‘No Mention of Ginni’: Clarence Thomas’s Wife Was Secretly Funneled At Least $80k By Leonard Leo via Kellyanne Conway
By Michael Luciano
AP Photo/Cliff Owen, File
In 2012, famed conservative legal activist Leonard Leo used Kellyanne Conway’s polling company to funnel at least $80,000 to Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, according to documents review by the Washington Post.
Clarence Thomas has come under heavy scrutiny after revelations he accepted luxury travel from, and sold property to, billionaire Republican megadonor and avid Nazi memorabilia collector Harlan Crow. Thomas did not disclose the gifts or the real estate transaction.
On Thursday morning, ProPublica reported Crow also paid at least one month of tuition for Thomas’s grandnephew to attend a boarding school. The payment in the amount of $6,000 was made by Crow’s real estate company in 2002. It is unclear if Crow made other tuition payments.
On Thursday night, the Washington Post reported that the Thomases had another benefactor in Leo, a former vice president of the Federalist Society, which for decades has fought to stack the judiciary with conservative judges.
The Post reported that Leo instructed Conway – then a pollster who later became an adviser to former President Donald Trump and is now a Fox News contributor – to make payments to Ginni Thomas, but added, “No mention of Ginni”:
In January 2012, Leo instructed the GOP pollster Kellyanne Conway to bill a nonprofit group he advises and use that money to pay Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, the documents show. The same year, the nonprofit, the Judicial Education Project, filed a brief to the Supreme Court in a landmark voting rights case.
Leo, a key figure in a network of nonprofits that has worked to support the nominations of conservative judges, told Conway that he wanted her to “give” Ginni Thomas “another $25K,” the documents show. He emphasized that the paperwork should have “No mention of Ginni, of course.”
Conway’s firm, the Polling Company, sent the Judicial Education Project a $25,000 bill that day. Per Leo’s instructions, it listed the purpose as “Supplement for Constitution Polling and Opinion Consulting,” the documents show.
In total, Conway’s outfit, the Polling Company, paid Thomas’s firm Liberty Consulting $80,000 between 2011 and 2012, with another $20,000 expected before the end of 2012.
In a statement to the Post, Leo defended the Thomases but did not address questions about how much money he funneled to Ginni Thomas.
Leo claimed “gossipy people” are the reasons he obscured the payments.
“Knowing how disrespectful, malicious and gossipy people can be, I have always tried to protect the privacy of Justice Thomas and Ginni,” he said.
Last year, it was reported Ginni Thomas collected a salary of $120,000 from her firm in 2010.
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