Texts Show Ginni Thomas’s Embrace of Conspiracy
Theories
In the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election,
the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas was involved in a range of efforts to keep
President Donald J. Trump in power.
A hard-line conservative activist, Virginia Thomas,
the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas, had long been viewed with suspicion by the
Republican establishment. Yet her influence rose during the Trump
administration.
By Danny
Hakim, Jo Becker and Alan Feuer
March 26,
2022
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/26/us/politics/ginni-thomas-donald-trump.html
Two days
after the 2020 election, Virginia Thomas, the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas,
texted an old friend, Mark Meadows, the chief of staff to President Donald J.
Trump.
She sent
messages that had been making the rounds on pro-Trump sites, where anger over
the election echoed her own raw feelings, including this passage: “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 to face military tribunals for
sedition.”
Then she
added of this fanciful, if chilling, set of conspiracy theories: “I hope this
is true.”
She texted
Mr. Meadows again the next day. “Do not concede,” she wrote. “It takes time for
the army who is gathering for his back.”
The
messages were among a flurry of text traffic between Ms. Thomas and Mr. Meadows
that was revealed this past week, part of a trove of documents previously
turned over to the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the
Capitol. (Ms. Thomas has openly opposed the committee and called for
Republicans who serve on it to be expelled from the House Republican
conference.)
A hard-line
conservative activist, Ms. Thomas had long been viewed with suspicion by the
Republican establishment. Yet her influence had risen during the Trump
administration, especially after Mr. Meadows, who like Ms. Thomas has roots in
the Tea Party movement, became chief of staff. Now, an examination of her
texts, woven together with recent revelations of the depth of her efforts to
overturn the election, shows how firmly she was embedded in the conspiratorial
fringe of right-wing politics, even as that fringe was drawing ever closer to
the center of Republican power.
The disclosures
add urgency to questions about how Ms. Thomas may have leveraged her marriage
to Justice Thomas, who would be ruling on elections cases throughout the battle
over the 2020 vote and beyond. As his wife agitated for Mr. Trump and his aides
to turn aside the election results, Justice Thomas was Mr. Trump’s staunchest
ally on the Supreme Court and has remained so. This year, in January, he was
the only justice who noted a dissent when the court allowed the release of
records from the Trump White House related to the Jan. 6 attack.
Calls
intensified this past week for Justice Thomas to step aside from such cases.
Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, said on Friday that Justice Thomas
“needs to recuse himself from any case related to the Jan. 6 investigation, and
should Donald Trump run again, any case related to the 2024 election.”
The
Thomases have been a fiercely close couple for decades. In his memoir, Justice
Thomas wrote that they were “one being — an amalgam” and called her his “best
friend.” She often uses similar language to describe her husband.
In one of
his texts to Ms. Thomas, Mr. Meadows called the election a “fight of good
versus evil” and added: “Evil always looks like the victor until the King of
Kings triumphs. Do not grow weary in well doing. The fight continues.”
“Thank
you!! Needed that!” Ms. Thomas replied. “This plus a conversation with my best
friend just now… I will try to keep holding on. America is worth it!”
Ms.
Thomas’s texts to Mr. Meadows tap into a deep well of debunked conspiracy
theories. References to the rounding up of elected officials, reporters and
bureaucrats for military tribunals at Guantánamo Bay are drawn from QAnon,
which imagines Satan-worshipping leaders running the country and trafficking
children.
Yet in the
days after the election, Ms. Thomas had far more standing to take action than
most who embraced such canards. As Mr. Trump courted Justice Thomas during his
years in office — curious about his popularity among the Republican base and
also about rumors that he might retire, aides said — the justice’s wife won
increasing access to the White House.
Though some
Trump aides came to view her with such suspicion that they assembled opposition
research meant to damage her standing with Mr. Trump — among other things, she
pressed the president to hire people who could not pass background checks, the
aides said — her clout grew with time.
