Friday, February 25, 2022
ON THE MARGIN: ACTVIST WIFE OF A SITTING SUPREME COURT JUSTICE
New York Times story about Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife, conservative activist Ginni Thomas, sparks social-media outcry
"The Times piece examines Ginni Thomas’s role in the movement to keep Donald Trump in the White House after his loss in the 2020 presidential election.
Others are saying he should already be impeached or forced to resign.
The New York Times NYT,
But perhaps more significantly, it details how Ginni Thomas has risen through the conservative ranks and was a key figure in the movement to keep Donald Trump in the White House despite his loss to Democrat Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election, over claims, including those by Trump, that the 2020 election was riddled with fraud — claims that election-tracking groups and state election bodies have disputed and the Supreme Court rejected.
The Times story points to how Ginni Thomas gained access to Trump in part through her husband. And it raises the question of how Clarence Thomas can be impartial as a jurist with his wife, whom he has described as an ideological partner, being so active politically. While Thomas is considered a key power center of the court’s conservative bloc, the Times nevertheless notes that justices “do not want to be perceived as partisan.”
The Times story also notes that the “spectacle of a Supreme Court justice’s spouse taking to Facebook FB,
All this has already sparked much discussion — and those calls for an investigation of the well-connected couple.
And, yes, some are calling for the justice to be impeached or forced to resign.
The Times story was a hot topic on the ABC show “The View.” Sunny Hostin, a co-host, said that Clarence Thomas is “slicing it pretty thin” in not recusing himself from Supreme Court cases that may touch upon political issues with which his wife has ties.
Other political and legal commentators have also spoken out. “That Clarence Thomas has made no effort to recuse himself from cases in which his wife has an interest is profoundly unethical,” wrote Jill Filipovic on CNN.com.
The Times story noted that Ginni Thomas has said she and her husband operate in “separate professional lanes.” Neither Ginni nor Clarence Thomas spoke with the Times for the piece. Nor did they respond to requests for comment from MarketWatch.
The Times reported that Ginni Thomas commented on a private Facebook group for her high-school classmates in response to the fact some may have been contacted for the story. She said the reporter “seems to have been told to write a hit piece.” (Two reporters, Danny Hakim and Jo Becker, wrote the story, which is already online and is scheduled to appear in print this Sunday, as the cover piece of the newspaper’s magazine.)
A New York Times spokesperson said the publication stood by its reporting and pointed to a statement from the story itself that explained the process behind the piece: “This article draws on hours of recordings and internal documents from groups affiliated with the Thomases; dozens of interviews with the Thomases’ classmates, friends, colleagues and critics, as well as more than a dozen Trump White House aides and supporters and some of Justice Thomas’s former clerks; and an archive of Council for National Policy videos and internal documents provided by an academic researcher in Australia.”
The Times isn’t the first publication to delve into the political ties between Clarence and Ginni Thomas, however. As recently as last month, The New Yorker magazine reported on the couple with a story that asked, “Is Ginni Thomas a threat to the Supreme Court?” The Washington Post also looked at Ginni Thomas’s involvement in the election advocacy for Trump.
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Donald Trump praises ‘pretty smart’ Vladimir Putin for Russia’s Ukraine invasion
While world leaders have widely condemned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, former President Donald Trump instead praised Vladimir Putin
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Thursday, February 24, 2022
UKRAINE'S OLIGARCHS: They have Billions To Lose
Richest Ukrainians With Billions To Lose Close Ranks As Putin Unleashes War
Amid reports of attacks against Ukrainian cities and Russian troops entering the country, Ukraine’s billionaires are putting aside their differences and lending their support to the government in Kyiv.
It was just last week that Ukrainian billionaires Rinat Akhmetov and Vadim Novinsky traveled to the frontline city of Mariupol to tell Metinvest Group mining and steel-making employees they were getting bumps in pay.
“We believe in Mariupol, we believe in Ukraine,” said Akhmetov, the country’s richest person, whose holdings include the mining conglomerate headquartered there. “We’ll continue working, we’ll continue building, we’ll continue investing.”
Mariupol was under heavy shelling Thursday as Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an attack on Ukraine. Putin had previously telegraphed his interest in Mariupol, a port city home to nearly half a million people, after Russian troops invaded eastern Ukraine’s separatist regions, Donetsk and Luhansk. Mariupol sits on the Sea of Azov, inside the larger borders claimed by the self-declared Donetsk People’s Republic.
Much of the world’s focus has been on the Russian oligarchs and their potential losses due to international sanctions. Already, on Thursday, Russian stocks have plummeted. But Ukraine’s half-dozen or so billionaires have as much and likely more to lose from armed conflict. According to Forbes Ukraine, the value of any assets held in the separatist-held regions of Donetsk and Luhansk had likely tumbled by as much as 40% in the days leading up to the attack, while holdings elsewhere in the country had lost at least 20%. By Thursday, the situation was much more dire.
While some Ukrainian billionaires initially fled the country, they returned in recent days to show their support. “They realized that Putin presents a clear threat to all of Ukraine, and their assets as well,” said Taras Berezovets, a Ukrainian political analyst and TV host. “He doesn’t care about Ukrainian oligarchs or to what extent they have been loyal to him. Everybody understands that any Ukrainian now, including tycoons, are enemies of Putin's regime.”
