What to know about Ginni Thomas’ connection to 2020 election reversal gambits
By Tierney Sneed
The drip-drip-drip of revelations concerning Supreme Court spouse Virginia “Ginni” Thomas’ support of former President Donald Trump’s election reversal gambits have created an unrelenting ethics scandal around the court.
Thomas, a political activist, has long advocated for conservative causes that touch on cases before the court on which her husband, Justice Clarence Thomas, sits. But several episodes connecting her to the efforts to overturn President Joe Biden’s electoral win — including contacts she had with top Trump advisers about the push and her own role in a mass email campaign to pressure state legislators responsible for certifying Biden’s electors — have put questions about her husband’s participation in relevant legal cases at the forefront. (Supreme Court justices decide for themselves whether a personal connection creates an appearance of a conflict requiring their recusal from a case.)
Her conduct has now made her of interest to the House January 6 committee. Ginni Thomas has insisted in the past that her political activism is kept separate from her husband’s work as a justice.
“I can’t wait to clear up misconceptions. I look forward to talking to them,” Ginni Thomas told the conservative outlet The Daily Caller in an interview published Thursday about the possibility of appearing before the House committee.
Trump’s supporters brought several lawsuits to the Supreme Court in late 2020 seeking that the justices disturb Biden’s win. Those cases were roundly rejected by the court, but with no indications that Thomas declined to participate. In one case, Thomas wrote a February 2021 dissent expressing sympathy with Trump’s baseless claims of election fraud. Thomas was also the sole publicly dissenting vote in a January 2022 Supreme Court move to allow House January 6 investigations to obtain Trump White House documents the former President sought to keep secret.
Here’s a look what we have learned about her connections to the effort to overturn Trump’s electoral defeat:
Support on Facebook of the rally that preceded the January 6 attack on the Capitol
In Facebook posts the morning of January 6 that were surfaced by Slate a day later, Ginni Thomas cheered on the protestors who were demonstrating in front of the White House in the rally that later turned into a violent assault on Congress’ certification of Biden’s victory.
“GOD BLESS EACH OF YOU STANDING UP or PRAYING,” she posted on her Facebook, along with a link to the livestream of the rally.
The posts were published before the protest turned into a riot. Later that week, she added a disclaimer, according to Slate, that said “[Note: written before violence in US Capitol].”
Apologies for sparring over 2020 election that broke out on listserv for Justice Thomas’ former clerks
Later that January, Thomas wrote an apology to members of listserv for Justice Thomas’ former clerk to defuse the sparring that erupted over the 2020 election.
The listserv was typically used to share personal and professional milestones among the circle of ex-clerks, and Thomas, in her apology, offered a “pledge to not let politics divide THIS family, and learn to speak more gently and knowingly across the divide.”
Prior to the apology, Thomas had used the listserv to express her disappointment with Trump’s defeat, writing to the former clerks, “Many of us are hurting, after leaving it all on the field, to preserve the best of this country.”
“I feel I have failed my parents who did their best and taught me to work to preserve liberties,” she wrote in the earlier email.
There was also a disagreement among a handful of the ex-clerks over the role John Eastman, a former Thomas clerk who spoke at the January 6 rally and was advising Trump behind the scenes, was playing to try to undermine the results.
A source told CNN at the time of Thomas’ apology that the dispute over the rally and Eastman’s role had been between the former clerks and not about what Thomas had expressed on the email listserv.
Calls that House Republicans boot GOP January 6 members from their conference
As the congressional investigation into the riot picked up steam, Ginni Thomas signed on to criticisms of the probe.
She joined several prominent conservative activists on a December 2021 letter that called for House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy to remove the two GOP members of the January 6 committee from the Republican conference.
“As part of [House Speaker Nancy] Pelosi’s team, Reps. [Liz] Cheney and [Adam] Kinzinger have deliberately sought to undermine the privacy and due process of their fellow Republicans, and those of private citizens, with improperly issued subpoenas and other investigatory tactics designed not to pursue any valid legislative end, but merely to exploit for the sake of political harassment and demagoguery,” the letter said.
A week later, Trump asked the Supreme Court to block the release of his White House documents to the committee. Among the arguments Trump was making was that the committee lacked a legislative purpose in the request and that it was on an improper fishing expedition.
When the court cleared the documents’ release in January 2022, Justice Thomas did not explain why he voted to block their disclosure.
Admission that she herself attended the January 6 rally before it turned violent
Thomas gave a rare interview to the conservative outlet Washington Free Beacon in March after back-to-back exposes in The New Yorker and New York Times Magazine examined her connections to the organizers of the January 6 rally. Thomas denied any role in the planning of the event but said she did attend the rally before leaving early because she got cold.
