(PartiallyPolitics.com) – On Friday, former President Trump aide Kellyanne Conway defended the payments she had made to Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, at the request of legal activist Leonard Leo.
According to a Washington Post report from the previous day Leo had told Conway that she needed to make “another $25K” payment to Ginni Thomas in January 2012, and that Thomas should not be mentioned in the paperwork.
That same day, the Polling Company, which belonged to Conway, had billed Leo $25K through his nonprofit Judicial Education Project. Between June 2011 and June 2012, Conway’s company paid Thomas’s Liberty Consulting firm $80K and it was expected that by the end of 2012, an additional $20K payment would have been made.
On Friday, Conway noted that Thomas was part of the Heritage Foundation, and that she had long been one of her contractors. She added that her organization did not have any business with the court and that they were just involved in public policy, opinion, and data analytics.
Despite her claims, Leo’s nonprofit, the Judicial Education Project, filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court in 2012 after the payments had been made.
In her response to these reports, Conway also sought to draw a connection between the threat and violence currently faced by Supreme Court Justices and these recent reports. She pointed out that last year Justice Kavanaugh had people outside his home trying to assassinate him, while his family was there.
Justice Clarence Thomas, Ginni Thomas’s husband, has also faced a lot of criticism lately following a number of ProPublica reports which showed that over the years he had accepted gifts from billionaire and GOP mega donor Harlan Crow.
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