Ginni Thomas Texts Expose Rift in House Jan. 6 Panel
Luke Broadwater, Jo Becker, Maggie Haberman and Alan Feuer
Sat, March 26, 2022
Peter Navarro, former trade advisor to the White House, speaks to reporters on Capitol Hill in Washington, on Oct. 30, 2020. (Anna Moneymaker/The New York Times).
WASHINGTON — Buried in the thousands of documents that Mark Meadows, former President Donald Trump’s final White House chief of staff, turned over late last year to the House committee examining the Jan. 6 attack were text messages that presented the panel with a political land mine: what to do about Virginia Thomas, wife of Justice Clarence Thomas.
The messages showed that Thomas, who goes by Ginni, relentlessly urged Meadows to overturn the 2020 presidential election, which she called a “heist,” and indicated that she reached out to Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, about Trump’s legal efforts to keep power. She even suggested the lawyer who should be put in charge of that effort.
The public disclosure of the messages Thursday focused new attention on one avenue of the investigation and risked creating a rare rift within the committee about how aggressively to pursue it, including whether to seek testimony from Ginni Thomas.
In the Thomases, the committee is up against a couple that has deep networks of support across the conservative movement and Washington, including inside the committee. The panel’s Republican vice chair, Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, has led the charge in holding Trump to account for his efforts to overturn the election but has wanted to avoid any aggressive effort that, in her view, could unfairly tarnish Justice Thomas, the senior member of the Supreme Court and an icon among the Republican base.
So although a debate has broken out inside the committee about summoning Ginni Thomas to testify, the panel at this point has no plans to do so, leaving some Democrats frustrated. That could change, however: On Friday, despite the potential for political backlash, Cheney indicated she has no objection to the panel asking Ginni Thomas for a voluntary interview.
A New York Times Magazine investigation last month examined the political and personal history of Ginni Thomas and her husband. That included her role in efforts to overturn the election from her perch on the nine-member board of CNP Action, a conservative group that helped advance the “Stop the Steal” movement, and in mediating between feuding factions of organizers “so that there wouldn’t be any division around Jan. 6,” as one organizer put it.
During that period, the Supreme Court was considering a number of cases related to the election, with Justice Thomas taking positions at times sympathetic to Trump’s efforts to challenge the outcome.
This month, Ginni Thomas acknowledged attending the rally that preceded the violence in an interview with a conservative news outlet, but otherwise downplayed her role. Then came disclosure of the texts to Meadows, the contents of which were earlier reported by The Washington Post and CBS News.
If the committee does not summon Ginni Thomas, some legal analysts said, it runs the risk of appearing to have a double standard. The panel has taken an aggressive posture toward many other potential witnesses, issuing subpoenas for bank and phone records of both high-ranking allies of the former president and low-level aides with only a tangential connection to the events of Jan. 6.
“I think it would be a dereliction not to bring her in and talk to her,” said Kimberly Wehle, a University of Baltimore law professor who has closely tracked the committee’s work. “It certainly is inconsistent with their neutral, ‘find the facts where they go’ type of approach to this.”
The committee’s light touch with Ginni Thomas to date reflects a number of considerations by both members and investigators, according to people familiar with the inquiry. Some saw the pursuit of Ginni Thomas as a distraction from more important targets. Others worried that pursuing Ginni Thomas could by implication sully Justice Thomas’ reputation. Still others argued that the panel could not know the full extent of her role without further questioning. And some members of the committee saw the text messages for the first time Thursday.
The lack of consensus also underscores the extent to which Justice Thomas’ shadow, including his network of supporters and former clerks, looms over various aspects of the investigation. Three of Justice Thomas’ former clerks — a federal judge, a top committee investigator and a key adviser to Trump — have major roles in the matter.
A main strategist in the effort to try to overturn the election, lawyer John Eastman, was a former clerk of Justice Thomas’. John Wood, one of the Jan. 6 committee’s top investigators and another former Thomas clerk, is leading the so-called gold team examining Trump’s inner circle. And a federal judge, Carl J. Nichols, who is hearing cases related to the Capitol riot, is also a former clerk of Justice Thomas’.
This dynamic was on display during a deposition in December of Eastman, who was subpoenaed by the committee to talk about his role in helping Trump try to overturn the election. Wood began the questioning by noting that Eastman had once served as a clerk to Justice Thomas.
“Like you, John,” Eastman shot back.
For at least several weeks, the committee’s senior level has discussed whether to call Ginni Thomas to testify, as well as whether to issue subpoenas for any other communications she may have had with the White House or the president’s legal team about the election, including a message she told Meadows she sent to Kushner, according to people with knowledge of the investigation.
