Trump has not unified the Republican party because he is under criminal indictments and convicted sexual abuser

What if, Knowing What They Know Now, Republicans Don’t Vote for Donald Trump?

Editorial echo opinion published in The New York Times:

After three other criminal indictments were filed against him, Donald Trump was accused on Monday in Georgia of racketeering. 

In a new indictment, Fani Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, Ga., charged him with leading what was effectively a criminal gang to overturn the 2020, presidential election in that state.

In fact, the grand jury indictment says Trump and 18 others violated the state’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO law, established by the federal government and more than 30 states and used to crack down on Mafia protection rackets, biker gangs and insider trading schemes. The Georgia indictment alleges that Trump often behaved like a mob boss, pressuring the Georgia secretary of state to decertify the Georgia election and holding a White House meeting to discuss seizing voting equipment.

Trump and a group of associates that included his then chief of staff, Mark Meadows, and one of his lawyers at the time, the former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani, were also accused of a series of crimes that go beyond even the sweeping federal indictment filed this month by the special counsel Jack Smith. The former guy president, for example, was charged with conspiracy to commit first-degree forgery, for arranging to have a false set of Georgia electors sent to Washington to replace the legitimate ones for Joe Biden. 

Moreover, that same act also resulted in a charge against Mr. Trump of conspiracy to impersonate a public officer and a series of charges relating to filing false statements and trying to get state officials to violate their oath of office.

Taken together, these four indictments — which include more than 90 federal and state criminal charges implicating his official conduct during his term and acts afterward, as well as in his personal and business life — offer a road map of the trauma and drama Trump has put this nation through. They raise questions about his fitness for office that go beyond ideology or temperament, focusing instead on his disdain for American democracy.

And yet these questions will ultimately be resolved not by the courts but by the electorate. Republican primary voters, in particular, are being presented with an opportunity to pause and consider the costs of his leadership thus far, to the health of the nation and of their party, and the further damage he could do if rewarded with another four years in power.

Put aside, for the moment, everything that has happened in the eight years since Trump first announced his candidacy for president. Consider only what is now on reams of legal paper before the American people: evidence of extraordinarily serious crimes, so overwhelming that many other defendants would have already negotiated a plea bargain rather than go to trial. This is what he faces as he asks, once again, for the votes of millions of Americans.

“I’m being indicted for you,” the former president has been telling his supporters. “They want to silence me because I will never let them silence you.” But time and again, Trump has put his ego and ambition over the interests of the public and of his own supporters. He has aggressively worked to undermine public faith in the democratic process and to warp the foundations of the electoral system. He repeatedly betrayed his constitutional duty to faithfully execute the nation’s laws. His supporters may be just as angered and disappointed by his loss as he is. But his actions, as detailed in these indictments, show that he is concerned with no one’s interests but his own. Among the accusations against him:

He took dozens of highly classified documents, some involving nuclear secrets and attack plans, out of the White House and stored them at Mar-a-Lago, his Florida residence, where guests of all kinds visit each year. Then, despite being asked multiple times, he refused to return many of these documents, instead working with his aides and confidants to move and hide the boxes containing them and to destroy video surveillance records of those acts, even after a subpoena from the Justice Department.

He attempted to overturn the 2020, election by using what he knew to be false claims of voter fraud to pressure numerous state and federal officials, including his own vice president and top officials of the Justice Department, to reverse voting results and declare him the winner.

He sought to disenfranchise millions of American voters by trying to nullify their legally cast ballots in order to keep himself in office. In doing so, he colluded with dozens of campaign staff members and other associates to pressure state officials to throw out certified vote counts and to organize slates of fake electors to cast ballots for him.

In one example of the personal damage he caused, Trump led a scheme to harass and intimidate a Fulton County election worker, Ruby Freeman, falsely accusing her of committing election crimes. The Georgia indictment — accusing him of the crime of false statements and writings in official matters — says he falsely called her a “professional vote scammer” who stuffed a ballot box with fraudulent votes for Mr. Biden.

After having extramarital sex with an adult film actress, he falsified business records to hide $130,000 in hush-money payments to her before the 2016 election.

That list does not include the verdict, by a New York State court in May, that Mr. Trump was civilly liable for sexual assault against E. Jean Carroll. Nor does it include the ongoing asset and tax fraud prosecution of the Trump Organization by the New York attorney general, Letitia James.

