A new recording obtained by the investigative website ProPublica and the watchdog Documented discloses a July email in which Ginni Thomas thanked First Liberty Institute for fighting to oppose supreme court reforms. She specifically referred to White House proposals from Joe Biden designed to rein in wayward justices on the country’s highest court, of which her husband is the prime example.
“I cannot adequately express enough appreciation for you guys pulling into reacting to the Biden effort on the supreme court. Many were so depressed by the lack of response by R[epublican]s and conservatives,” she said.
Writing in all caps, she added: “YOU GUYS HAVE FILLED THE SAILS OF MANY JUDGES. CAN I JUST TELL YOU, THANK YOU SO, SO, SO MUCH.”
The email was read out by the head of First Liberty Institute, Kelly Shackelford, on a 31 July call with donors to the group. He said the email had been written by Ginni Thomas that same day.
Two days previously, Biden had called for sweeping changes to the court, including term limits for the nine justices and a code of ethics that would be enforced by an outside body. Under current arrangements, the justices are liable to a voluntary code which they individually police themselves.
The battle over Supreme Court ethics reform intensified in May after Justice Samuel Alito refused to recuse himself from cases related to Jan. 6 despite reports that the justice had flown flags associated with the movement to overturn the 2020 election results outside of his residences.
Alito blamed his wife, Martha-Ann Alito, for flying one of the flag's outside of the couple's home.
Mrs. Alito is by no means the first Supreme Court spouse to invite controversy into the court. Ginni Thomas has plenty of her own links to the 2020 "Stop the Steal" movement, and has been a party in the scandal surrounding her husband's relationship with influential conservative billionaires.
In the aftermath of the 2020 election, Ginni Thomas was an active voice in efforts by pro-Trump Republicans to subvert the result of the vote. Thomas sent dozens of text messages to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows urging him to stop Democrats from carrying out "the greatest Heist of our History."
"Iraq snapshot" (THE COMMON ILLS):
Ever since Donald Trump appeared on the scene, the mainstream media has struggled with how to deal with him as a candidate. At first, they were enchanted by his sheer weirdness, which made for great copy and footage. But when Trump flooded the field with lies, they couldn’t bring themselves to use the term. They used “falsehoods” or “claims without evidence.” Most of all, they treated Trump as if he were just like any other candidate, even when he was anything but.
You would think that by the third time around, the media would have learned its lesson. If anything, the media has gotten worse. This election cycle, reporters at major outlets seem to be going out of their way to treat Trump ever-so-gently, normalizing his most dangerous behavior.
Perhaps the worst offender is the self-appointed paper of record, The New York Times. When the scandal broke about Trump illegally filming for a campaign ad at Arlington National Cemetery last week – while his aides physically assaulted a worker – the Times reported that the “campaign clashed with an official” at the cemetery, which downplayed just how brazen Trump’s actions were. The paper then followed up with another story about how Trump “returns to the politics of forever wars,” as if that was the story instead of how the Trump campaign broke the law prohibiting using the hallowed ground for political purposes.
In short, the politics became the story, not the scandal.
Or look at the paper’s coverage of Trump’s cognitive decline.
Oh, wait. That was just reserved for Joe Biden.
Instead, the Times decided to run a story about Trump’s truly bizarre rantings at his rallies. They didn’t question the stability of someone who worries about being eaten by sharks or praises Hannibal Lecter. Rather, they came up with this humdinger of an appraisal: “It is difficult to find the hermeneutic methods with which to parse the linguistic flights that take him from electrocuted sharks to Hannibal Lecter’s cannibalism, windmills, and Rosie O’Donnell.”
Who are we kidding here? Trump’s inability to think linearly hints at cognitive issues. He is now the oldest candidate to run for president. Instead of a serious look at whether he’s displaying exactly the kind of problems that the Times took Biden to task for, the paper came up with a cutesy little piece that quotes English professors instead of geriatricians.
