By Moira Warburton
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas should recuse himself from cases related to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, U.S. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said on Tuesday.
Text messages first reported by the Washington Post and CBS News showed that Thomas’s wife Virginia Thomas, who goes by Ginni, urged Mark Meadows, then-White House Chief of Staff to President Donald Trump, to work to overturn the November 2020 election of Joe Biden over Trump.
The information available “raises a serious question about how close Justice Thomas and his wife were to the planning and execution of the Jan. 6 insurrection,” Schumer told reporters.
On Monday, 24 Democrats from both the Senate and the House of Representatives sent a letter to John Roberts, chief justice of the United States, asking that Thomas recuse himself.
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a House Democrat, wrote in a tweet on Tuesday that Thomas should resign.
Clarence Thomas was the lone dissenting voice in January when the U.S. Supreme Court rejected Trump’s request to block the release of White House records sought by the congressional panel.
(Reporting by Moira Warburton; Writing by Rami Ayyub, Editing by Franklin Paul and Howard Goller)
