As founder and president of a think tank and advocacy group called Liberty Central, Virginia 'Ginni' Thomas has quickly established herself in the tea party movement. Thomas's wife takes on Obama

When Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s wife announced in 2008 that she was going to help run Washington operations for a Michigan college once described as “a citadel of American conservatism,” she said the move was her “way of pulling away from politics” and the “safest place for me to be when it comes to conflicts” with her husband’s position on the court.

But, less than two years later, Virginia “Ginni” Thomas has returned to partisan politics as a fully engaged opponent of President Barack Obama, whom she has described as “hard left” and steering the nation “for tyranny.” As founder and president of a think tank and advocacy group called Liberty Central, she quickly established herself in the tea party movement by drawing on her longstanding ties to Washington’s conservative establishment and by landing two big donations — one for $500,000 and another for $50,000 —that put her group on the map.


The two donations are the only sources of money the group, which she established in November, reported to the Internal Revenue Service in 2009, according to a recently released report, which blocks out the donors’ names, as allowed by the section of the tax code under which the group is registered, 501(c)4. Yet, its size sets Liberty Central apart from other new tea party groups that have struggled to raise money from mostly small, grass-roots contributions.

In interviews with popular conservative media outlets, Thomas described her still-evolving vision for Liberty Central, which she recently said she envisions forming a bridge between the conservative establishment and the anti-establishment tea party.

“I’m getting to know the Tea Party groups and the new citizen activists,” Thomas told Human Events late last month. “What I think I can bring to the table is a connective (t)issue between the new people and the old people.”

The group appears to be positioning itself as a hybrid think tank/advocacy group/campaign arm for the tea party movement. Last month, it endorsed its first candidate, Mike Lee, who defeated incumbent Sen. Bob Bennett of Utah in a Republican primary, and it intends to roll out a larger round of endorsements this month, according to Sarah Field, its policy director and general counsel.

In the meantime, it’s been providing legislative analysis intended to help tea party activists lobby Congress against initiatives pushed by the Obama administration.

Neither a Liberty Central official, nor a Supreme Court spokeswoman would say whether the group would disclose the names of its donors to the Supreme Court legal office or to Thomas’s husband so he can avoid ruling on cases in which a major Liberty Central donor is a party.

“Liberty Central has been run past the Supreme Court ethics office and they found that the organization meets all ethics standards,” Field said. “As she has throughout her 30-year history in the policy community, Ginni will address any potential conflicts on a case-by-case basis.”

As Ginni Thomas has begun to emerge as a high-profile political player in her own right, friends and allies say has bristled at the focus on her husband, and questions about whether her involvement with Liberty Central could compromise his impartiality.

The Thomases last faced conflict questions in 2000 when Ginni Thomas, then working for the conservative Heritage Foundation, solicited resumes for potential transition team members for George W. Bush, while Justice Thomas was part of the court majority that sided with Bush over Democratic rival Al Gore in the historic case of Bush v. Gore.

While she brushed off those questions as well the ones about Liberty Central, it is clear that her famous husband has helped distinguish the group from the crowd of organizations jockeying for prominence in the new conservative order.

“Her association with Justice Thomas clearly provides a level of credibility that others wouldn’t be able to have, just because of the beliefs that he has and the stands that he has on the different positions that align with our own,” said Carl Graham, president of the Montana Policy Institute, one of the more than 30 state and national think tanks and advocacy groups listed as partners in Liberty Central’s fledgling network.

Before affiliating with Liberty Central, Graham said his group “looked at their mission and we looked at the people involved and we looked at how they are going to try to appeal to people, and it’s similar to what we do.” But, he added, the connection to Justice Thomas “gets you to open the e-mail, if nothing else, as opposed to some other one that you may not even open.”

Liberty Central spent $27,000 last year developing its website, according to its IRS report, and officially launched in May touting partnerships with a slew of prominent establishment groups and the backing of big-name conservatives including former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Federalist Society executive Leonard Leo, who serves on Liberty Central’s board and who Justice Thomas has called “my good friend.”

As the group prepares to ramp up its profile even more in the coming weeks, it has relied on the services of CRC Public Relations, a top conservative Beltway communications shop, and CMDI, a leading political data firm that has reaped at least $15 million in the past decade from clients including the top national Republican Party committees and the presidential campaigns or political committees of George W. Bush, Mitt Romney and John McCain, among others.

“Ginni was able to raise the seed capital to have a real launch” because of her connections in small-government conservative circles, said Matt Kibbe, president of FreedomWorks, a small-government non-profit that pre-dates the year-old tea party movement, but has positioned itself as perhaps the leading national tea party group and has partnered with Liberty Central.

“In my experience working with her, people usually didn’t know (she was married to Clarence Thomas), because she doesn’t wear it on her sleeve,” said Kibbe, who worked with Thomas at the right-leaning U.S. Chamber of Commerce while her husband was a federal appeals court judge rumored to be on then-President George H.W. Bush’s shortlist for the Supreme Court.