There are plenty of leads to pursue. The committee could recall Dustin Stockton, a rally organizer who told the Times about a conversation he had with Caroline Wren, a Republican who helped raise money for the Jan. 6 “March for America,” in which she described Ginni Thomas’ peacemaking role. They could also recall Amy Kremer and Jenny Beth Martin, two rally organizers close to Ginni Thomas, to ask about her post-election communications with them.
It could subpoena records from not only Ginni Thomas, but also CNP Action, which was deeply involved in the effort to spread falsehoods about the election. Investigators could ask her the name of the friend she was referring to when she wrote back to thank Meadows, saying: “Needed that! This plus a conversation with my best friend just now…I will try to keep holding on.” (Ginni Thomas and her husband have publicly referred to each other as their best friends.) Ultimately, they could ask her whether she had discussed Trump’s fight to overturn the election with her husband.
Justice Thomas has declined to comment on the matter, through a representative. A lawyer for Ginni Thomas did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Privately, some Republicans conceded that Ginni Thomas’ texts to Meadows were a mistake — particularly ones in which she urged Meadows to make Sidney Powell, a lawyer who had advocated conspiracy theories about voting machines being hacked, the face of the legal team. Yet the Republicans, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they worried about being seen as critical of Ginni Thomas, predicted that if Democrats increased pressure on the Thomases, the right would counter with more calls for investigations of Democrats if Republicans win back the House in the November elections.
Conservatives have long viewed criticism of his Ginni Thomas as an attack on Justice Thomas. Her supporters include lawyer Mark Paoletta, who was Justice Thomas’ “sherpa,” introducing him to senators for his confirmation hearings.
The news media “seeks to portray Ginni Thomas’s public policy work as a threat to the Supreme Court in order to pressure Thomas to recuse himself from any case that Ginni, or any of the groups she has worked with, has even commented on,” he wrote in an op-ed for The Washington Examiner.
Justice Thomas could in the coming months consider a long list of important legal issues surrounding Jan. 6. He may be called upon to rule on questions involving the prosecution for contempt of Congress of Steve Bannon, a onetime aide to Trump, or concerning the House committee’s efforts to obtain emails from Eastman.
Nichols is overseeing the criminal prosecution of Bannon, who was charged with contempt of Congress in November after refusing to comply with a subpoena from the committee.
Nichols is also handling the high-profile defamation lawsuits that Dominion Voting Systems filed last year against two lawyers closely associated with Trump: Rudy Giuliani and Powell.
Perhaps most important, Nichols is the only federal jurist in Washington so far to have thrown out the key obstruction of Congress charge that the Justice Department has used against hundreds of Jan. 6 defendants to describe the political results of a pro-Trump mob storming into the Capitol. Differing from 12 other federal judges, Nichols wrote in a ruling this month that prosecutors had stretched the statute beyond its original intent.
The ruling could prove important to the House committee as it weighs whether to make a criminal referral to the Justice Department of Trump.
Cheney has indicated that she believes Trump may have violated the obstruction of Congress law, going so far as to read from the text of the statute on the House floor. If prosecutors ultimately use the law to charge Trump, it could face scrutiny from Nichols — or from another district judge who could consider his opinion.
Such a case, too, could eventually be considered by the Supreme Court and Justice Thomas.
© 2022 The New York Times Company
Luke Broadwater, Jo Becker, Maggie Haberman and Alan Feuer
Sat, March 26, 2022
Peter Navarro, former trade advisor to the White House, speaks to reporters on Capitol Hill in Washington, on Oct. 30, 2020. (Anna Moneymaker/The New York Times).
WASHINGTON — Buried in the thousands of documents that Mark Meadows, former President Donald Trump’s final White House chief of staff, turned over late last year to the House committee examining the Jan. 6 attack were text messages that presented the panel with a political land mine: what to do about Virginia Thomas, wife of Justice Clarence Thomas.
The messages showed that Thomas, who goes by Ginni, relentlessly urged Meadows to overturn the 2020 presidential election, which she called a “heist,” and indicated that she reached out to Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, about Trump’s legal efforts to keep power. She even suggested the lawyer who should be put in charge of that effort.
The public disclosure of the messages Thursday focused new attention on one avenue of the investigation and risked creating a rare rift within the committee about how aggressively to pursue it, including whether to seek testimony from Ginni Thomas.
In the Thomases, the committee is up against a couple that has deep networks of support across the conservative movement and Washington, including inside the committee. The panel’s Republican vice chair, Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, has led the charge in holding Trump to account for his efforts to overturn the election but has wanted to avoid any aggressive effort that, in her view, could unfairly tarnish Justice Thomas, the senior member of the Supreme Court and an icon among the Republican base.
So although a debate has broken out inside the committee about summoning Ginni Thomas to testify, the panel at this point has no plans to do so, leaving some Democrats frustrated. That could change, however: On Friday, despite the potential for political backlash, Cheney indicated she has no objection to the panel asking Ginni Thomas for a voluntary interview.