The Times‘ velvet-glove approach to Trump extends to his allies as well. In a piece about Trump’s appearance before Moms for Liberty, the paper treated the extremist group as a stand-in for “the fired-up suburban women” that Trump is in danger of losing. Moms for Liberty is a far cry from the suburban women demographic, consisting instead primarily of evangelicals who don’t have kids in public schools. The article failed to mention the group’s recent scandals with one howler of an exception: “The Moms for Liberty can get a bit carried away – one of their local chapters once accidentally quoted Adolf Hitler.”
Here’s the problem. It wasn’t an accident. Hitler was actually quoted by name. (The paper had to issue a correction.) Also not mentioned in the “bit carried away” part was the group’s efforts to ban hundreds of books and attack drag queens.
It’s
emblematic of what the political media in this country are doing so
badly in covering this race. With dizzying regularity, Trump lies. He
says toxic, anti-democratic things over and over again. And he still
gets treated like a normal candidate. It’s often the case that the
media, presented with another one of his addled rants, will dive in,
scoop and separate enough words to make it seem like he’s got enough
actual grey matter gooping around in his skull to form a complete
sentence, and present their director’s cut of his wandering mind for public consumption.
The Democrat, first Joe Biden and now Harris, gets called evasive or worse if he-then-she doesn’t respond to Trump’s ridiculous lies. The effect is to legitimize Trump—in this case, to make it seem as if he raised fair and reasonable questions about Harris’s identity.
But this isn’t even the most glaring recent example of the press laying down on the job. That prize goes to the two New York Times reporters who recently gave us this gem, which ran under another genius headline: “Harris and Trump Have Housing Ideas. Economists Have Doubts.”
You can tell instantly what kind of article this is going to be—one of those classic on-the-one-hand-on-the-other-hand pieces that pretends to weigh evidence in a sober way and absolutely refrains from drawing any conclusions that might give offense to one side or the other. Except that in this case, the conclusion gives offense to anyone with a functioning brain.
It’s worth going into this at a little length. Here’s the story’s second paragraph: “Their two visions of how to solve America’s affordable housing shortage have little in common, and Ms. Harris’s plan is far more detailed. But they do share one quality: Both have drawn skepticism from outside economists.”
First of all: If you’ve been in journalism long enough then you know that you can find economists who’ll say anything, especially when it comes to picking apart a candidate’s plan. More importantly: “Ms. Harris’s plan is far more detailed” is Times-speak, as any veteran reader of that paper knows, for “Harris at least has a plan, while Trump doesn’t have anything close to a plan.”
Which is confirmed two paragraphs later: “Mr. Trump’s plan is garnering even more doubt. He pledges to deport undocumented immigrants, which could cut back temporarily on housing demand but would also most likely cut into the construction work force and eventually limit new housing supply. His other ideas include lowering interest rates, something that he has no direct control over and that is poised to happen anyway.”
Wait a second. Are you kidding me? Trump’s “housing plan” is to deport people? And the most important newspaper in the English-speaking world is taking this idea seriously? What could these reporters—and more importantly, their editor, who is supposed to use his or her years of experience to guide them—be thinking?
This highlights a continuing problem with how the political press deals with a person who a) historically has very few actual ideas beyond schemes to get himself on television, b) whose ideas, such as they are, are often unworkable and unconstitutional and un-American and extremist, c) who lies about them every time he speaks.
A reality-based article comparing the candidates’ “housing plans” would have gone something like: Harris, who talks about housing all the time on the stump, has a real and reasonably detailed plan that economists say has some good points and bad points; Trump shows no sign of having given even ten seconds of thought to the housing crisis (on Trump’s 20-point platform, the word isn’t mentioned), and by the way, he spent four years as president, during which time he amassed a thoroughly rotten record on housing and never once showed any interest in ameliorating the affordable housing crisis, how about that?
During the melee, Trump cooed from the pulpit. “Beautiful, that’s beautiful, that’s alright, that’s okay, no, he’s on our side. We get a little itchy, David, don’t we? No, no, he’s on our side.”
Minimizing political violence as "getting a little itchy," even from Trump’s micro-vocabulary, signaled approval, while “He’s on our side” urged us vs. them lenience for the attacker. As in, it’s normal to physically assault reporters because reporters say mean things about me.