Time and again, Mr. Trump has demanded that Republicans choose him over the party, and he has exposed and exploited some genuine rifts in the G.O.P., refashioning the party to suit his own agenda. The party will have to deal with those fault lines and may have to reconfigure itself and its platform. But if Republicans surrender to his demands, they may find themselves led by a candidate whose second term in office would be even more damaging to America and to the party than his first.

A president facing multiple criminal trials, some prosecuted by his own Justice Department, could not hope to be effective in enforcing the nation’s laws — one of the primary duties of a chief executive. (If re-elected, Trump could order the federal prosecutions to be dropped, though that would hardly enhance his credibility.) A man accused of compromising national security would have little credibility in his negotiations with foreign allies or adversaries. No document could be assumed to remain secret, no communication secure. The nation’s image as a beacon of democracy, already badly tarnished by the January 6th attack, may not survive the election of someone formally accused of systematically dismantling his own country’s democratic process through deceit.

The charges in the Georgia case are part of the larger plot described in the federal indictment of Mr. Trump this month. 

But, Ms. Willis used tools that weren’t available to Mr. Smith. Georgia’s RICO statute allows for many more predicate crimes than the federal version does, including false statements, which she used to bring the charge against several of the defendants in the fake-elector part of the scheme.

Altogether, the Fulton grand jury cited 161 separate acts in the larger conspiracy, from small statements like false tweets to major violations like trying to get the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, to decertify the state’s election by “unlawfully altering” the official vote count, which was in Mr. Biden’s favor. Though some of the individual acts might not be crimes themselves, they added up to what Ms. Willis called a scheme by “a criminal organization whose members and associates engaged in various related criminal activities,” all for the benefit of the former president of the United States.

Those legal tools are part of a broad American justice ecosystem that is, at its core, a mechanism for seeking the truth. It is not designed to care about politics or partisanship; it is supposed to establish facts. To do so, it tests every claim rigorously, with a set of processes and rules that ensure both sides can be heard on every issue, and then it puts the final decision to convict in the hands of a jury of the defendant’s peers, who will make the weighty decision of guilt or innocence.

And that is what makes this moment different from all the chaos of the past eight years.  Trump is now a criminal defendant four times over. While he is innocent until proven guilty, he will have to answer for his actions.

But, almost certainly before then, he will have to answer to Republican voters. His grip on the party has proved enduring, but not universal; while he is far ahead of the other candidates, a recent New York Times/Siena College poll showed that he is the choice of only 54 percent of likely primary voters. And about half of Republican voters told pollsters for Reuters/Ipsos that they would not vote for him if he was convicted of a felony.

The indictments — two brought by elected prosecutors who are Democrats, all of them arriving before the start of Republican presidential primaries — have been read by many as political, and Republicans have said without evidence they are all organized for the benefit of President Biden. 

Trump has amplified that message and used it to drive fund-raising for his campaign. Although the outcome of these indictments may have a political impact, that alone does not make them political. To assume that any prosecution of a political figure is political would, in effect, “immunize all high-ranking powerful political people from ever being held accountable for the wrongful things they do,” said Kristy Parker, a lawyer with the advocacy group Protect Democracy. “And if you do that, you subvert the idea that this is a rule-of-law society where everybody is subject to equal justice.”

Trump has repeatedly offered Republicans a false choice: Stick by me, or the enemy wins. But a healthy political party does not belong to or depend on one man, particularly one who has repeatedly put himself over his party and his country. A healthy democracy needs at least two functioning parties to challenge each other’s honesty and direction. Republican voters are key to restoring that health and balance.

Trump knew he lost: Dereliction of duty

Echo opinion letter published in the The Repository 

CantonRep.Com, an Ohio newspaper.

The House committee investigating the January 6, riot did what the Republicans opposed.

A screen above the committee reads "Trump knew he lost" as the panel summarizes its various findings about the January 6 insurrection.

On December 31, 2020, members of the Oath Keepers planned to supply and store weapons in the Washington area. Led by Edward Vallejo, one of the members of the Oath Keepers charged with seditious conspiracy, they coordinated a “Quick Reaction Force,” which consisted of Oath Keeper members armed with weapons in the areas just outside Washington. A hotel in Arlington, VA, was used as the base for the “Quick Reaction Force.” Weapons were stored at this hotel and members of the Oath Keepers stayed there.

