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- Ginni Thomas affirmed that she did not speak with Clarence Thomas about 2020 election challenges.
- On Friday, the conservative activist’s September testimony with the January 6 panel was released.
- Thomas during her interview was unable to point to any specific instances of voter fraud in 2020.
Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, told the January 6 committee that it was “laughable” for anyone who knew her husband to believe that she could “influence” his judicial philosophy.
The conservative activist — who in September gave a voluntary interview to the House panel probing the January 6, 2021, riot at the United States Capitol — told the members that Clarence Thomas is “stubborn” and “uninterested in politics.”
“I am certain I never spoke with him about any of the legal challenges to the 2020 election, as I was not involved in those challenges in any way,” Ginni Thomas told the panel during her interview, noting that she had an “ironclad” household rule on not discussing pending court cases with Clarence Thomas. “Let me also add, it’s laughable for anyone who knows my husband to think I could influence his jurisprudence. The man is independent and stubborn, with strong character traits of independence and integrity.”
Ginni Thomas, who in the immediate aftermath of the 2020 presidential election exchanged texts with then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows where she pushed him to challenge now-President Joe Biden’s victory over then-President Donald Trump, said during her January 6 interview that she regretted sending the messages to the high-ranking Trump administration official.
“I regret all of these texts,” she told the committee during her closed-door testimony, which was released to the public on Friday. “It was an emotional time, and people were scared that there had been enough fraud happening that they weren’t going to get to the bottom of it. So that’s how I would look at that one.”
Ginni Thomas during her January 6 committee interview admitted that while she had concerns about voter fraud in the 2020 election, she couldn’t pinpoint specific cases of such malfeasance.
“I can’t say that I was familiar at the time with any specific evidence,” she told the members. “I was just hearing it from news reports and friends on the ground, grassroots activists who were inside of various polling places that found things suspicious.”
Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the Republican vice chair of the January 6 panel, then asked Ginni Thomas to confirm her lack of verifiable information about voting irregularities in 2020.
“Right. I know. I wasn’t very deep; I admit it,” she told Cheney.
“I was hearing it, Congresswoman, from a lot of people I trust. So trusted people were telling me there were problems, and I just thought there should be people at the state level investigating those before it was too late,” she added.
After the 2020 election, Thomas also emailed a range of GOP legislators in Arizona and Wisconsin — two key swing states where Biden narrowly outpaced Trump — where she also pushed them to help overturn Biden’s victory.
Ginni Thomas, well-known in GOP circles for decades, has only in the past few years become a larger figure in the public sphere, driven by her ties to prominent conservatives as her husband has taken a prominent role as a leader of the now-dominant conservative bloc on the Supreme Court.
With a 6-3 conservative majority on the high court, Justice Thomas’ judicial philosophy has taken on incredible significance as the conservative bloc is set to reshape some of the most pertinent issues in American society for the foreseeable future.