A New York Times Magazine investigation last month examined the political and personal history of Ginni Thomas and her husband. That included her role in efforts to overturn the election from her perch on the nine-member board of CNP Action, a conservative group that helped advance the “Stop the Steal” movement, and in mediating between feuding factions of organizers “so that there wouldn’t be any division around Jan. 6,” as one organizer put it.
During that period, the Supreme Court was considering a number of cases related to the election, with Justice Thomas taking positions at times sympathetic to Trump’s efforts to challenge the outcome.
This month, Ginni Thomas acknowledged attending the rally that preceded the violence in an interview with a conservative news outlet, but otherwise downplayed her role. Then came disclosure of the texts to Meadows, the contents of which were earlier reported by The Washington Post and CBS News.
If the committee does not summon Ginni Thomas, some legal analysts said, it runs the risk of appearing to have a double standard. The panel has taken an aggressive posture toward many other potential witnesses, issuing subpoenas for bank and phone records of both high-ranking allies of the former president and low-level aides with only a tangential connection to the events of Jan. 6.
“I think it would be a dereliction not to bring her in and talk to her,” said Kimberly Wehle, a University of Baltimore law professor who has closely tracked the committee’s work. “It certainly is inconsistent with their neutral, ‘find the facts where they go’ type of approach to this.”
The committee’s light touch with Ginni Thomas to date reflects a number of considerations by both members and investigators, according to people familiar with the inquiry. Some saw the pursuit of Ginni Thomas as a distraction from more important targets. Others worried that pursuing Ginni Thomas could by implication sully Justice Thomas’ reputation. Still others argued that the panel could not know the full extent of her role without further questioning. And some members of the committee saw the text messages for the first time Thursday.
The lack of consensus also underscores the extent to which Justice Thomas’ shadow, including his network of supporters and former clerks, looms over various aspects of the investigation. Three of Justice Thomas’ former clerks — a federal judge, a top committee investigator and a key adviser to Trump — have major roles in the matter.
A main strategist in the effort to try to overturn the election, lawyer John Eastman, was a former clerk of Justice Thomas’. John Wood, one of the Jan. 6 committee’s top investigators and another former Thomas clerk, is leading the so-called gold team examining Trump’s inner circle. And a federal judge, Carl J. Nichols, who is hearing cases related to the Capitol riot, is also a former clerk of Justice Thomas’.
This dynamic was on display during a deposition in December of Eastman, who was subpoenaed by the committee to talk about his role in helping Trump try to overturn the election. Wood began the questioning by noting that Eastman had once served as a clerk to Justice Thomas.
“Like you, John,” Eastman shot back.
For at least several weeks, the committee’s senior level has discussed whether to call Ginni Thomas to testify, as well as whether to issue subpoenas for any other communications she may have had with the White House or the president’s legal team about the election, including a message she told Meadows she sent to Kushner, according to people with knowledge of the investigation.
There are plenty of leads to pursue. The committee could recall Dustin Stockton, a rally organizer who told the Times about a conversation he had with Caroline Wren, a Republican who helped raise money for the Jan. 6 “March for America,” in which she described Ginni Thomas’ peacemaking role. They could also recall Amy Kremer and Jenny Beth Martin, two rally organizers close to Ginni Thomas, to ask about her post-election communications with them.
It could subpoena records from not only Ginni Thomas, but also CNP Action, which was deeply involved in the effort to spread falsehoods about the election. Investigators could ask her the name of the friend she was referring to when she wrote back to thank Meadows, saying: “Needed that! This plus a conversation with my best friend just now…I will try to keep holding on.” (Ginni Thomas and her husband have publicly referred to each other as their best friends.) Ultimately, they could ask her whether she had discussed Trump’s fight to overturn the election with her husband.
Justice Thomas has declined to comment on the matter, through a representative. A lawyer for Ginni Thomas did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Privately, some Republicans conceded that Ginni Thomas’ texts to Meadows were a mistake — particularly ones in which she urged Meadows to make Sidney Powell, a lawyer who had advocated conspiracy theories about voting machines being hacked, the face of the legal team. Yet the Republicans, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they worried about being seen as critical of Ginni Thomas, predicted that if Democrats increased pressure on the Thomases, the right would counter with more calls for investigations of Democrats if Republicans win back the House in the November elections.
Conservatives have long viewed criticism of his Ginni Thomas as an attack on Justice Thomas. Her supporters include lawyer Mark Paoletta, who was Justice Thomas’ “sherpa,” introducing him to senators for his confirmation hearings.
The news media “seeks to portray Ginni Thomas’s public policy work as a threat to the Supreme Court in order to pressure Thomas to recuse himself from any case that Ginni, or any of the groups she has worked with, has even commented on,” he wrote in an op-ed for The Washington Examiner.