The Democrats, along with two GOP members, Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney, brought forth evidence, witness testimony, video footage of what happened before, during and after the Capitol assault to overturn the 2020, election. Former President Donald Trump said it was a political witch-hunt, that the committee members were thugs.

It was historic and symbolic; never in the history of the U.S. government had a sitting president incited a violent insurrection on democracy to stay in office. Everyone who testified before a live audience did their due diligence, as well as those who testified behind closed doors.

The evidence gathered, the testimony painted a road map to Mark Meadows and ex-president Donald Trump. Does Trump get charged by the Department of Justice or do they give him a pass? The laws were equally written; the rich will be treated as the poor are treated in a court of law, and that no one is above the law.

Dahnaad Ahshaad, Canton,Ohio

On January 6, 2021, a right-wing mob stormed the U.S. Capitol at the urging of President Donald J. Trump in an attempt to prevent the certification of presidential election results. But the attack didn’t come from nowhere. It was the culmination of a year of increasingly radical activity by a slew of extremists around the country. They mobilized against racial justice protests, COVID-19 prevention measures, and voting rights for all Americans, and were goaded on by the president and politicians on the right.

Matthew Pottinger appears to be the highest-ranking White House official to resign that day, although Cabinet secretaries also resigned in response to January 6.

Rep. Liz Cheney swears in Sarah Matthews and Mathew Pottinger on July 21: 

Let me get this right: The Big Lie enablers sought tRumpzi pardons? Guilt by associaiton!

Why would TRumpzis need pardons his allies truly believed the election had been stolen? Echo essay published on MSNBC. written by Michael A. Cohen. 

American people were shown evidence about Trump’s lies to the world, his illegitimate efforts to use the Justice Department to further his false Fake Election Fraud claims, and his fomenting of the January 6 mob that attacked the U.S. Capitol. 

Perhaps most unsettling was his embrace of the demonstrators chant to “Hang Mike Pence.” (Trump reportedly told his aides, “Maybe our supporters have the right idea,” that Pence “deserves it.”)

But what was perhaps most striking about the hearings was learning about the complicity of Trump’s allies, both inside the White House and on Capitol Hill. They cynically enabled his assault on American democracy, even though it now seems apparent that they didn’t believe a word about his spewing about The Big Lie, that somehow the 2020 election was not valid. 

Among the more startling revelations came from Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., who said that multiple members of Congress, including Rep. Scott Perry, R-Pa., sought presidential pardons for their efforts to overturn the election results.

If Trump allies truly believed the election had been stolen, why would they need pardons? They were simply pushing good faith arguments about election fraud, right? The fact that they sought Trump’s assistance in potentially avoiding prosecution is compelling evidence that they knew the claims they were making then — and are still making now — were not true.

In a statement, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy refused to say that Trump was responsible for the events of January 6, instead stating that “everybody” (?) is responsible. 

But McCarthy is on tape, telling colleagues that Trump “bears responsibility for his words and actions. No ifs, ands or buts.” 

Moreover, the top-ranking House Republican has also called Trump’s actions “unacceptable” and that “nobody can defend that, and nobody should defend it.”

I would imagine that the latter attitude is shared by many of his staffers, who were shown on tape fleeing their offices in terror on January 6, as the Trump-inspired mob entered the building. Still, McCarthy continues to defend the former president, and in the process, cravenly and cynically lies to Republican voters.

If one did a private survey of House Republicans, I would expect that the vast majority would acknowledge Trump’s primary culpability for the violence that took place that day. Most would likely acknowledge that his claims of a stolen election are, to quote former Attorney General Bill Barr, “bulls---.”

But the truth, it seems, is no impediment to their ambitions. The few Republicans who are willing to publicly recognize the central role Trump played in the insurrection have been ostracized from the party, or are choosing not to seek re-election. 

Unfortunately, the second Republican on the January 6 committee, Rep. Adam Kinzinger, has taken the latter course. Cheney is fighting to keep her job against a pro-Trump Republican primary opponent, which looks increasingly like a long-shot.