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Here’s a roundup of how Ukraine’s billionaires have reacted to Russia’s recent actions and how much they stand to lose in the war.
> The most pro-Russian of Ukraine’s oligarchs, Novinsky presented a draft resolution to the Ukrainian parliament on February 21 that proposed negotiations with members of Russia’s parliament to de-escalate the crisis and guarantee a sustainable peace between Russia and Ukraine.
The resolution proposed formulating a common position to prevent further escalation and reduce military tensions, including the establishment of a representative group of Russian and Ukrainian legislators. It also called for Ukraine to work with its international partners and urge them to return their diplomats to Kyiv. The U.S., the U.K., Germany and several other Western countries temporarily relocated their embassies to Lviv, a city near the western border with Poland, over the past week.
As recently as late January, Novinsky had cast doubts on the prospect of a Russian takeover of Ukraine, including the veracity of a British intelligence report that cited a potential Russian coup that would replace Ukraine’s elected authorities with a government led by pro-Russia lawmaker Yevhen Murayev. In an interview with the Financial Times, Novinsky called those reports “complete nonsense,” adding that “the only way there’s going to be a puppet government is if there’s an invasion.”
> One of Ukraine’s most pro-Western billionaires, Pinchuk is a fixture at the World Economic Forum at Davos, where he is known for hosting annual breakfasts focused on Ukraine. He also owns a large art collection and significant real estate in the West, including homes in London and Sardinia. “Pinchuk has been organizing these big international conferences in Ukraine and hosting very high-profile guests from Europe and the U.S.,” said Harvard’s Channell-Justice.
> One of the first oligarchs to push Ukraine in a pro-European direction, Kolomoyskyy—an oil baron who first made his fortune in banking—reportedly spent millions funding and equipping volunteer military battalions to help stop Russian troops in 2014. He also agreed to become governor of his native Dnipro region, serving in the role from March 2014 until March 2015, when he was fired by Ukraine’s then-president, fellow billionaire Petro Poroshenko. Once seen as one of the most powerful figures in the nation, he’s since been drawn into court cases in Ukraine, the U.S. and the U.K. over allegations of corruption while he was governor of Dnipro, as well as financial misconduct at PrivatBank, Ukraine’s largest bank, which he cofounded in the 1990s with fellow billionaire Henadiy Boholyubov. “He’s sort of a persona non grata [in the West] at this point,” said Harvard’s Channell-Justice.
Formerly a close ally of Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky—the comedian-turned-politician starred in a TV show called “Servant of the People” that ran on Kolomoyskyy’s TV network—the relationship has soured of late. In September, the Zelensky government passed a “de-oligarchization” law aimed at reducing the economic power of Ukraine’s richest people, and Kolomoyskyy was included on a list of oligarchs. (The list also included Akhmetov, Pinchuk, Poroshenko and another Ukrainian billionaire, Kostyantin Zhevago.)
>
Known as the “chocolate king” for founding Roshen, Ukraine’s largest confectionery group, Poroshenko was elected president in May 2014, two months after Russia annexed Crimea. He emerged as one of Russia’s fiercest critics and built closer ties with the West, signing a long-delayed association agreement with the European Union a month after taking office.
In 2019, he lost his bid for reelection in a landslide to Zelensky. In 2020, Ukrainian prosecutors opened more than 20 criminal cases against Poroshenko, alleging an array of charges ranging from treason to “usurping power.” He rejected the charges, calling them “purely political.” In December 2021, he was charged with high treason and aiding terrorist organizations for allegedly financing the Russan-backed separatists in Donetsk and Luhansk. Calling the decision politically motivated, Poroshenko fled the country for Poland, before returning a month later. Two days after his return, on January 19, a court declined to arrest him and allowed him to remain free, pending trial, without posting bail.
But the feud is now on hold after Poroshenko met Zelensky on Tuesday to discuss his plan to boost Ukraine’s military readiness and increase the defenses around Kyiv. He also stated his support for Ukraine’s future membership of NATO and emphasized that Russia poses a threat to the entire world, not just Ukraine.
Other Billionaires
The other Ukrainian billionaires tracked by Forbes haven’t publicly spoken out about Russia’s invasion so far. Mining billionaire Kostyantin Zhevago, who was named in Zelensky’s de-oligarchization bill, served in Ukraine’s parliament from 1998 to 2019, most recently as an independent and previously as a member of a pro-European party led by former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko. Despite his past political involvement, Zhevago hasn’t spoken out about the current situation. Neither has Henadiy Boholyubov, Ihor Kolomoyskyy’s former business partner.
Three other Ukrainian-born billionaires based outside the country—Vlad Yatsenko, founder of U.K.-based fintech Revolut, and Alex Shevchenko and Max Lytvyn, cofounders of grammar checking tool Grammarly—have also yet to comment on the events in their birth country. Yatsenko lives in London, while Lytvyn and Shevchenko are both Canadian citizens. A spokesperson for Grammarly did not immediately respond to a request for comment. . .
Read more details >> https://www.forbes.com/sites/giacomotognini/2022/02/24/richest-ukrainians-with-billions-to-lose-close-ranks-as-putin-unleashes-war/
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