It’s a fool’s game to expect Trump to embrace the First Amendment (or any other tenant of Constitutional law), or the historical underpinnings of protecting the free press. Trump’s inability to hold either nuance or history isn’t surprising, but the mainstream media’s complicity in letting him get away with it is.
Few major media outlets have picked up the story of the assault or Trump’s delight in it, despite videos of the exchange circulating on social media.
Ty: Nope. One more e-mail. It's about C.I. and THE COMMON ILLS and I think Ava should be the one to speak to it. Isla e-mailed to comment on C.I.'s Wednesday snapshot and she writes, "Thank God, she covered it Wednesday morning because it wasn't getting attention, the attacks in Texas on those of us who are Latino. This is very serious. The attorney general of our state trying to intimidate us and scare us away from voter registration and voting. This is an attack on our rights and our freedoms. And it got local coverage but wasn't a national issue when it should have been. This Republican attack on Latinos will register with other Latinos in other states but only if they know about it. And they need to know about it because if they'd do it to us in Texas, the GOP would do it any state that they thought they could get away with it." Ava?
Ava: For those who don't know, I'm a Latina which is probably why Ty's tossing to me -- that and the fact that C.I. and I write a lot of things together about the media and the fact that C.I. said she didn't want to talk at all in this roundtable. Yeah, Isla is correct. I'm in California and I was outraged to learn that the attorney general in Texas, Ken Paxton, was sending armed officers to the homes of Latinos involved in voter registration, barging into their homes at six in the morning, refusing to let them get dressed and treating them like criminals. It's outrageous and it's offensive. There was no legitimate reason for it but it was intended to terrorize the Latino population in Texas. As a Latina, I call it out. CBS did something Wednesday evening and I'd like to include it.
Ava (Con't): Ken Paxton should be carted off in handcuffs for those raids. And Texas Latinos -- Democrats, Republicans, independents and non-voters -- need to especially register what happened. They need to turn out and they need to support Colin Allred for the US Senate and Democrats in every race to send a message to the GOP in Texas and elsewhere that this is not acceptable and we will not ignore it.
Jim: C.I., you and Texas community members Sabina and Francisco have been writing a lot about this over the last few days. Do you know what the last day to register to vote in Texas is?
C.I.: I didn't want to talk but I'll grab this. Sabina and Francisco are doing great work in Texas and it's great to talk to them and amplify them in any way possible. One thing not being reported is that Texas has disabled online voter registration. If you're planning to vote in Texas in November, the first thing you need to do is to check and make sure you weren't purged because Governor Greg Asshole has purged over a million people from the voter rolls. The next thing you need to know is that Greg Asshole has stopped online voter registration. You will need to register by October 7th. That may require you going to your local voter registration officials office. If you're renewing your drivers license or getting a replacement for it, you can register at the DMV. Fall means county fairs and there will be people with booths and tables set up to register voters.. You can also print up an application online and mail it in. You need to move quickly on that because October 7th is the deadline.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González. A warning to our audience: The following story contains graphic images and descriptions of violence.
The New Yorker has published 10 photographs of the U.S. Marines’ 2005 massacre of 24 Iraqi civilians in the Iraqi town of Haditha. Their killings in the middle of the night came in retaliation for an attack on U.S. military convoy as it drove through Haditha. The convoy hit a roadside bomb, an IED, placed there by Iraqis resisting the U.S. invasion. It killed Lance Corporal Miguel Terrazas.
The gruesome images published last week show dead Iraqi men, women and children, many of them shot in the head at close range. One of the victims, a 5-year-old girl named Zainab Younis Salim, is seen with a number 11 written on her back with a red marker. The release of the photos comes 19 years after the massacre and only after producers of the investigative podcast series In the Dark sued the Navy, the Marine Corps and U.S. Central Command to force them to turn over the photos and other records. This is a trailer for In the Dark.
MICHAEL FAY: It’s now about 17:30, and we’re finishing up the day here at an observation post. And right now for about the last 10, 15 minutes, we hear in the background the evening singing from the minarets.
CAP. LUCAS McDONNELL: Believe it or not, sooner or later, we will kill some of these folks, who need to be killed. And that’s the beautiful thing about this world, is that there’s always someone who needs to be killed. And we’re the folks to do it.