Justice Thomas could in the coming months consider a long list of important legal issues surrounding Jan. 6. He may be called upon to rule on questions involving the prosecution for contempt of Congress of Steve Bannon, a onetime aide to Trump, or concerning the House committee’s efforts to obtain emails from Eastman.
Nichols is overseeing the criminal prosecution of Bannon, who was charged with contempt of Congress in November after refusing to comply with a subpoena from the committee.
Nichols is also handling the high-profile defamation lawsuits that Dominion Voting Systems filed last year against two lawyers closely associated with Trump: Rudy Giuliani and Powell.
Perhaps most important, Nichols is the only federal jurist in Washington so far to have thrown out the key obstruction of Congress charge that the Justice Department has used against hundreds of Jan. 6 defendants to describe the political results of a pro-Trump mob storming into the Capitol. Differing from 12 other federal judges, Nichols wrote in a ruling this month that prosecutors had stretched the statute beyond its original intent.
The ruling could prove important to the House committee as it weighs whether to make a criminal referral to the Justice Department of Trump.
Cheney has indicated that she believes Trump may have violated the obstruction of Congress law, going so far as to read from the text of the statute on the House floor. If prosecutors ultimately use the law to charge Trump, it could face scrutiny from Nichols — or from another district judge who could consider his opinion.
Such a case, too, could eventually be considered by the Supreme Court and Justice Thomas.
© 2022 The New York Times Company
Jacob Crosse
wsws.org
On Thursday, the Washington Post and CBS News reported that Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, wife of arch-conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, texted former President Donald Trump’s Chief of Staff Mark Meadows repeatedly after the November 2020 election in support of Trump’s dictatorial efforts. In her messages to Meadows, Thomas endorsed fascistic QAnon conspiracy theories, calling for Trump’s political enemies to be “arrested & detained” and face “military tribunals, for sedition.”
Virginia "Ginni" Lamp Thomas (Wikimedia Commons)The messages confirm that Virginia Thomas, a lifelong Republican Party operative who married her “best friend” Clarence Thomas four years prior to his accession to the Supreme Court in 1991, coordinated with the White House chief of staff and Republican lawmakers to overturn the election of Biden and with it, American democracy.
The texts, which regurgitate verbatim arguments advanced on the fascist InfoWars program hosted by Alex Jones, follow an admission by Thomas earlier this month that she participated in the January 6 “Stop the Steal” rally held outside the White House. The rally coincided with the attack on Congress by far-right militia elements, white supremacists and pro-Trump sycophants who were summoned by the aspiring-dictator and his Republican allies to occupy the Capitol, take politicians hostage and block the Electoral College certification.
The text messages were part of a tranche of material turned over by Meadows last year to the January 6 House Select Committee charged with investigating Trump’s failed coup. Before Meadows ceased cooperating with the committee, he volunteered some 9,000 pages of documents, which included 2,320 texts, at least 29 of which were shared between Thomas and Meadows. While Meadows was held in contempt of Congress for his refusal to cooperate with the committee in December 2021, he has yet to be arraigned over four months later.
In their report, Bob Woodward and Robert Costa write that the texts “show for the first time how Ginni Thomas used her access to Trump’s inner circle to promote and seek to guide the president’s strategy to overturn the election results—and how receptive and grateful Meadows said he was to receive her advice.” Woodward and Costa noted that the text messages have been independently verified by five sources who have seen the original documents, as well as Meadows’ attorney, George Terwilliger III, who told the Post that “nothing about the text messages present any legal issues.”
The first of the 29 messages between Thomas and Meadows was sent by Thomas on November 5, 2020, two days after the election. In the text, Thomas included a link to a YouTube video named “TRUMP STING w CIA Director Steve Pieczenik, The Biggest Election Story in History, QFS-BLOCKCHAIN.”
Pieczenik was a deputy assistant secretary of state in the Carter administration and worked under Henry Kissinger, Cyrus Vance and James Baker in the US State Department.
A former member of the Council on Foreign Relations, Pieczenik has made multiple appearances on InfoWars in the last decade. While on the program, Pieczenik has echoed the disgusting lies of its host, Jones, that the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre was a “false flag” operation engineered by the “deep state” as a pretext to abolish the Second Amendment. He also appears to have been the originator of the QAnon claim that alleged “legitimate ballots” had a special encryption code printed on them to distinguish them from fraudulent, i.e., Biden, ballots.
Commenting on Pieczenik’s video, Thomas wrote to Meadows, “I hope this is true; never heard anything like this before, or even a hint of it. Possible???”
“Watermarked ballots in over 12 states have been part of a huge Trump & military white hat sting operation in 12 key battleground states,” she added.