The overwhelming majority of congressional Republicans and those seeking to become congressional Republicans have chosen to peddle the former president’s lies to their supporters. They’d rather be members of Congress than patriots.

They have plenty of company among Trump’s inner circle.

In fact, those close to Trump were heard over and over about how they knew in early November that he’d lost the 2020, presidential election. Alex Cannon, a campaign lawyer, says he gave the same information to then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, who replied via text, “There’s no there there.” A key Trump aide, Jason Miller, recounted Trump being told, in the Oval Office, by a campaign data expert that he was going to lose.

Ivanka Trump, the former president’s daughter and former White House aide told the committee that she believed Barr when he said that Trump had lost.

But that didn’t stop them from parroting Trump’s lies and enabling his election mania. Barr spent months before the campaign raising false claims about potential voter fraud and allowing partisan Justice Department investigations to take place in the run-up to Election Day. Ivanka Trump has largely tried to wash her hands of the Jan.6 attack, but she was there on the White House Ellipse with her father when he urged the protesters who had gathered to march down to the Capitol and “demand that Congress do the right thing.”

Meadows continued to push the Big Lie about 2020, even bringing election deniers like Sydney Powell, Rudy Guiliani, and Mike “The Pillow Guy” Lindell into the White House to tell Trump the lies he was so desperate to hear.

Cheney most accurately described the immoral choice that basically her entire party of fellow Republicans had made: “There will come a day when president Trump is gone,” she said. “But your dishonor will remain.” With the January 6, committee resuming hearings Monday, we should expect to see more clearly how deep that dishonor runs.

Mrs. Clarence Thomas: Ginni Thomas did not just suddenly erupt on January 6

Echo report published in The Hill, by Kimberly Wehle*

Maine Writer opinion introduction: Indeed, Ginni Thomas exposed a career of supporting right wing extremism during the  January 6, 2021 seditious riots, where rioters chanted "Hang Mike Pence". Mrs. Clarence Thomas didn't just suddenly show up during that dangerous riot. Rather, she participated in the lead up to it and encouraged the intentions.

In my opinion, this shadowy figure was paid to plant pipe bombs in Washington DC on January 6, 2021. Where did the money come from?  Does Ginni Thomas know where the money came from? #FollowThheMoney

Ginni Thomas- Mrs. Clarence Thomas: Unpacking potential conflicts of interest on the Supreme Court.

The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection wants to speak with Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, a conservative activist and wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Committee Chairman Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) recently announced plans to invite her to appear.

Congress wants to hear more about her bombshell texts with former President Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows in which she urged that something be done to thwart Joe Biden’s White House win. Her husband, Clarence Thomas, a sitting justice, is now under intense pressure to recuse himself from cases relating to the 2020 election and the January 6 violence, short of resignation or possibly even impeachment.

An interview with the January 6 committee is vitally important, not only for what Ginni Thomas has to say about her texts, but because under oath testimony could reveal even deeper conflicts of interest infecting the nation’s highest court — and thus its very legitimacy, writ large.

In three election-related cases, Clarence Thomas voted in a manner seemingly consistent with his wife’s far-right activism, and failed to recuse himself in contravention of a federal law mandating disqualification from any proceeding in which his impartiality may be questioned, including due to the interests of a spouse.

Most disturbingly, he was the sole dissenter in a decision requiring the National Archives to turn over to the Jan. 6 committee White House records relating to the subject matter of its inquiry. 

Who paid for this scaffolding! Who constructed it? #HangMikePence was not a spur of the moment violent mantra. Instead, this deadly scaffolding exhibit was pre-planned and paid for. #FollowTheMoney

Ginni Thomas’s texts were provided voluntarily by Meadows before he stopped cooperating. It’s reported that Ginni Thomas may have communicated with others in the White House, too — if her husband’s vote reflected a desire to keep his wife’s involvement in Jan. 6 from public scrutiny, he was clearly flouting his ethical and legal obligation of actual — let alone perceived — neutrality.

The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer exposed a litany of potential conflicts arising from Ginni Thomas’ tightness with radical ideologues, noting even back then — before the text scandal — that “the claim that the Justices’ opinions are politically neutral is becoming increasingly hard to accept.” 