The arc of
her political career had also led her to a powerful new platform. Ms. Thomas
had started out working for establishment right-leaning organizations like the
Heritage Foundation and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. But her desire for more
radical change had led her to the Tea Party, and increasingly to the party’s
fringes. Mr. Meadows, who was appointed chief of staff in March 2020, held
similar views and has attended meetings of Groundswell, a group that Ms. Thomas
founded in 2013 after consulting with Stephen K. Bannon, who would later become
Mr. Trump’s chief strategist.
With their
brand of conservatism ascendant, Ms. Thomas had been appointed in 2019 to the
nine-member board of CNP Action, an offshoot of a secretive but influential
conservative group called the Council for National Policy, whose membership
includes leaders of the National Rifle Association, the Family Research Council
and the Federalist Society.
The New
York Times Magazine, in a profile of the Thomases published last month,
detailed CNP Action’s assertive role in efforts to overturn the presidential
election. That included circulating a document to its members in November 2020
urging them to pressure Republican lawmakers in swing states to challenge the
results and appoint alternate slates of electors: “Demand that they not abandon
their Constitutional responsibilities during a time such as this,” the document
said.
In one of
her texts, the contents of which were earlier reported by The Washington Post
and CBS News, Ms. Thomas sent Mr. Meadows a link to a video featuring Steve
Pieczenik, a former State Department official who was claiming that mail-in
ballots had been watermarked as part of an elaborate government sting operation
to catch voter fraud. Mr. Pieczenik previously appeared on a webcast with the
conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and claimed that the 2012 school massacre in
Newtown, Conn., was a false-flag operation, a notion that has been thoroughly
debunked.
On Nov. 19,
Ms. Thomas promoted the efforts of Sidney Powell, the Trump lawyer who spent
much of the postelection period spreading conspiracy theories. “Sidney and her
team are getting inundated with evidence of fraud,” Ms. Thomas wrote to Mr.
Meadows. “Make a plan. Release the Kraken and save us from the left taking
America down.”
That same
day, Ms. Powell held a news conference with Rudolph W. Giuliani, one of Mr.
Trump’s lawyers, at the Republican National Committee headquarters in
Washington. There, she laid out baseless allegations that a cabal that included
Chinese software firms, international shell companies and the financier George
Soros had conspired to hack America’s voting machines.
At that
time, Ms. Powell was in the early stages of preparing four federal lawsuits
that would present this purported plot as a reason for judges to overturn the
election results. She nicknamed her suits the “Krakens,” referring to a giant
octopus-like sea creature.
Virginia
Thomas’ text messages. In the weeks before the Capitol riot, Virginia Thomas,
the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, sent several text messages
imploring Mark Meadows, President Donald J. Trump’s chief of staff, to take
steps to overturn the vote. The messages appear to have exposed a rift within
the House committee investigating the attack.
Potential
contempt charges. The House committee investigating the attack on Jan. 6 said
that it would consider contempt of Congress charges against Peter Navarro, a
former White House adviser, and Dan Scavino Jr., a former deputy chief of
staff, for refusing to comply with its subpoenas.
Requests to
“rescind” the election. Representative Mo Brooks, who challenged President
Biden’s victory on Jan. 6, claimed that Donald J. Trump had asked him to
illegally “rescind” the election. The statement came after Mr. Trump withdrew
his endorsement of Mr. Brooks in the G.O.P. primary for Alabama’s Senate seat.
By Dec. 10,
John Eastman, a former Supreme Court clerk for Justice Thomas and a close
friend of the Thomases, went on “War Room,” a podcast hosted by Mr. Bannon.
Mr. Eastman
urged the Supreme Court to intervene and said the country was in the midst of a
constitutional crisis. Behind the scenes, he was advising Mr. Trump and his
campaign on a proposal regarded as outlandish by many other lawyers — that Vice
President Mike Pence could refuse to accept swing-state electoral votes and
send them back to the state legislatures when he presided over the certification
of the election in a joint session of Congress on Jan. 6. Mr. Eastman’s role
would only become fully clear months later.