Throughout his presidency Trump embraced the QAnon movement, which posits that Trump will lead a military coup, dubbed “The Storm,” that will end in a purge of his political opponents. Trump, and other Republican politicians, frequently share QAnon talking points on social media accounts and most recently in Supreme Court confirmation hearings. Trump co-conspirators and sitting Republican representatives Lauren Boebert (Colorado) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (Georgia) are known adherents to the far-right movement.
In the same November 5 message to Meadows, Thomas shared a right-wing meme proliferating on “Stop the Steal” social media pages at the time which read: “Biden crime family & ballot fraud co-conspirators (elected officials, bureaucrats, social media censorship mongers, fake stream media reporters, etc) are being arrested & detained for ballot fraud right now & over coming days, & will be living in barges off GITMO [Guantanamo Bay Prison] to face military tribunals for sedition.”
The day before Biden was declared the winner of the 2020 election, on November 6, Thomas sent another message to Meadows imploring him not to “… concede. It takes time for the army who is gathering for his back.” The Post notes that it is “unclear” if Meadows responded, however, Trump continued to take Thomas’ advice, refusing to concede the election while vowing to take his dictatorial ambitions to the Supreme Court.
“We’ll be going to the US Supreme Court—we want all voting to stop,” Trump declared on November 4.
On November 10 Thomas texted Meadows again, telling him he was “in my prayers!!” and urged him to continue supporting Trump’s coup plotting. “Help This Great President stand firm” against “the greatest Heist of our History.” Since his 2016 campaign, Trump claimed that the only way he could lose an election is due to “fraud.” Since his defeat to Biden, Trump has repeatedly referred to the 2020 election, in which he lost the Electoral College vote 306–232 and the popular vote by over 7 million, as the “Crime of the Century.”
Meadows replied: “I will stand firm. We will fight until there is no fight left. Our country is too precious to give up on. Thanks for all you do,” to which Thomas replied some nine minutes later, “Tearing up and praying for you guys!!!!! So proud to know you!!”
Later that same night, Thomas wrote to Meadows expressing her frustration that more Republicans in Congress were not rallying enough far-right lumpen elements in furtherance of the coup, “House and Senate guys are pathetic too… only 4 GOP House members seen out in street rallies with grassroots… [Texas Rep. Louie] Gohmert, [Ohio Rep. Jim] Jordan, [Arizona Rep. Paul] Gosar and [Texas Rep. Chip] Roy.”
In addition to coordinating with Meadows and Republican lawmakers, the texts revealed that Thomas was also in communication with senior White House adviser and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner. On November 13, the Post report claims she texted Meadows, “Just forwarded to [your] gmail an email I sent Jared this am. Sidney Powell & improved coordination now will help the cavalry come and Fraud exposed and America saved.”
A November 19 text from Thomas to Meadows reveals her avid support for the far-right lawyer Powell. Urging Meadows to make Powell the “lead and the face” of their efforts to overturn the election, Thomas wrote, “Mark (don’t want to wake you)… Sounds like Sidney 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.”
In the same thread, Thomas, revealing her knowledge of inner-workings within the White House, something she no doubt shared with her Supreme Court justice husband, advised Meadows on managing White House personnel.
“Suggestion: You need to buck up your team on the inside, Mark. The lower level insiders are scared, fearful or sending out signals of hopelessness vs an awareness of the existential threat to America right now. You can buck them up, strengthen their spirits.”
Thomas wrote, “You guys fold, the evil just moves fast down underneath you all. Lots of intensifying threats coming to ACB [Justice Amy Coney Barrett] and others.” Meadows replied to the text later that same day, “Thanks so much.”
The same day that Thomas texted Meadows to “Release the Kraken,” Trump coup lawyers Rudy Giuliani, Jenna Ellis and Sidney Powell held a press conference where they alleged “communists” in China, Cuba and Venezuela, along with “antifa” elements and billionaire Holocaust survivor George Soros were part of a wide ranging plot to block the election of Trump through electoral fraud.
“Globalists, dictators, corporations, you name it—everybody’s against us except President Trump,” Powell declared in a fascist tirade.
The phrase “Release the Kraken” was popularized by Powell during an appearance she made on the Fox Business Network with Lou Dobbs on November 13. In her appearance Powell spewed election conspiracies and ended the interview claiming she was going “to release the Kraken.” However within three days of the deranged November 19 press conference, Trump, Giuliani and Ellis had soured on Powell, with Giuliani releasing a statement on November 22 saying she was not a member of the Trump legal team.
The same day as the statement, Thomas reached out to Meadows, expressing disappointment that Powell was no longer part of the inner coup circle. “Trying to understand the Sidney Powell distancing,” wrote Thomas.