MADELEINE BARAN: I spent the past four years investigating a crime, a crime that most people have long forgotten.
INTERPRETER FOR KHALID SALMAN RASEEF: He heard the sound of really strong bombing.
KHALID SALMAN RASEEF: I heard M16, zhzhzhzhzhzh.
MADELEINE BARAN: A crime that for almost 20 years has gone unpunished.
KEVIN PARMELEE: They went into the room, and they were just taking shots.
SAFA YOUNIS: [translated] Me and Noor, we were under the bed. He get his rifle and then start shooting at us.
KEVIN PARMELEE: How did they not perceive that these were children?
ARISTOTELES BARBOSA: I remember I opened a Humvee, and I just see bodies stacked up. And I open another one, the same thing. I’m like, “[Bleep].”
MADELEINE BARAN: A four-year investigation, hundreds of interviews, thousands of documents, all in an effort to see what the U.S. military has kept from the public for years.
COL. GREGORY WATT: You know, I don’t know what’s to be gained by this investigative journalism.
FORMER MARINE: I’m not interested in talking about that. That was a long time ago, and I tried to move past all that. So, no, thank you, on all that.
MARINE FAMILY MEMBER: He was saying it was so traumatic, he couldn’t talk about it.
KHALID JAMAL: You and you and you.
INTERPRETER FOR KHALID JAMAL: And you and you. They pointed at each one to go inside the house.
JEFFREY CHESSANI: Can I help you?
PARKER YESKO: Hi there, Mr. Chessani. My name is Parker. I’m a radio reporter, working on —
JEFFREY CHESSANI: Parker what?
BRIAN WITT: What did I think?
MADELEINE BARAN: Yeah.
BRIAN WITT: I assumed it meant that he had [bleep] shot someone.
FORMER MARINE: It’s not a big deal. [bleep] everyday [bleep]. Normal day in Haditha.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re now joined by Madeleine Baran, head reporter and host of The New Yorker's In the Dark podcast. She traveled to Haditha, Iraq, to meet with family members, the victims of the Haditha massacre. Her piece for The New Yorker is titled “The Haditha Massacre Photos That the Military Didn't Want the World to See.”
Welcome to Democracy Now!, Madeleine. This is an astounding, what, nine-part podcast series and piece in The New Yorker with these photographs. You’ve interviewed hundreds of people, you and your team. First, talk about what these photographs mean now, so many years later, the significance of what they show, and what happened with this massacre, who was charged, who was not held accountable.
MADELEINE BARAN: Well, what these photos show, Amy, are direct evidence of what the Marines did that day in Haditha. I should say I didn’t personally travel to Haditha. We traveled to another part of Iraq, and we did send a reporter with more experience in the region to Haditha. But these photos show, as you can see, men, women, children in defenseless positions — in one case, a mother on a bed surrounded by her dead children; in another case, a mother in the corner of their living room with her arm around her 4-year-old boy, both of them killed, and they’re facedown on the ground, huddled, cowering in a corner. And so, what the photos clearly show is that these were innocent people who do not appear to be doing anything threatening at the time of their deaths.
And what happened with the Haditha case is, is that four marines initially were charged with murder, but all of those murder charges eventually went away. In three cases, the charges were dismissed. And in the final case, the one against the squad leader, Sergeant Frank Wuterich, that case did go to trial, but it ended in the middle of the trial with a plea deal for negligent dereliction of duty. It’s a very low-level charge. Wuterich’s own lawyer described it to me as basically akin to a parking ticket. It didn’t carry a single day in prison or jail.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Madeleine, could you talk about your long battle to get these photos and the resistance that you met and why you persevered for so long?
MADELEINE BARAN: Well, so, this all started in 2020, when a reporter on our team, Parker Yesko, filed the first FOIA request by our team, trying to get not just the photos, but all of the investigative records into what happened in Haditha. You know, at the time when this killing happened, this was described as another My Lai. And yet, you know, we still know very little, at least when we started our reporting, knew very little about what even happened that day. So, we filed this FOIA. The military really barely responded. And so, we worked with a law firm who specializes in FOIA work, Loevy & Loevy, an amazing team, led by a lawyer, Matt Topic, and they helped us sue the military. So we filed suit against the military. And then, at that point, you know, we were still not necessarily getting anywhere. I mean, I don’t think we ever thought it was at all a foregone conclusion that we would receive these photos.