Around the
same time, CNP Action, with Ms. Thomas on its board, circulated a report titled
“Five States and the Election Irregularities and Issues,” focusing on five
swing states where Mr. Trump and his allies were already pressing litigation.
The report
warned that time was running out for the courts to “declare the elections null
and void”; an accompanying newsletter pressed for swing states to turn back the
voters’ will and name an alternate slate of electors. Cleta Mitchell, a friend
of Ms. Thomas who was one of the election lawyers advising Mr. Trump, was a
co-author of the report.
Ms. Thomas
has not responded to requests for comment. In recently published remarks, she
downplayed her role at CNP Action but also said she had attended the Jan. 6
rally at the Ellipse in Washington and “was disappointed and frustrated that
there was violence that happened following a peaceful gathering.”
One of the
rally organizers, Dustin Stockton, told The Times that Ms. Thomas had played a
mediating role among different factions of organizers ahead of the rally. Ms.
Thomas disputed that account and said she “played no role with those who were
planning and leading the Jan. 6 events,” a claim undercut by her communications
with Mr. Meadows, who was deeply involved in planning the protests that led up
to the storming of the Capitol.
A number of
her allies and associates have rallied around her in recent weeks. Two fellow
members of the Council for National Policy — Edwin Meese III, who was attorney
general in the Reagan administration, and J. Kenneth Blackwell, a former Ohio
secretary of state — published a joint defense of the Thomases earlier this
year. Recent reporting about her, they wrote, amounted to “cancel culture taken
to a level that threatens our institutions of government” and was an attempt
“to delegitimize a distinguished and senior member of the best-functioning
branch of the federal government by smearing his wife.”
Yet in the
immediate aftermath of Jan. 6, the Council for National Policy circulated in
its newsletter a memo, written by one of its members, that outlined strategies
to make the Capitol riot seem more palatable. “Drive the narrative that it was
mostly peaceful protests,” the memo advised. “Amplify the concerns of the protesters
and give them legitimacy.”
On Jan. 10,
Ms. Thomas texted Mr. Meadows to express her disgust that Mr. Pence had not
gone along with efforts to keep Mr. Trump in power. “We are living in what
feels like the end of America,” she wrote. “Most of us are disgusted with the
VP and are in listening mode to see where to fight with our teams. Those who
attacked the Capitol are not representative of our great teams of patriots for
DJT!! Amazing times. The end of liberty.”
In her
speeches and communications with other activists, Ms. Thomas regularly invokes
her husband’s name. Last summer, she invited Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, a
Republican, to speak at a meeting of Groundswell, which she referred to as a
“cone of silence coalition.” In an email to Mr. DeSantis’s staff, which was
obtained through a public records request by the watchdog group American
Oversight, she wrote that the justice had been in contact with the governor “on
various things of late.”
“We start
and end each meeting with prayer, but the Left has all the cultural institutions
now and seem to be weaponizing them against conservatives and basic freedoms,”
she said in her email, adding that she was hoping Mr. DeSantis could “pick us
up and refocus us — as Washington is not where our hope lies.”
Danny Hakim
is an investigative reporter. He has been a European economics correspondent
and bureau chief in Albany and Detroit. He was also a lead reporter on the team
awarded the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News. @dannyhakim • Facebook
Jo Becker
is a reporter in the investigative unit and a three-time Pulitzer Prize winner.
She is the author of “Forcing the Spring: Inside the Fight for Marriage
Equality.” @Jo_Becker
Alan Feuer
covers courts and criminal justice for the Metro desk. He has written about
mobsters, jails, police misconduct, wrongful convictions, government corruption
and El Chapo, the jailed chief of the Sinaloa drug cartel. He joined The
Times in 1999. @alanfeuer
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