Two days later, on November 24, Thomas wrote to Meadows: “I can’t see Americans swallowing the obvious fraud. Just going with one more thing with no frickin consequences… the whole coup and now this… we just cave to people wanting Biden to be anointed? Many of us can’t continue the GOP charade.” Meadows, agreeing with Thomas’ delusions, wrote, “You’re preaching to the choir. Very demoralizing.”
Meadows, adopting overt Christian themes, added that their joint efforts to overturn the election was “a fight of good versus evil. Evil always looks like the victor until the King of Kings triumphs. Do not grow weary in well doing. The fight continues. I have staked my career on it. Well at least my time in DC on it.”
The Post writes that Thomas replied: “Thank you!! Needed that! This plus a conversation with my best friend just now… I will try to keep holding on. America is worth it!” While Virginia never directly refers to her husband in the texts, the couple have frequently referred to each other as their respective “best friends.”
While Ginni Thomas was urging Trump’s chief of staff to overturn the election in early December, her husband argued that a Texas lawsuit advanced by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and other pro-Trump lawyers seeking to invalidate millions of voters in the “battleground” states of Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin should be heard by the Supreme Court. At the time, Justices Thomas and Samuel Alito wrote a joint statement saying they did not believe the court has “discretion to deny the filing of a bill of complaint in a case that falls without our original jurisdiction.”
After November 24, 2020, the Post report notes that there is “an unexplained gap in correspondence. The committee received one additional message sent by Thomas to Meadows, on Jan. 10, four days after the ‘Stop the Steal’ rally Thomas said she attended and the deadly attack on the Capitol.”
In that January 10 message, Thomas, echoing the sentiments of the fascist mob that broke into the Capitol, expressed her revulsion at Vice President Mike Pence’s unwillingness to unconstitutionally reject the electoral college vote of states Trump lost.
“We are living through what feels like the end of America,” Thomas bemoaned to Trump’s chief of staff. “Most of us are disgusted with the VP and are in listening mode to see where to fight with our teams.” In what could be a reference to the poor performance of the fascist militias who stormed the Capitol on Trump’s behalf, Thomas claimed that those “who attacked the Capitol are not representative of our great teams of patriots for DJT!!”
In addition to disproving Thomas’ lying claims that she “played no role with those who were planning and leading the January 6 events,” as she claimed in an interview earlier this month, the texts illuminate the obvious conflict of interest between Justice Thomas and any future court hearings pertaining to Trump’s failed coup.
In addition to supporting a hearing on the previously mentioned Texas lawsuit, earlier this year Clarence Thomas was the only justice to vote against allowing the release of records from the Trump White House pertaining to the attack. In a functioning democratic society, the justice would already have been impeached and removed from the bench, however, as of this writing, it is not even clear if he, recently discharged after being hospitalized this week, would even recuse himself from any future hearing related to January 6. Currently there is no legal mechanism that would force him to do so.
If Clarence Thomas does choose to recuse himself it will not be due to any pressure imposed on him by the Democratic Party. In a pathetic statement issued Friday morning, Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden meekly suggested that Thomas, “at the bare minimum … recuse himself from any case released to the January 6th investigation, and should Donald Trump run again, any case related to the 2024 election.”
That Wyden accepts that Trump will be free to “run again” in 2024 shows that there will be no accountability for Trump or any of his high-level co-conspirators if it is left to the Democratic Party and the courts, riddled with reactionaries like Thomas, to decide. That Trump and his far-right conspirators in the Republican Party and on the Supreme Court remain free to plot their next coup underscores that the only social force capable of defeating dictatorship and the rise of fascism is the international working class armed with a socialist program.
The texts, which regurgitate verbatim arguments advanced on the fascist InfoWars program hosted by Alex Jones, follow an admission by Thomas earlier this month that she participated in the January 6 “Stop the Steal” rally held outside the White House. The rally coincided with the attack on Congress by far-right militia elements, white supremacists and pro-Trump sycophants who were summoned by the aspiring-dictator and his Republican allies to occupy the Capitol, take politicians hostage and block the Electoral College certification.
The text messages were part of a tranche of material turned over by Meadows last year to the January 6 House Select Committee charged with investigating Trump’s failed coup. Before Meadows ceased cooperating with the committee, he volunteered some 9,000 pages of documents, which included 2,320 texts, at least 29 of which were shared between Thomas and Meadows. While Meadows was held in contempt of Congress for his refusal to cooperate with the committee in December 2021, he has yet to be arraigned over four months later.
In their report, Bob Woodward and Robert Costa write that the texts “show for the first time how Ginni Thomas used her access to Trump’s inner circle to promote and seek to guide the president’s strategy to overturn the election results—and how receptive and grateful Meadows said he was to receive her advice.” Woodward and Costa noted that the text messages have been independently verified by five sources who have seen the original documents, as well as Meadows’ attorney, George Terwilliger III, who told the Post that “nothing about the text messages present any legal issues.”
