Texts Show Ginni Thomas’s Embrace of Conspiracy Theories

Two days after the 2020 election, Virginia Thomas, the spouse of Justice Clarence Thomas, texted an previous good friend, Mark Meadows, the chief of employees to President Donald J. Trump.

She despatched messages that had been making the rounds on pro-Trump websites, the place anger over the election echoed her personal uncooked emotions, together with this passage: “Biden crime household & poll fraud co-conspirators (elected officers, bureaucrats, social media censorship mongers, faux stream media reporters, and so forth) are being arrested & detained for poll fraud proper now & over coming days, & shall be residing in barges off GITMO to face navy tribunals for sedition.”

Then she added of this fanciful, if chilling, set of conspiracy theories: “I hope that is true.”

She texted Mr. Meadows once more the following day. “Don’t concede,” she wrote. “It takes time for the military who’s gathering for his again.”

The messages have been amongst a flurry of textual content site visitors between Ms. Thomas and Mr. Meadows that was revealed this previous week, a part of a trove of paperwork beforehand turned over to the Home committee investigating the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol. (Ms. Thomas has overtly opposed the committee and known as for Republicans who serve on it to be expelled from the Home Republican convention.)

A tough-line conservative activist, Ms. Thomas had lengthy been seen with suspicion by the Republican institution. But her affect had risen in the course of the Trump administration, particularly after Mr. Meadows, who like Ms. Thomas has roots within the Tea Celebration motion, grew to become chief of employees. Now, an examination of her texts, woven along with latest revelations of the depth of her efforts to overturn the election, exhibits how firmly she was embedded within the conspiratorial fringe of right-wing politics, whilst that fringe was drawing ever nearer to the middle of Republican energy.

The disclosures add urgency to questions on how Ms. Thomas could have leveraged her marriage to Justice Thomas, who could be ruling on elections circumstances all through the battle over the 2020 vote and past. As his spouse agitated for Mr. Trump and his aides to show apart the election outcomes, Justice Thomas was Mr. Trump’s staunchest ally on the Supreme Courtroom and has remained so. This 12 months, in January, he was the one justice who famous a dissent when the courtroom allowed the discharge of data from the Trump White Home associated to the Jan. 6 assault.

Calls intensified this previous week for Justice Thomas to step other than such circumstances. Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, mentioned on Friday that Justice Thomas “must recuse himself from any case associated to the Jan. 6 investigation, and may Donald Trump run once more, any case associated to the 2024 election.”

The Thomases have been a fiercely shut couple for many years. In his memoir, Justice Thomas wrote that they have been “one being — an amalgam” and known as her his “greatest good friend.” She usually makes use of comparable language to explain her husband.

In one in every of his texts to Ms. Thomas, Mr. Meadows known as the election a “battle of fine versus evil” and added: “Evil all the time seems to be just like the victor till the King of Kings triumphs. Don’t develop weary in effectively doing. The battle continues.”

“Thanks!! Wanted that!” Ms. Thomas replied. “This plus a dialog with my greatest good friend simply now… I’ll attempt to preserve holding on. America is price it!”

Ms. Thomas’s texts to Mr. Meadows faucet right into a deep effectively of debunked conspiracy theories. References to the rounding up of elected officers, reporters and bureaucrats for navy tribunals at Guantánamo Bay are drawn from QAnon, which imagines Devil-worshipping leaders working the nation and trafficking youngsters.

But within the days after the election, Ms. Thomas had much more standing to take motion than most who embraced such canards. As Mr. Trump courted Justice Thomas throughout his years in workplace — interested by his reputation among the many Republican base and likewise about rumors that he may retire, aides mentioned — the justice’s spouse gained rising entry to the White Home.

Although some Trump aides got here to view her with such suspicion that they assembled opposition analysis meant to break her standing with Mr. Trump — amongst different issues, she pressed the president to rent individuals who couldn’t cross background checks, the aides mentioned — her clout grew with time.

The arc of her political profession had additionally led her to a robust new platform. Ms. Thomas had began out working for institution right-leaning organizations just like the Heritage Basis and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. However her want for extra radical change had led her to the Tea Celebration, and more and more to the occasion’s fringes. Mr. Meadows, who was appointed chief of employees in March 2020, held comparable views and has attended conferences of Groundswell, a bunch that Ms. Thomas based in 2013 after consulting with Stephen Okay. Bannon, who would later grow to be Mr. Trump’s chief strategist.

With their model of conservatism ascendant, Ms. Thomas had been appointed in 2019 to the nine-member board of CNP Motion, an offshoot of a secretive however influential conservative group known as the Council for Nationwide Coverage, whose membership consists of leaders of the Nationwide Rifle Affiliation, the Household Analysis Council and the Federalist Society.

The New York Instances Journal, in a profile of the Thomases printed final month, detailed CNP Motion’s assertive function in efforts to overturn the presidential election. That included circulating a doc to its members in November 2020 urging them to strain Republican lawmakers in swing states to problem the outcomes and appoint alternate slates of electors: “Demand that they not abandon their Constitutional obligations throughout a time corresponding to this,” the doc mentioned.

