Why Read it?
"Ginni Thomas' testimony before the Jan. 6 Committee kind of got buried in the avalanche of material the committee released before the end of the last Congress. But it deserves a closer look and Frank Wilkinson takes that deep dive right here. Fascinating stuff. " -Josh Marshall
"One of the best-written things we've ever published at TPM." -David Kurtz
Preview
It's been said that no one expects the Spanish Inquisition. Virginia Thomas seemingly did. The transcript of her appearance before the House January 6 Committee, which was buried in an avalanche of committee documents released at the end of December, shows not only that Thomas was well prepared for the committee: She prevailed over it.
The committee had sought, in its late September interview with the spouse of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, to expose the errors of her doctrines and the crookedness of her path. But Thomas emerged from the roughly 4-hour meeting triumphant, her faith unshaken. No rack could break her. No fact could bend her.
Thomas is an arch-conservative activist who has spent a lifetime advancing right-wing political causes in concert with other arch-conservative activists. But she does not, she says, much discuss her political activities with her spouse, the arch-conservative jurist who has used his lifetime seat on the U.S. Supreme Court to advance those same right-wing political causes.
In her testimony, Thomas claimed household dominion over the "political lane," with career stops at ideological outposts such as the Heritage Foundation, Hillsdale College and the Daily Caller, along with an active volunteer life in right-wing political networks, such as Frontliners and Groundswell. The latter, Thomas told the committee, is a "center-right" response to the "30-front war that the left has on constitutional governance."
Thomas is at home in a netherworld that others might deride as "fringe." Her friends are numerous — the word "friend" appears 40 times in the transcript — and include right-wing figures such as former Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and Connie Hair, the longtime chief of staff to recently retired Representative Louis Gohmert of Texas. Gohmert is a pro-insurrection Republican known for the "ease with which he was willing to make unfounded and offensive pronouncements," according to the Texas Tribune. Thomas told the committee that she talks to Hair frequently. "She comes to my Thanksgiving," she said.
Justice Clarence Thomas, by contrast, is "uninterested" in politics, his wife said. He operates exclusively in the "legal lane." Thus the couple navigates the ethical grid of Washington, where the Supreme Court is across the street from the Congress, which is down the street from the Justice Department, which is a short walk from the White House, as easily as a stroll across the Mayberry town square.
Virginia Thomas — who goes by "Ginni" — occupies a singular place in elite conservative politics. Yet what's striking about her testimony is how generically MAGA it is. She laments election "fraud and irregularities" for which she can summon no evidence; reveals deep resentment of political and media elites who are not like-minded conservatives; resorts to unabashedly opportunistic lapses of memory; and provides warm reminiscences of a morning spent on the Ellipse on Jan. 6, 2021. A 65-year-old suburban volunteer, Thomas appeared before the committee, after lengthy negotiations, with nothing to hide. But somewhere along the way she had obtained the Signal app for encrypting communications just the same.
Over the course of her interview with the committee, Thomas described her political efforts in 2020 as "minimal and mainstream." She was "very active with Trump rallies" in her home state of Virginia, she said.
After Trump lost the election, her political enthusiasms evolved. Thomas repeatedly beseeched Mark Meadows, via text message, to find a way to invalidate the 2020 election and prevent Trump's democratically elected successor from assuming office. She texted Trump's White House chief of staff about her swooning appreciation of Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell, the axis of a Trump legal team described by Attorney General William Barr as a "clown car." She sent robo-emails to Republican state legislators who were urged to carry out a plot, conjured in part by Thomas allies John Eastman and Cleta Mitchell, to send false electors to Washington to halt the democratic transfer of power.
"Make a plan, release the Kraken, and save us from the left taking America down," Thomas implored Meadows on Nov. 19, 2020. If the spouse of Justice Thomas restricted herself to a particular lane in the days surrounding the 2020 election, it appears to have been a roadway heavily trafficked by the former president's co-conspirators.
Thomas's texts with Meadows are one of the topics she did not discuss with Justice Thomas. "I do know," she told the committee, "he was completely unaware of the texts that I had with Mark Meadows until this committee leaked them to the press while my husband was in a hospital bed in March fighting an infection." Justice Thomas provided the lone dissent in an 8-1 Supreme Court ruling against Trump, which gave the January 6 committee access to a trove of White House documents related to the insurrection.
The Washington Post published excerpts from 29 texts between Thomas and Meadows. They are mostly not the ambiguous sort.
"Help This Great President stand firm, Mark!!!" Thomas wrote to Meadows on Nov. 10, 2020, when Trump's campaign to sabotage the peaceful transfer of power was well under way. "The majority knows Biden and the Left is attempting the greatest Heist of our History."
Thomas's projection may read as dark comedy, but, like her testimony, it illuminates a deep MAGA mindset. Victimhood, denial, whataboutism, resentment, lies — many of the signposts of Trumpism are vividly displayed.
One quality, however, appears paramount. Throughout her testimony, Thomas conveys the abiding arrogance that girds so much fear and flailing on the right. When facts defy MAGA mythology, to hell with facts. The Justice's wife clearly shares the insurrectionists' animating logic: If American democracy won't continue to enshrine white Christian conservative preeminence, then it is American democracy, not the preeminence, which must be brought to heel.
Consider the date — Nov. 10 — of Thomas's "Heist" message. Fox News had called the state of Arizona for Joe Biden on Nov. 3, effectively announcing the Trump campaign's doom. By Nov. 7, the broadcast networks and the Associated Press had all declared Joe Biden the president-elect. On Nov. 10, the date of Thomas's text, the New York Times ran a lead story reporting the results of interviews with top election officials in all 50 states. Every state, red and blue, told the Times there had been no significant irregularities or fraud in the vote.
There was also, notably, the junkyard dog that didn't bark. William Barr had flagrantly misled the public, for Trump's benefit, about the findings of the Mueller report, and he had run interference for Trump on corruption investigations. Prior to the 2020 election, Barr had spread additional falsehoods about voting by mail, echoing Trump. But as the post-election morass deepened, and Trump desperately sought endorsements of his ever loopier claims, Barr was conspicuously silent.
On Nov. 12, the executive committee of the Trump administration's Election Infrastructure Government Coordinating Council confirmed what Barr surely knew. The 2020 election was "the most secure in American history."
Thus, by Nov. 7, you had to be an extraordinary optimist to believe that Trump had a chance. By Nov. 10, you had to be a fantasist. By Nov. 12, the task required a good deal more — including perhaps a passing interest in the termination of republican government. Yet on Nov. 13 here comes Thomas, texting Meadows that "Sidney Powell & improved coordination now will help the cavalry come and Fraud exposed and America saved."
Even Trump, who typically prioritizes quantity over quality in the matter of lies, found Powell's sci-fi yarns and sloppy escapades detrimental to his plans. On Nov. 22, the Trump campaign officially cut Powell loose. But unlike Trump, Thomas is a woman of faith. She kept cheering Powell's improvisational circus until late November, when Meadows finally convinced Thomas to surrender her hope in the Kraken. Thomas was loath to let go. "I viewed her as a trusted person to get at facts," she told the committee of Powell. She did not say if she had ever changed that view.
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