The first of the 29 messages between Thomas and Meadows was sent by Thomas on November 5, 2020, two days after the election. In the text, Thomas included a link to a YouTube video named “TRUMP STING w CIA Director Steve Pieczenik, The Biggest Election Story in History, QFS-BLOCKCHAIN.”
Pieczenik was a deputy assistant secretary of state in the Carter administration and worked under Henry Kissinger, Cyrus Vance and James Baker in the US State Department.
A former member of the Council on Foreign Relations, Pieczenik has made multiple appearances on InfoWars in the last decade. While on the program, Pieczenik has echoed the disgusting lies of its host, Jones, that the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre was a “false flag” operation engineered by the “deep state” as a pretext to abolish the Second Amendment. He also appears to have been the originator of the QAnon claim that alleged “legitimate ballots” had a special encryption code printed on them to distinguish them from fraudulent, i.e., Biden, ballots.
Commenting on Pieczenik’s video, Thomas wrote to Meadows, “I hope this is true; never heard anything like this before, or even a hint of it. Possible???”
“Watermarked ballots in over 12 states have been part of a huge Trump & military white hat sting operation in 12 key battleground states,” she added.
Throughout his presidency Trump embraced the QAnon movement, which posits that Trump will lead a military coup, dubbed “The Storm,” that will end in a purge of his political opponents. Trump, and other Republican politicians, frequently share QAnon talking points on social media accounts and most recently in Supreme Court confirmation hearings. Trump co-conspirators and sitting Republican representatives Lauren Boebert (Colorado) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (Georgia) are known adherents to the far-right movement.
In the same November 5 message to Meadows, Thomas shared a right-wing meme proliferating on “Stop the Steal” social media pages at the time which read: “Biden crime family & ballot fraud co-conspirators (elected officials, bureaucrats, social media censorship mongers, fake stream media reporters, etc) are being arrested & detained for ballot fraud right now & over coming days, & will be living in barges off GITMO [Guantanamo Bay Prison] to face military tribunals for sedition.”
The day before Biden was declared the winner of the 2020 election, on November 6, Thomas sent another message to Meadows imploring him not to “… concede. It takes time for the army who is gathering for his back.” The Post notes that it is “unclear” if Meadows responded, however, Trump continued to take Thomas’ advice, refusing to concede the election while vowing to take his dictatorial ambitions to the Supreme Court.
“We’ll be going to the US Supreme Court—we want all voting to stop,” Trump declared on November 4.
On November 10 Thomas texted Meadows again, telling him he was “in my prayers!!” and urged him to continue supporting Trump’s coup plotting. “Help This Great President stand firm” against “the greatest Heist of our History.” Since his 2016 campaign, Trump claimed that the only way he could lose an election is due to “fraud.” Since his defeat to Biden, Trump has repeatedly referred to the 2020 election, in which he lost the Electoral College vote 306–232 and the popular vote by over 7 million, as the “Crime of the Century.”
Meadows replied: “I will stand firm. We will fight until there is no fight left. Our country is too precious to give up on. Thanks for all you do,” to which Thomas replied some nine minutes later, “Tearing up and praying for you guys!!!!! So proud to know you!!”
Later that same night, Thomas wrote to Meadows expressing her frustration that more Republicans in Congress were not rallying enough far-right lumpen elements in furtherance of the coup, “House and Senate guys are pathetic too… only 4 GOP House members seen out in street rallies with grassroots… [Texas Rep. Louie] Gohmert, [Ohio Rep. Jim] Jordan, [Arizona Rep. Paul] Gosar and [Texas Rep. Chip] Roy.”
In addition to coordinating with Meadows and Republican lawmakers, the texts revealed that Thomas was also in communication with senior White House adviser and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner. On November 13, the Post report claims she texted Meadows, “Just forwarded to [your] gmail an email I sent Jared this am. Sidney Powell & improved coordination now will help the cavalry come and Fraud exposed and America saved.”
A November 19 text from Thomas to Meadows reveals her avid support for the far-right lawyer Powell. Urging Meadows to make Powell the “lead and the face” of their efforts to overturn the election, Thomas wrote, “Mark (don’t want to wake you)… Sounds like Sidney 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.”
In the same thread, Thomas, revealing her knowledge of inner-workings within the White House, something she no doubt shared with her Supreme Court justice husband, advised Meadows on managing White House personnel.
“Suggestion: You need to buck up your team on the inside, Mark. The lower level insiders are scared, fearful or sending out signals of hopelessness vs an awareness of the existential threat to America right now. You can buck them up, strengthen their spirits.”
Thomas wrote, “You guys fold, the evil just moves fast down underneath you all. Lots of intensifying threats coming to ACB [Justice Amy Coney Barrett] and others.” Meadows replied to the text later that same day, “Thanks so much.”
