Christopher Armitage came on Narativ Live tonight to argue, in plain language, what most of the legal-political world has been too cautious to say aloud — that Justice Clarence Thomas could be indicted next Monday, in a Fairfax County courthouse, on charges already supported by the public record. The case does not require Congress, the Department of Justice, or the Supreme Court itself to do anything. It requires three Virginia officials who already have the authority to act, and the will to use it.
Armitage’s argument rests on a doctrine the Supreme Court has affirmed as recently as the 2019 Snyder decision — dual sovereignty: states are allowed to enforce their own laws, even on federal officials. The Roberts Court has narrowed federal fraud, bribery, and corruption statutes to the point that the federal-level case against Thomas may no longer be winnable, but Virginia’s laws are not bound by John Roberts’s reading. Thomas lives in Fairfax County. He files a Virginia resident income tax return.
The twenty years of private jets, superyachts, summer compounds at Harlan Crow’s Adirondacks property, tuition payments for a child he was raising, and a quarter-million-dollar motorhome from a separate benefactor — totaling, by Armitage’s accounting, more than twenty million dollars in gifts, of which roughly ten million are documented and unreported and another eleven million are estimated from gaps in the record — are income under federal tax law unless they meet the Supreme Court’s own 1960 “detached and disinterested generosity” test in Duberstein. A politically active billionaire whose business and ideological interests appear before the Court does not meet that test. Leaving that income off a Virginia return, with intent to defraud, is a felony under Virginia Code § 58.1-348.
The intent question — usually the hardest piece of a tax-fraud prosecution to prove — is the easiest one to read in Thomas’s record. He disclosed his first Harlan Crow flight in 1997, then stopped disclosing them for the next twenty years while continuing to take them, and amended his forms only for the specific trips reporters had already proven. He used to report large gifts as taxable income. He stopped. He knows.
The deeper contribution Armitage brought to the conversation tonight is the four-tier taxonomy of state resistance his soft-secession academic work has built — Tier 0 cooperative federalism, Tier 1 uncooperative federalism (Heather Gerken’s 2009 contribution, we don’t have to help you), Tier 2 soft secession (we don’t need you — Washington State’s economy alone exceeds plenty of European countries that maintain full safety nets), Tier 3 oppositional federalism (state criminal law turned on federal officials), and Tier 4 constitutional noncompliance (active intervention against federal action, such as state National Guards refusing to participate in mass deportations). The Thomas case is Tier 3. So is the fifty-thousand-dollar bribe Tom Homan took on Texas soil and could be charged for in a Texas courtroom if Texas had Democratic leadership. So is every federal corruption case the Roberts Court has narrowed out of federal reach and left lying in state jurisdiction. Armitage’s frame names what the right wing has been doing for fifty years — building state-level pressure that the Supreme Court eventually has to ratify — and asks why Democrats are not running the same play, applied for good.
On Pam Bondi’s testimony before the House Oversight Committee tomorrow on the Epstein files, Armitage’s instruction was direct. Every Democratic member with questioning time should open by stating, on the record and to her face, that they will pursue criminal perjury charges if she lies under oath. Then they should follow Ted Lieu’s example — start their questions by saying the president is a pedophile who is named in the Epstein files. Refuse to grant Bondi the lawyerly courtesy that has, until now, allowed every Trump-regime official to stonewall a hearing without consequence. “Call her a liar,” Armitage said. “Do it.”
On the November midterms, Armitage offered a deliberately bleak prediction: no veto-proof majority for the Democrats, a rigging campaign the existing checks cannot fully stop, and a Democratic Party whose own approval rating sits below Donald Trump’s because it has no counter-incentive plan for its voters. The fight, he said, is not about the outcome — it is about the daily practice. The right wing waged a fifty-year campaign to overturn Roe v. Wade because they took the long-shot cases and refused to be told the cases could not be won. The same tactic, applied for good, can charge Clarence Thomas in Virginia on Monday, indict Tom Homan in Texas, and unwind the federal capture from below — one county, one statehouse, one indictment at a time.
The action items Armitage handed our viewers were not federal. Pressure your state attorney general. Pressure your county prosecutor. Pressure your statehouse representative. Pressure your city council member if that is what you have access to. Treat the prosecution movement the way the right wing treated Roe — a multi-decade campaign of state-level pressure that culminates in courthouse doors opening, not closing. Steve Descano, the Fairfax Commonwealth’s Attorney, spent six years in the Justice Department’s Criminal Tax Division and knows how to read this case. Governor Abigail Spanberger has the authority under Virginia Code § 2.2-511 to ask Attorney General Jay Jones to take it up. None of them has moved. All three of them can.
What came through most clearly tonight is that nothing about this requires permission from the institutions that are failing. It requires a county prosecutor in Virginia who is willing to do his job, and enough constituents writing, calling, and showing up to make doing that job the safer political bet. Charge him on Monday. Then charge the next one.
Christopher Armitage publishes The Existentialist Republic and is the architect of the soft-secession framework — academic working paper, free booklets, and tools at the link.
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