Ginni Thomas, who is a lawyer herself, runs a lobbying firm called Liberty Consulting, and is on record as declaring the “deep state” a danger to America because of “transsexual fascists” on the left.

She attended a “Stop the Steal” rally in Washington, D.C. on January 6, and posted a since-removed “LOVE MAGA people!!!!” message on Facebook that went viral. 

Evil MAGA sedition on January 6, 2020

Mrs. Clarence Thomas complained about Trump’s November 4 loss on a private Listserv called Thomas Clerk World, which includes a number of her husband’s former Supreme Court law clerks, including attorney John Eastman.

Eastman penned the infamous memos outlining a bogus theory for justifying former Vice President Pence’s stalling of the Electoral College certification. Pence ultimately refused, and a federal judge just this week pinged Eastman as “likely” having committed three federal crimes along with his client Trump, in that connection. (The court’s opinion specifically had to do with attorney-client privilege and work product claims, and thus has no bearing on actual criminal liability, which would have to come through the Justice Department.)

Ginni Thomas also served as a director of C.N.P. Action, a dark money group that, according to Mayer, “behind closed doors, connects wealthy donors with some of the most radical right-wing figures in America.” She’s also on the advisory board of Turning Point USA, a pro-Trump student group that reportedly sent protestors to the January 6 rally.

She has partnerships with right-wing groups that have other Supreme Court business, including Project Veritas, which is known for making secret videotapes of progressive public officials, and Cleta Mitchell, who was on the call in which Trump urged Georgia’s secretary of state to “find” enough votes to swing the state’s electors to him — ostensibly illegally.

Ginni Thomas was also a paid consultant to a group that filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court in support of Trump’s Muslim travel ban, which was ultimately upheld over the dissenting votes of Justices Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan, Sonya Sotomayor and Ruth Bader Ginsberg. And she serves on the board of a conservative group that filed an amicus brief in a Supreme Court case involving race-conscious affirmative action at Harvard. (Although during her Supreme Court confirmation hearings, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson pledged to recuse herself from that case, due to a six-year role on the Harvard Board of Overseers, Thomas has not.)

Meanwhile, the host of hot-button issues now pending before this Court is hard to match in recent memory. They include the fate of Roe v. Wade and the constitutional right to make decisions to end a pregnancy (a right the court already effectively overruled by refusing to halt the Texas six-week abortion ban). 

They also include the vitality of the longstanding separation between church and state, in a case involving whether taxpayer dollars must fund religious education, as well as the question of whether states and municipalities can regulate handguns outside the home. Another question of major constitutional significance currently pending before the court is whether the Environmental Protection Agency can regulate to meaningfully slow climate change.

Each of these cases presents a possible sea change in constitutional law itself if the court reverses longstanding precedent — whether expressly or under the guise of disinterestedness. Conservative groups would presumably want the new conservative majority to upend existing law on all of these fronts. If agencies cannot constitutionally enact regulations, big business wins. If states can’t constitutionally pass laws protecting the public from gun violence, proponents of an unfettered Second Amendment right win. If states must fund right-wing religious schools if it funds non-sectarian ones, the Christian right wins. And so on.

What’s more, an unpacking of potential conflicts-of-interest on this court could mean that past cases are tainted, too. The implications of looking backward and not just forward to future January 6 cases — as appears to Democrats’ primary focus when it comes to Clarence Thomas and his wife’s problematic texts — are hard to fathom.

One might argue that it’s better not to know what we don’t know, because the stakes of knowing are too high. But unfortunately, not knowing is the real problem here. If Congress doesn’t get to the bottom of things, it might soon be too late.

*Kimberly Wehle is a professor at the University of Baltimore School of Law and author of “How to Read the Constitution — and Why,” as well as “What You Need to Know About Voting — and Why” and “How to Think Like a Lawyer – and Why.” 

Ginni Thomas is morally vile: More dangerous than I could have imagined

Virginia Thomas, wife of the Supreme Court Judge Clarence Thomas, urged the White House chief to pursue unrelenting efforts to overturn the 2020, election, revealed in texts released by TFG's chief of staff Mark Meadows.

(Check two Twitter messages about Ginni Thomas I cut and pasted into the end of this blog.)