The same day that Thomas texted Meadows to “Release the Kraken,” Trump coup lawyers Rudy Giuliani, Jenna Ellis and Sidney Powell held a press conference where they alleged “communists” in China, Cuba and Venezuela, along with “antifa” elements and billionaire Holocaust survivor George Soros were part of a wide ranging plot to block the election of Trump through electoral fraud.
“Globalists, dictators, corporations, you name it—everybody’s against us except President Trump,” Powell declared in a fascist tirade.
The phrase “Release the Kraken” was popularized by Powell during an appearance she made on the Fox Business Network with Lou Dobbs on November 13. In her appearance Powell spewed election conspiracies and ended the interview claiming she was going “to release the Kraken.” However within three days of the deranged November 19 press conference, Trump, Giuliani and Ellis had soured on Powell, with Giuliani releasing a statement on November 22 saying she was not a member of the Trump legal team.
The same day as the statement, Thomas reached out to Meadows, expressing disappointment that Powell was no longer part of the inner coup circle. “Trying to understand the Sidney Powell distancing,” wrote Thomas.
Two days later, on November 24, Thomas wrote to Meadows: “I can’t see Americans swallowing the obvious fraud. Just going with one more thing with no frickin consequences… the whole coup and now this… we just cave to people wanting Biden to be anointed? Many of us can’t continue the GOP charade.” Meadows, agreeing with Thomas’ delusions, wrote, “You’re preaching to the choir. Very demoralizing.”
Meadows, adopting overt Christian themes, added that their joint efforts to overturn the election was “a fight of good versus evil. Evil always looks like the victor until the King of Kings triumphs. Do not grow weary in well doing. The fight continues. I have staked my career on it. Well at least my time in DC on it.”
The Post writes that Thomas replied: “Thank you!! Needed that! This plus a conversation with my best friend just now… I will try to keep holding on. America is worth it!” While Virginia never directly refers to her husband in the texts, the couple have frequently referred to each other as their respective “best friends.”
While Ginni Thomas was urging Trump’s chief of staff to overturn the election in early December, her husband argued that a Texas lawsuit advanced by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and other pro-Trump lawyers seeking to invalidate millions of voters in the “battleground” states of Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin should be heard by the Supreme Court. At the time, Justices Thomas and Samuel Alito wrote a joint statement saying they did not believe the court has “discretion to deny the filing of a bill of complaint in a case that falls without our original jurisdiction.”
After November 24, 2020, the Post report notes that there is “an unexplained gap in correspondence. The committee received one additional message sent by Thomas to Meadows, on Jan. 10, four days after the ‘Stop the Steal’ rally Thomas said she attended and the deadly attack on the Capitol.”
In that January 10 message, Thomas, echoing the sentiments of the fascist mob that broke into the Capitol, expressed her revulsion at Vice President Mike Pence’s unwillingness to unconstitutionally reject the electoral college vote of states Trump lost.
“We are living through what feels like the end of America,” Thomas bemoaned to Trump’s chief of staff. “Most of us are disgusted with the VP and are in listening mode to see where to fight with our teams.” In what could be a reference to the poor performance of the fascist militias who stormed the Capitol on Trump’s behalf, Thomas claimed that those “who attacked the Capitol are not representative of our great teams of patriots for DJT!!”
In addition to disproving Thomas’ lying claims that she “played no role with those who were planning and leading the January 6 events,” as she claimed in an interview earlier this month, the texts illuminate the obvious conflict of interest between Justice Thomas and any future court hearings pertaining to Trump’s failed coup.
In addition to supporting a hearing on the previously mentioned Texas lawsuit, earlier this year Clarence Thomas was the only justice to vote against allowing the release of records from the Trump White House pertaining to the attack. In a functioning democratic society, the justice would already have been impeached and removed from the bench, however, as of this writing, it is not even clear if he, recently discharged after being hospitalized this week, would even recuse himself from any future hearing related to January 6. Currently there is no legal mechanism that would force him to do so.
If Clarence Thomas does choose to recuse himself it will not be due to any pressure imposed on him by the Democratic Party. In a pathetic statement issued Friday morning, Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden meekly suggested that Thomas, “at the bare minimum … recuse himself from any case released to the January 6th investigation, and should Donald Trump run again, any case related to the 2024 election.”
That Wyden accepts that Trump will be free to “run again” in 2024 shows that there will be no accountability for Trump or any of his high-level co-conspirators if it is left to the Democratic Party and the courts, riddled with reactionaries like Thomas, to decide. That Trump and his far-right conspirators in the Republican Party and on the Supreme Court remain free to plot their next coup underscores that the only social force capable of defeating dictatorship and the rise of fascism is the international working class armed with a socialist program.
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