She said that she and her husband have “our own separate careers,” and that ” Clarence doesn’t discuss his work with me, and I don’t involve him in my work.”
“The legal lane is my husband’s — I never much enjoyed reading briefs and judicial opinions anyway and am quite happy to stay out of that lane,” she told the Free Beacon. “We do not discuss cases until opinions are public — and even then, our discussions have always been very general and limited to public information.”
Texts with Mark Meadows encouraging the bid to overturn Trump’s defeat
Not long after the Free Beacon interview, CNN revealed that the committee had obtained texts Thomas exchanged with Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows in which Thomas cheered the efforts by Trump’s advisers to overturn the results.
“Sounds like Sidney [Powell] and her team are getting inundated with evidence of fraud. Make a plan. Release the Kraken and save us from the left taking America down,” she wrote to Meadows on November 19, 2020.
(The texts were part of a collection that Meadows turned over to the committee voluntarily, before the legal dispute brought by Trump over the committee obtaining his White House materials.)
Thomas also texted Meadows days after the January 6 Capitol assault that “Most of us are disgusted” with the then-Vice President Mike Pence, who had resisted Trump’s demands that he disrupt Congress’ certification vote.
“Those who attacked the Capitol are not representative of our great teams of patriots for DJT!! Amazing times. The end of Liberty,” she wrote.
The Thomases declined to comment to CNN at the time the texts were reported.
Participation in an email campaign pressuring Arizona legislators to swap out Biden’s electors
In the weeks leading up to Congress’ certification vote, Ginni Thomas also participated in a mass email campaign calling on Arizona state legislators to meddle with the process for putting forward the state’s presidential electors, according to messages obtained by CNN and first reported by The Washington Post.
Thomas sent messages to 29 legislators in November and December 2020. The messages appear to have repeated pre-fabricated script, with the November tranche calling on the lawmakers to “fight back against fraud” and exercise what’s described as a constitutional authority to unilaterally choose a “clean” slate of presidential electors. The December message asked that the lawmakers, before choosing the electors, “consider what will happen to the nation we all love if you do not stand up and lead.”
One of her defenders, conservative attorney Mark Paoletta said the reporting around the emails was “ridiculous.”
“She joined a mass grassroots mass email campaign, along with 100,000 people to send emails to state legislators. She did not write or have any input in the email,” he wrote on Twitter.
At least one of the messages prompted a personalized exchange, however. Arizona state Rep. Shawnna Bolick, whose husband worked work with Clarence Thomas before Thomas joined the high bench, responded to Ginni’s message with a generic suggestion that she contact the state attorney general with any complaints, but with an added greeting hoping “you and Clarence are doing great!”
“Fun that this came to you,” Ginni wrote back. “Just part of our campaign to help states feel America’s eyes!!!”
Emails with a top legal architect of Trump’s election reversal schemes
The House January 6 committee has also obtained emails between Ginni Thomas and Eastman, the former Thomas clerk who played a prominent role advising Trump on how he could reverse his electoral defeat, the Washington Post, CNN and other outlets reported Wednesday evening.
Eastman published one of the emails with a Substack Thursday post downplaying their communications. In the December 4, 2020 email, Thomas asked Eastman and another recipient whose name is redacted to “present a status update to a group of grassroots state leaders on Tuesday, Dec 8th at 3:00 ET at a gathering called Frontliners that [redacted] helps me with.”
The email matches a description of a document referenced in the litigation over the Eastman emails the committee has sought. In a June 7 order requiring the disclosure of certain Eastman emails to the committee, Judge David O. Carter described two emails from a “high-profile leader” of a group “inviting Dr. Eastman to speak” at a meeting of the group and two emails containing “the meeting’s agenda.”
“Based on the agenda, Dr. Eastman discussed ‘State legislative actions that can reverse the media-called election for Joe Biden,'” Carter’s order said. “Another speaker gave an ‘update on [state] legislature actions regarding electoral votes.'”
Earlier Thursday, Democratic Rep. Bennie Thompson, who chairs the January 6 committee, said “It’s time for us to invite her to come talk.”
He said that she may come up “at some point” in the committee committee’s hearings, “but we’re still in the discovery phase.”
The-CNN-Wire
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CNN’s Melanie Zanona, Annie Grayer, Ryan Nobles, Katelyn Polantz, Zachary Cohen and Ariane de Vogue contributed to this report.