January 6 committee has text messages between Ginni Thomas and Mark Meadows

In messages to TFG's Chief of Staff Mark Meadows in the weeks after the 2020 Election Day, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas called Biden’s victory “the greatest Heist of our History”, and she told him that former Donald Trump should not concede.- By Bob Woodward and Robert Costa in The Washington Post.

Virginia Thomas, a conservative activist married to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, repeatedly pressed White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows to pursue unrelenting efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election in a series of urgent text exchanges in the critical weeks after the vote, according to copies of the messages obtained by The Washington Post and CBS News.

The messages — 29 in all — reveal an extraordinary pipeline between Virginia Thomas, who goes by Ginni, and former President Donald Trump’s top aide during a period when Trump and his allies were vowing to go to the Supreme Court in an effort to negate the election results.

On Nov. 10, after news organizations had projected Joe Biden the winner based on state vote totals, Thomas wrote to Meadows: “Help This Great President stand firm, Mark!!!...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.”

When Meadows wrote to Thomas on Nov. 24, the White House chief of staff invoked God to describe the effort to overturn the election. “This is a fight of good versus evil,” Meadows wrote. “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. Well at least my time in DC on it.”

Thomas replied: “Thank you!! Needed that! This plus a conversation with my best friend just now… I will try to keep holding on. America is worth it!”

It is unclear to whom Thomas was referring.

The messages, which do not directly reference Justice Thomas or the Supreme Court, show for the first time how Ginni Thomas used her access to Trump’s inner circle to promote and seek to guide the president’s strategy to overturn the election results — and how receptive and grateful Meadows said he was to receive her advice. Among Thomas’s stated goals in the messages was for lawyer Sidney Powell, who promoted incendiary and unsupported claims about the election, to be “the lead and the face” of Trump’s legal team.

The text messages were among 2,320 that Meadows provided to the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. The content of messages between Thomas and Meadows — 21 sent by her, eight by him – has not previously been reported. They were reviewed by The Post and CBS News and then confirmed by five people who have seen the committee’s documents.

Meadows’s attorney, George Terwilliger III, confirmed the existence of the 29 messages between his client and Thomas. In reviewing the substance of the messages Wednesday, he said that neither he nor Meadows would comment on individual texts. But, Terwilliger added, “nothing about the text messages presents any legal issues.”

Ginni Thomas did not respond to multiple requests for comment made Thursday by email and phone. Justice Thomas, who has been hospitalized for treatment of an infection, did not respond to a request for comment made through the Supreme Court’s public information office.

It is unknown whether Ginni Thomas and Meadows exchanged additional messages between the election and Biden’s inauguration beyond the 29 received by the committee. Shortly after providing the 2,320 messages, Meadows ceased cooperating with the committee, arguing that any further engagement could violate Trump’s claims of executive privilege. Committee members and aides said they believe the messages may be just a portion of the pair’s total exchanges.

A spokesman for the committee declined to comment. The revelation of Thomas’s messages with Meadows comes three weeks after lawyers for the committee said in a court filing that the panel has “a good-faith basis for concluding that the President and members of his Campaign engaged in a criminal conspiracy to defraud the United States” and obstruct the counting of electoral votes by Congress.

Trump spoke publicly during this period about his intent to contest the election results in the Supreme Court. “This is a major fraud on our nation,” the president said in a speech at 2:30 the morning after the election. “We want the law to be used in a proper manner. So we’ll be going to the U.S. Supreme Court.”

Clarence Thomas fell asleep during oral arguments at the Supreme Court

Thomas has publicly denied any conflict of interest between her activism and her husband’s work on the Supreme Court. “Clarence doesn’t discuss his work with me, and I don’t involve him in my work,” she said in an interview with the Washington Free Beacon, a conservative outlet, for an article published March 14.

Ginni Thomas, in that interview, also acknowledged that she had attended Trump’s “Stop the Steal” rally at the Ellipse near the White House on Jan. 6, but said that she left early because it was too cold and that she did not have any role in planning the event.

Justice Thomas, 73, is the Supreme Court’s longest-serving current justice and has missed oral arguments this week because of his hospitalization. He has made few public comments about the 2020 election. In February 2021, when the Supreme Court rejected election challenges filed by Trump and his allies, Thomas wrote in a dissent that it was “baffling” and “inexplicable” that the majority had decided against hearing the cases because he believed the Supreme Court should provide states with guidance for future elections.

