Ginni Thomas testified to the Jan. 6 committee that she regrets sending texts to then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows pushing him to aggressively challenge the 2020 election, but said she never discussed it with her husband, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.
In March, The Washington Post reported Thomas had texted Meadows repeatedly, pushing against conceding the election while sharing conspiracy theories and criticizing then-Vice President Mike Pence.
According to a transcript released Friday of her deposition with investigators and members of the committee studying the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, Thomas said she stays in the “political” lane at home and her husband stays in a “legal” lane.
“He’s uninterested in politics,” she said. “I did not speak with him at all about the details of my post-election activities, which were minimal.”
She later added, “He had no idea I was texting Mark Meadows about the election,” though she conceded that a “best friend” she had talked to in one text to Meadows was likely her husband.
Thomas said she regrets the tone of her texts to Meadows, and that they became public. Her activities on former President Donald Trump’s behalf raised questions about her husband’s judicial objectivity. The Supreme Court rejected Trump’s request to block the release of White House records concerning the attack, but Justice Thomas dissented from that ruling, giving no reason.
Thomas, a longtime conservative activist, said she worked to get state legislators to focus on claims of voting fraud, and said she had a “gut” feeling starting on election night that something was wrong.
“I thought the election was not going the right way,” she testified. “I think I hoped that state legislators could identify fraud and irregularities in a timely way before it was too late.”
She also testified that she stepped away from some conservative activism around the election because, she said, they were discussing legal matters and her presence, given her husband’s job, could have a “chilling” effect on some people.
But she continued to talk to Meadows and other top White House advisers. She said she remembers sending an email to Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, trying to “buck him up and encourage him to stand firm until all of the evidence is in.”
And she said she was disappointed in Pence for wanting to concede the election before Trump was willing to do so. On Jan. 10, 2021, she sent a text saying “most of us are disgusted with the VP and are in a listening mode to see where to fight with our teams.”
She also texted Meadows that Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s adviser on overturning the election, had brought tears to her eyes when he and lawyer Sidney Powell held a news conference alleging election fraud. She also had pushed Meadows to “make a plan, release the Kraken, and save us from the left taking America down,” a reference to Powell’s nickname.
“I was just hopeful that someone with capacity could get at the fraud,” she told the committee.
The Thomases faced scrutiny after her text messages to Meadows and other communications turned up. Some have suggested her husband should have recused himself from election-related cases given her involvement.