So, we knew from reading the records — I had seen in the past that the U.S. military had made a claim that they wanted to keep the photos private because of concern — in part because of concern for the surviving family members of the dead. And so, anticipating this concern, when I was in Iraq, I talked with one of the survivors and, ultimately, talked to two of the survivors and said, you know, “What do you think about us trying to get these photos?” And they both said — one is a man, Khalid Jamal, who was 14 when his father and uncles were killed. Another is Khalid Salman Raseef, who’s a lawyer who lost 15 members of his family that day. And they both said, “Yes, we want you to have these photos. These photos are important.” And so, then they did something remarkable. Working with a reporter we sent there, they went house to house and talked to other surviving family members, explained our reporting to them, explained what we were trying to do, and had, like, a form with them that we had provided, in Arabic and English, that explained that this form would authorize us to try to obtain the photos, with their permission, from the U.S. military. And ultimately, those two men collected 17 signatures, and then we filed those in court. And then, in March of this year, the military relented and sent us the photos.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to play two clips for you from the podcast series. But start off by walking us through that day, November 19th, 2005.
MADELEINE BARAN: So, early that morning, the marines set off, a squad of marines in a four-vehicle convoy, just a routine supply run. And one of those vehicles was hit by an IED, and it killed Lance Corporal Miguel Terrazas and injured two other marines. In the hours that followed, the marines shot five people by a white car next to the — near the site of the explosion, and then went into three houses, and they killed men, women and children inside. The oldest person they killed was a grandfather in his seventies, and the youngest was a 3-year-old girl.
AMY GOODMAN: So, this is retired Colonel Gregory Watt of the Army. He was — first led a noncriminal investigation into what happened in Haditha. And this is him speaking in this podcast, In the Dark.
COL. GREGORY WATT: Yeah, my experience leads me to believe that this occurred 2006, 2007. Now it’s now 2023. I think they’ve moved on.
MADELEINE BARAN: Why do you think that?
COL. GREGORY WATT: I think it’s human nature.
MADELEINE BARAN: Even if your whole family was killed?
COL. GREGORY WATT: I believe so, especially in that region of the world.
MADELEINE BARAN: What do you mean?
COL. GREGORY WATT: They have different values than we do, OK? They are more concerned about the living than those that have passed.
MADELEINE BARAN: I think, to the — I’ve talked to some of the survivors. And for them, it’s really important to know as much as possible about how their family members were killed and then also why no one was ever punished.
COL. GREGORY WATT: Yeah, I’m not — I don’t have the answers to that.
AMY GOODMAN: So, that’s Colonel Gregory Watt from the In the Dark podcast. This is Khalid Jamal, who you just described, one of the survivors of the Haditha massacre, 14 at the time, his dad and three uncles killed by the Marines in 2005, responding.
MADELEINE BARAN: One day while we were talking with Khalid Jamal, we turned off the air conditioner in the hotel room because it was so noisy. But at one point, it got so hot, we had to take a break.
SAMARA FREEMARK: Yeah, OK, let’s turn on the air conditioning, take a little break.
MADELEINE BARAN: Samara called down to the lobby and ordered coffee and pastries.
SAMARA FREEMARK: Hi. Is this room service? Hi. I wanted to order…
MADELEINE BARAN: While we were waiting, Khalid Jamal asked me a question. He asked me whether I had ever talked to Frank Wuterich.
KHALID JAMAL: Did you meet Frank Wuterich?
MADELEINE BARAN: Not yet, no.
And then Khaild Jamal said something surprising.
KHALID JAMAL: I hope to meet him.
MADELEINE BARAN: He wanted to talk to Wuterich.
KHALID JAMAL: I want to ask him —
SAMARA FREEMARK: Hold up. OK.