After the Chamber, Ginni Thomas, who has a law degree, went on to work for the Labor Department under the Bush administration and later for then-House Majority Leader Dick Armey, a Texas Republican who now chairs Kibbe’s group, as well as the Heritage Foundation, a pillar of the Washington conservative establishment. That was followed by the job as a Washington coordinator for Hillsdale College.

Thomas, who declined to be interviewed for this story and has mostly limited her media interaction to conservative outlets, explained to the Washington Examiner last month that she decided to start Liberty Central because she “realized I needed to get closer to the front lines, that there was a more short-term crisis — and that unless we have a big impact in November and again in 2012, we wouldn't recognize the country we're living in.”

She also explained to the Examiner, “My favorite times are when people who have worked for me for over 10 years come to understand only later that I am the wife of Justice Thomas.”

In an appearance on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show — arranged after she and her husband ran into Hannity at Rush Limbaugh’s wedding last month in Palm Beach, Fla. (Justice Thomas performed Limbaugh’s previous wedding, in 1994, at the couple’s Northern Virginia home) — Thomas suggested that in her new role she’s drawing liberal criticism in much the same way her husband did during his Supreme Court confirmation battle.

“They're after me now sometimes,” she told Hannity. “And so, we're not going to be dissuaded. We are in the fight for our country's life.” But she said she would “watch for conflicts” between Liberty Central and her husband’s post. “There's a lot of judicial wives and husbands out there causing trouble. I'm just one of many,” she said.

Supreme Court spokeswoman Kathy Arberg told POLITICO that “Mrs. Thomas had reviewed her involvement (in Liberty Central) with the Supreme Court legal office.” But Arberg would not say whether Clarence Thomas had participated in the discussion, nor whether Liberty Central had agreed to reveal its donors to him or the court’s legal office.

Thomas has compared her situation to that of Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, whose wife Marjorie Rendell is a federal appeals court judge. But Steven Lubet, a Northwestern University law school professor who studies judicial ethics, said the analogy is flawed because lower courts “just aren’t as important as the Supreme Court” and because another appeals court judge can replace Rendell on a case.

“Should Justice Thomas disqualify himself, the court goes ahead shorthanded,” Lubet said.

Additionally, donations to Rendell’s campaigns or committees are legally required to be disclosed.

As for whether Ginni Thomas should disclose Liberty Central’s donations, Lubet said, “there are arguments both ways. One can see a certain logic on both sides of that issue.”

But, Lubet cautioned that disclosure could be “a slippery slope. Lots of judges are married to lots of people who work for lots of non-profits, and there’s a real Pandora’s Box there.”

And, he said, “if he’s not going to disqualify himself, then it’s best that he not know. If she keeps her political life separate from her personal life, that is permissible and ethical.”

FreedomWorks’ Kibbe said Thomas’s connections in Washington’s conservative scene or her status as a Supreme Court spouse would not help with tea party activists, who tend to be leery of anything that smacks of a political establishment they see as corrupt and free-spending.

“There is sort of this anti-establishment thing going on,” Kibbe said. “Just because you’re related to somebody famous, these people are not necessarily going to be impressed.”

Jenny Beth Martin, an Atlanta tea party activist who co-founded the influential national coalition group Tea Party Patriots, said Thomas has used her insider connections to help the movement, volunteering since December as sort of a Washington shaman for the Patriots, and “helping to navigate some of the waters in D.C.,” partly by making introductions.

“She’s been kind of a mentor, and when we had questions about things that we were doing, we bounced a few of the ideas off of her and also off of a few other people in D.C. just to make sure that what we were doing made sense,” Martin said.

And, in the run-up to the House’s passage of the Democratic health care overhaul in March, in the weeks before Liberty Central’s roll-out, Thomas baked homemade cookies for tea party leaders organizing activists’ visits to congressional offices to lobby against the bill, said Debbie Dooley, a national coordinator for the Tea Party Patriots.

“She’s just that type of personable lady,” Dooley said. “She’s very intelligent, very educated — and she is very well connected.”

Dooley and Martin have reciprocated by vouching for Thomas and her new group, arranging for Thomas to deliver the keynote address at an April tax day tea party in Atlanta (her first major tea party speech) and sending a May e-mail to the Patriots 500,000-address list of activists calling Thomas “a fellow Tea Party Patriot in heart and spirit” and lauding Liberty Central.

“When we wrote that e-mail, I didn’t introduce it as ‘this is the wife of a Supreme Court Justice’s group,’” Martin said. “When she spoke in Atlanta, we didn’t introduce her as ‘this is the wife of a Supreme Court Justice.’ It’s my impression that she wants to stand on her own with this.”

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