January 6 Committee? This squib from NPR is as close as I’ve gotten and all it says was Thomas “thought there was fraud” and Bennie Thompson said, “she didn’t offer any proof.”

That’s swell. What about the fact that Ginni Thomas was part of a conspiracy to overthrow the results of the election?  Again, crickets.

This case of Clarence and Ginni Thomas is the linchpin to unraveling what went on with Trump, Eastman, and the whole enchilada. I wonder if the January 6 Committee is biding its time or if it’s simply futile to even attempt to hold people this highly placed in government accountable.

Or, what may happen next and what I am hoping is going to happen, is that Fani Willis’ investigation is going to shine a light into all these dark corners and let us see what went on. Not only will Donald Trump be possibly facing a criminal indictment when she is through, it is possible that Clarence Thomas might be looking at some kind of an early retirement. Wouldn’t that be something?