Virginia Thomas, a conservative political activist and wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, urged the White House to continue insisting that Donald Trump won the 2020 election, even as state vote totals showed otherwise, text messages reveal.
Ms Thomas, who also works as a political lobbyist, sent a total of 29 messages to the White House chief of staff at the time, Mark Meadows, urging him to hold fast to Mr Trump’s baseless claims about a rigged election, according to documents turned over to the special 6 January inquiry in Congress, as reported by The Washington Post and CBS News.
“Help This Great President stand firm, Mark!!!” reads one message from November she sent to the top Trump official, after news networks predicted a Biden win. “You are the leader, with him, who is standing for America’s constitutional governance at the precipice. The majority knows Biden and the Left is attempting the greatest Heist of our History.”
In another message two days after the election, Ms Thomas, who goes by “Ginni,” appeared to be quoting from right-wing conspiracy theories.
“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,” she wrote to the White House official on 5 November.
“Do not concede. It takes time for the army who is gathering for his back,” she added a day later.
The Independent has contacted Ms Thomas for comment.
Not all of the messages elicited responses from the chief of staff, but he occasionally did reply, casting the effort to challenge the 2020 results in a religious light in one exchange from late November, the records show.
“This is a fight of good versus evil,” Mr Meadows wrote to Ms Thomas. “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.”
Mr Meadows has turned over thousands of election-time conversations to the committee investigating the 6 January riot at the US Capitol, and the former chief of staff’s lawyer confirmed to the Post that the communications from Ms Thomas had taken place.
“Nothing about the text messages presents any legal issues,” said attorney George Terwilliger III.
After turning over the texts to Congress, Mr Meadows stopped cooperating with the committee’s requests, arguing that he couldn’t disclose further information without violating executive privilege.
As a result, in December, the House of Representatives voted to hold Mr Meadows in contempt of Congress, leaving the Department of Justice to consider potential criminal charges.
The newly revealed texts are the latest in a growing body of scrutiny about Ms Thomas’s activism, given her personal ties to the Supreme Court.
In January, The New Yorker ran an exposé highlighting how Ms Thomas has held leadership positions in or partnered with conservative groups with business before the Supreme Court.
These groups were often involved in cases in the form of amicus curiae or “friend of the court” briefs submitted by outside groups offering their opinion of a pending case.
Justice Thomas did not recuse himself from these cases, and Ginni Thomas did not explicitly note her involvement with these groups, the New Yorker report notes.
While not technically running afoul of court rules, the conduct nonetheless is far outside of judicial conflict of interest norms.
After Ms Thomas lobbied the White House about the 2020 election, her husband ruled on a number of cases involving claims from Mr Trump and his Republican allies challenging the results. However, Mr Trump was never able to successfully alter the election results in the Supreme Court or in lawsuits in any state court across the country.
Ms Thomas has defended herself against accusations of improper ties to the Supreme Court and its decisions, telling the Washington Free Beacon in an interview this month, “Clarence doesn’t discuss his work with me, and I don’t involve him in my work.”
