Clarence Thomas Participates in Oral Arguments Remotely Amid Mounting Ethics Concerns

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Justice Clarence Thomas is participating in Supreme Court oral arguments remotely and the Supreme Court has been guarded about his health status since his hospital stay.

Thomas officially left the hospital after a stay of nearly a week after he was forced to miss Supreme Court oral arguments due to flu-like symptoms that developed the prior Friday. He was later diagnosed with an infection.

That Thomas continues to participate in oral arguments despite the controversy surrounding his wife’s involvement on January 6 angered his critics.

Thomas now faces mounting ethics concerns amid reports that his wife Virginia Thomas, who goes by Ginni, was involved in the plot to overturn the 2020 presidential election, playing a key role in pressuring the White House to back former President Donald Trump’s lies that the election had been stolen from him.

“You have the wife of a sitting Supreme Court justice advocating for an insurrection, advocating for overturning a legal election to the sitting president’s chief of staff and she also knows this election, these cases, are going to come before her husband. This is a textbook case for removing him, recusing him from these decisions,” Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said Sunday on ABC’s “This Week.”

The House Select Committee tasked with investigating the January 6 insurrection has in its possession 29 text messages between former Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and Ginni Thomas that show Thomas urging Meadows to continue the effort the overturn the election results.

The committee obtained the messages because Meadows turned over thousands of text messages before he stopped cooperating with the committee. Ginni Thomas has previously claimed that she attended the “Stop the Steal” rally ahead of the attack on the United States Capitol but that she did not play a role in plotting the attack itself.