Opinion Page: ‘Another 25K’ for Ginni Thomas?

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According to reporting by The Post’s Emma Brown, Shawn Boburg and Jonathan O’Connell, Conway’s firm paid Ginni Thomas’s firm, Liberty Consulting, $80,000 from June 2011 to June 2012 and was slated to pay $20,000 more by the end of 2012.

This transfer does not have the aura of an ordinary business transaction. There’s nothing wrong with the Judicial Education Project hiring a pollster and nothing wrong with Conway’s firm, the Polling Company, enlisting Thomas’s consulting firm as a subcontractor. Moreover, Ginni Thomas, who was a conservative activist before she met her husband, Clarence Thomas, should be able to have her own career, within the bounds of appropriateness given her husband’s position as a Supreme Court justice.

But why is Leo directing how much and when Conway will “give” to Ginni Thomas, a transaction that would ordinarily be between the consultant and the subcontractor? Usually, invoices are submitted and work substantiated before money is paid, rather than the other way around. And, as the Post story points out, Leo, a powerful Washington operative who has overseen a generation-long project to fill the federal judiciary with conservative jurists, didn’t have any official role at the Judicial Education Project; its president at the time, Neil Corkery, certified on the organization’s tax filing that no one other than officers or key employees had control over its operations.