According to a report published Tuesday by The New York Times, a network of Clarence Thomas aides, including the conservative justice’s wife Ginni Thomas set in motion a campaign to overturn the 2020 election after Donald Trump’s November defeat. That effort ultimately culminated with the attack on the US Capitol by a mob of Trump supporters who believed the election was stolen from him.
“It was after Trump’s November loss that [Ginni Thomas] would prove her loyalty beyond doubt, when she and her group urged on efforts to overturn the election,” journalists Danny Hakim and Jo Becker wrote in the report, which was focused on Mrs. Thomas’ political activism.
“The call to action was titled ‘Election Results and Legal Battles: What Now?’ Shared in the days after the 2020 presidential election, it urged the members of an influential if secretive right-wing group to contact legislators in three of the swing states that tipped the balance for Joe Biden — Arizona, Georgia and Pennsylvania. The aim was audacious: Keep President Donald J. Trump in power,” The newspaper revealed on Tuesday.
“New reporting also shows just how blurred the lines between the couple’s interests became during the effort to overturn the 2020 election, which culminated in the rally held at the Ellipse, just outside the White House grounds, aimed at stopping Congress from certifying the state votes that gave Joe Biden his victory,” The Times states. “Many of the rally organizers and those advising Trump had connections to the Thomases, but little has been known about what role, if any, Ginni Thomas played, beyond the fact that on the morning of the March to Save America, as the rally was called, she urged her Facebook followers to watch how the day unfolded.”
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“In the weeks after Trump’s loss, court challenges began to pile up from his team, his allies and even Republican lawmakers,” the report says. “By then, the network around the Thomases was lighting up. On Dec. 10, a former Thomas clerk and close friend of the couple’s, John C. Eastman, went on ‘War Room,’ a podcast and radio show hosted by Bannon. Eastman argued that the country was already at the point of a constitutional crisis — and he urged the Supreme Court to intervene. Bannon eagerly agreed.”
The report concluded that “the spectacle of a Supreme Court justice’s spouse taking to Facebook to champion the attempt of a defeated president to stay in power, as Ginni Thomas did on the morning of Jan. 6, crossed a line for several people in the Thomases’ circle who talked to The Times.”
Read the full report in The New York Times.