In one in every of her texts, the contents of which have been earlier reported by The Washington Publish and CBS Information, Ms. Thomas despatched Mr. Meadows a hyperlink to a video that includes Steve Pieczenik, a former State Division official who was claiming that mail-in ballots had been watermarked as a part of an elaborate authorities sting operation to catch voter fraud. Mr. Pieczenik beforehand appeared on a webcast with the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and claimed that the 2012 faculty bloodbath in Newtown, Conn., was a false-flag operation, a notion that has been totally debunked.

On Nov. 19, Ms. Thomas promoted the efforts of Sidney Powell, the Trump lawyer who spent a lot of the postelection interval spreading conspiracy theories. “Sidney and her group are getting inundated with proof of fraud,” Ms. Thomas wrote to Mr. Meadows. “Make a plan. Launch the Kraken and save us from the left taking America down.”

That very same day, Ms. Powell held a information convention with Rudolph W. Giuliani, one in every of Mr. Trump’s legal professionals, on the Republican Nationwide Committee headquarters in Washington. There, she laid out baseless allegations {that a} cabal that included Chinese language software program companies, worldwide shell firms and the financier George Soros had conspired to hack America’s voting machines.

At the moment, Ms. Powell was within the early phases of getting ready 4 federal lawsuits that might current this purported plot as a motive for judges to overturn the election outcomes. She nicknamed her fits the “Krakens,” referring to a large octopus-like sea creature.

By Dec. 10, John Eastman, a former Supreme Courtroom clerk for Justice Thomas and a detailed good friend of the Thomases, went on “Warfare Room,” a podcast hosted by Mr. Bannon.

Mr. Eastman urged the Supreme Courtroom to intervene and mentioned the nation was within the midst of a constitutional disaster. Behind the scenes, he was advising Mr. Trump and his marketing campaign on a proposal thought to be outlandish by many different legal professionals — that Vice President Mike Pence may refuse to simply accept swing-state electoral votes and ship them again 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 function would solely grow to be totally clear months later.

Across the similar time, CNP Motion, with Ms. Thomas on its board, circulated a report titled “5 States and the Election Irregularities and Points,” specializing in 5 swing states the place Mr. Trump and his allies have been already urgent litigation.

The report warned that point was working out for the courts to “declare the elections null and void”; an accompanying e-newsletter pressed for swing states to show again the voters’ will and identify an alternate slate of electors. Cleta Mitchell, a good friend of Ms. Thomas who was one of many election legal professionals advising Mr. Trump, was a co-author of the report.

Ms. Thomas has not responded to requests for remark. In not too long ago printed remarks, she downplayed her function at CNP Motion but additionally mentioned she had attended the Jan. 6 rally on the Ellipse in Washington and “was disillusioned and pissed off that there was violence that occurred following a peaceable gathering.”

One of many rally organizers, Dustin Stockton, informed The Instances that Ms. Thomas had performed a mediating function amongst completely different factions of organizers forward of the rally. Ms. Thomas disputed that account and mentioned she “performed no function with those that have been planning and main the Jan. 6 occasions,” a declare undercut by her communications with Mr. Meadows, who was deeply concerned in planning the protests that led as much as the storming of the Capitol.

A variety of her allies and associates have rallied round her in latest weeks. Two fellow members of the Council for Nationwide Coverage — Edwin Meese III, who was lawyer normal within the Reagan administration, and J. Kenneth Blackwell, a former Ohio secretary of state — printed a joint protection of the Thomases earlier this 12 months. Current reporting about her, they wrote, amounted to “cancel tradition taken to a degree that threatens our establishments of presidency” and was an try “to delegitimize a distinguished and senior member of the best-functioning department of the federal authorities by smearing his spouse.”

But within the fast aftermath of Jan. 6, the Council for Nationwide Coverage circulated in its e-newsletter a memo, written by one in every of its members, that outlined methods to make the Capitol riot appear extra palatable. “Drive the narrative that it was principally peaceable protests,” the memo suggested. “Amplify the considerations of the protesters and provides them legitimacy.”

On Jan. 10, Ms. Thomas texted Mr. Meadows to specific her disgust that Mr. Pence had not gone together with efforts to maintain Mr. Trump in energy. “We live in what seems like the top of America,” she wrote. “Most of us are disgusted with the VP and are in listening mode to see the place to battle with our groups. Those that attacked the Capitol should not consultant of our nice groups of patriots for DJT!! Wonderful instances. The tip of liberty.”

In her speeches and communications with different activists, Ms. Thomas often invokes her husband’s identify. Final summer time, she invited Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, a Republican, to talk at a gathering of Groundswell, which she known as a “cone of silence coalition.” In an e mail to Mr. DeSantis’s employees, which was obtained via a public data request by the watchdog group American Oversight, she wrote that the justice had been involved with the governor “on varied issues of late.”

“We begin and finish every assembly with prayer, however the Left has all of the cultural establishments now and appear to be weaponizing them towards conservatives and fundamental freedoms,” she mentioned in her e mail, including that she hoped Mr. DeSantis may “choose us up and refocus us — as Washington isn’t the place our hope lies.”