KHALID JAMAL: I need to ask him one question only. Just one question. How did he kill them? I want to explain how did he that in our house. How?
MADELEINE BARAN: Khalid Jamal told us that he’s always wanted to know what happened in his father and uncles’ final moments.
KHALID JAMAL: I want. I want that.
SAMARA FREEMARK: Why?
KHALID JAMAL: I want to know what’s happened in home.
SAMARA FREEMARK: Because you don’t know.
KHALID JAMAL: Yes. I saw the bodies only. I want to know how he did this killings of my father.
AMY GOODMAN: And this is Khalid Salman Raseef, 15 members of his family killed by the Marines in the Haditha massacre.
INTERPRETER FOR KHALID SALMAN RASEEF: They kind of gave up on anyone talking about this case again. They didn’t forget. They have been heartbroken every day since that day. But they gave up on someone talk about the case or someone reinvestigate the case.
AMY GOODMAN: So, Madeleine Baran, it is now almost 20 years later, and you have the military, the representative, saying, “Why would they care? They can move on.” Explain what you were most shocked by in what you discovered in these investigations, not to mention another man that they killed that day.
MADELEINE BARAN: Well, of course, you know, the crime itself is shocking. You know, what happened that day is shocking. I think that, you know, as we got deeper and deeper into the reporting, it was also very interesting to see what happened in the years that followed, how — you know, I think, really, one of the big undertold parts of this whole story is the role of the surviving family members, who have been quietly and persistently questing for justice for years now and have done almost everything they can think of to try to reveal this story, to try to get justice for their dead family members, and have been repeatedly sort of left out of the process.
You know, as we show in the podcast, at trial of the squad leader, none of the depositions — you know, the jury never heard any of the depositions of the survivors, the eyewitnesses to the killings who were Iraqi. You know, at trial, the prosecutors had asked to replace the names of the victims with numbers. And so, at trial, the dead were referred to by the numbers that the marines scrawled on their bodies hours after the killings. And so, I think there’s also a story here about how we treat the Iraqi civilians and how we treated these particular Iraqi civilians in this case.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Madeleine, could you talk about the role of General James “Mad Dog” Mattis, who went on to become secretary of defense in the Trump administration?
MADELEINE BARAN: So, Mattis played a very key role in this case. You know, Mattis was the person who, most memorably in this case, dismissed the charges against one of the marines, a man named Lance Corporal Justin Sharratt. Sharratt is the one who killed three members of 14-year-old Khalid Jamal’s family. And Mattis didn’t just dismiss the charges. He also wrote Sharratt a very glowing, full-of-praise letter, saying that, in his eyes, Sharratt was innocent, and praising Sharratt for how he had performed as a marine. And, you know, this is something that Mattis, I think, to this day appears as very proud of. In his memoir, he even published the letter in his book.
AMY GOODMAN: And at this point, no one went to jail, Madeleine. We have 15 seconds.
MADELEINE BARAN: Correct, no punishment, no jail time for the killings to this day. That’s correct.
AMY GOODMAN: And the response of the Iraqis, the family members who survived?
MADELEINE BARAN: What they want is the world to know what happened to their family, to know their family were good people, not insurgents, and they want justice.
AMY GOODMAN: Madeleine Baran, we want to thank you for an astounding podcast series, In the Dark, head reporter and host of the New Yorker podcast, the new article in The New Yorker is “The Haditha Massacre Photos That the Military Didn’t Want the World to See.” We will link to it all.
That does it for our show. I’m Amy Goodman in New York, with Juan González in Chicago. Thanks for joining us.
Israeli actress Gadot also posted a montage of images of the six victims, telling her fans that her heart was broken after learning the news.
“They survived almost 11 months in captivity and then were murdered by Hamas,” she wrote. “People who became an inseparable part of our hearts, families who waited so long for a different end, the heart is broken into pieces today. 101 more hostages still there.”
Gal's fans? Gal got fired from the only real job she had: Wonder Woman. She's got nothing now. Since being fired, no one wants her. She can't act. She's diffident onscreen and, hey, HOLLYWOOOD REPORTTER, aren't you forgetting her chief credit: Israeli soldier.
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