Clarence Thomas hasn’t suddenly decided to follow the rules. His recusal from a January 6 case is just smoke and mirrors.

The Supreme Court announced today that Justice Clarence Thomas, the serial glommer of luxo-deals from billionaire “friends” of his, recused himself from an appeal brought by former Trump lawyer John Eastman that sought to have his emails withheld from the House January 6 Committee.  The court rejected the appeal without Thomas’ participation in the vote. Yes, I was amazed as well to hear that Eastman’s attempt to keep his emails private was still in the works.  Thomas did not give a reason for recusing himself from the court’s rejection of Eastman’s appeal, but Eastman was one of Thomas’s clerks in 1996, and he must have thought that casting a vote on a case from one of his former clerks was behind the pale, even for him.

Eastman attended a reunion of Thomas’ clerks at the Greenbriar Resort in West Virginia in July of 2021, where the Washington Post reported, “he was welcomed at the Greenbrier gathering as a member of the tightknit clerk family,” despite some uneasiness among fellow former clerks about his authorship of the fake elector scheme that sought to overturn the results of the 2020 election and make Trump, who lost the popular vote by millions and the Electoral College 306 to 232, the winner. 

The connection between Thomas and Eastman even pre-dates Thomas’ elevation to the Supreme Court.  When they were young lawyers working in the administration of Ronald Reagan in the 1980’s, both men were influenced by scholarly writing from the Claremont Institute in California, an arch-conservative think tank that published papers promoting the idea that the Constitution should be interpreted according to a theory of “natural law.”  That intellectual theory went beyond even the “originalist” interpretation of the Constitution by justices such as Antonin Scalia, and stated that rights held by citizens of the United States came from God and nature, rather than the Constitution.

In a previous case that reached the Supreme Court brought by Donald Trump, who sought to have his papers withheld from the January 6 Committee, Thomas was the only justice who approved of Trump’s arguments and voted that he could withhold White House documents from the January 6 Committee.  Legal experts at the time opined that Thomas should have recused himself from that case because of the actions of his right-wing wife, Ginni, who exchanged emails with White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows encouraging his efforts to help Trump overturn the 2020 election results.

Most recently, Eastman had signed a letter supporting Thomas after ProPublica had published its first article that was critical of Thomas for accepting the largess of billionaires such as flights on their private jets and vacations on private yachts.  It has turned out that some of those whose gifts Thomas accepted had cases before the Supreme Court.

So, Clarence Thomas hasn’t all of a sudden had a change of heart and decided that he had better watch his ethical P’s and Q’s from now on.  He was just avoiding a landmine with the execrable name of John Eastman engraved on it.