Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) said Friday on MSNBC’s “All In” that Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, potentially broke criminal laws when discussing a Washington Post report that Ginni was paid tens of thousands of dollars for consulting work, set up by conservative activist Leonard Leo.
Whitehouse said, “Leonard Leo operates a very, very opaque flotilla of phony front groups through which money can be shuffled around and shunted around to protect and hide the billionaires who fund him behind this whole phony flotilla. This Judicial Education Project that we’ve been talking about that’s actually not even a real organization. It doesn’t exist. It is the registered, quote, ‘fictitious name’ of another group called the 85 Fund, which is Leonard Leo’s pet project that is connected to him through his CRC advisors group, which is where he extracts his money out of this array of billionaire fronted front groups.”
He added, “All the mischief with Leo and these phony front groups, all of that is potentially in violation of the tax code. Some of it is conceivably even fraud. There could be potentially criminal aspects to this, particularly if no work is performed for the $25,000. And all of that can be properly investigated without getting into the internal operations of the court and Clarence Thomas.”
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