In her text messages to Meadows, Ginni Thomas spread false theories, commented on cable news segments and advocated with urgency and fervor that the president and his team take action to reverse the outcome of the election. She urged that they take a hard line with Trump staffers and congressional Republicans who had resisted arguments that the election was stolen.

In the messages, Thomas and Meadows each assert a belief that the election was stolen and seem to share a solidarity of purpose and faith, though they occasionally express differences on tactics.

“The intense pressures you and our President are now experiencing are more intense than Anything Experienced (but I only felt a fraction of it in 1991),” Thomas wrote to Meadows on Nov. 19, an apparent reference to Justice Thomas’s 1991 confirmation hearings in which lawyer Anita Hill testified that he had made unwanted sexual comments when he was her boss. Thomas strongly denied the accusations.

The first of the 29 messages between Ginni Thomas and Mark Meadows was sent on Nov. 5, two days after the election.

She sent him a link to a YouTube video labeled “TRUMP STING w CIA Director Steve Pieczenik, The Biggest Election Story in History, QFS-BLOCKCHAIN.”

Pieczenik, a former State Department official, is a far-right commentator who has falsely claimed that the 2012, massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., was a “false-flag” operation to push a gun-control agenda.

The video Thomas shared with Meadows is no longer available on YouTube. But Thomas wrote to Meadows, “I hope this is true; never heard anything like this before, or even a hint of it. Possible???”

“Watermarked ballots in over 12 states have been part of a huge Trump & military white hat sting operation in 12 key battleground states,” she wrote.

During that period, supporters of the QAnon extremist ideology embraced a false theory that Trump had watermarked mail-in ballots so he could track potential fraud. “Watch the water” was a refrain in QAnon circles at the time.

In the Nov. 5 message to Meadows, Thomas went on to quote a passage that had circulated on right-wing websites: “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.”

The text messages received by the House select committee do not include a response from Meadows.

The next day, Nov. 6, Thomas sent a follow-up to Meadows: “Do not concede. It takes time for the army who is gathering for his back.”

It is unclear if Meadows responded.

On Nov. 10, Thomas drew a reply from Meadows. She wrote, “Mark, I wanted to text you and tell you for days you are in my prayers!!” She continued by urging him to “Help This Great President stand firm” and invoking “the greatest Heist of our History.”

Thomas added in the message that Meadows should “Listen to Rush. Mark Steyn, Bongino, Cleta” — appearing to refer to conservative commentators Rush Limbaugh, Mark Steyn and Dan Bongino, as well as lawyer Cleta Mitchell, who was involved in Trump’s push to claim victory in Georgia despite Biden’s certified win there.

One minute later, Meadows responded: “I will stand firm. We will fight until there is no fight left. Our country is too precious to give up on. Thanks for all you do.”

Nine minutes after that, Thomas replied, “Tearing up and praying for you guys!!!!! So proud to know you!!”

Later that night, Ginni Thomas messaged Meadows seeming to react to a cable news segment. “Van Jones spins interestingly, but shows us the balls being juggled too,” Thomas said, referring to the prominent CNN commentator.

Thomas then turned to her frustrations with congressional Republicans and said she wished more of them were rallying behind Trump and being more active with his base voters, who were furious about the election.

She wrote, “House and Senate guys are pathetic too... only 4 GOP

House members seen out in street rallies with grassroots... Gohmert, Jordan, Gosar, and Roy.” She appeared to be referring to Republican House members Louie Gohmert of Texas, Jim Jordan of Ohio, Paul A. Gosar of Arizona and Chip Roy of Texas.

This was a troubled time for Trump. News organizations had declared Biden the winner on Nov. 7, after a review of vote totals in each state and the electoral count. Trump’s legal operation was divided between his campaign’s official lawyers and Rudolph W. Giuliani, Trump’s confidant and personal attorney who was fast asserting control of his campaign’s legal strategy. While many Republicans supported Trump’s filing of legal challenges in several states, his lawyers stumbled in court and many allies by mid-November were privately confiding that Trump’s legal battle would be short-lived.

Yet Thomas urged Meadows to plow ahead, rally Republicans around Trump and remind them of his enduring political capital.

“Where the heck are all those who benefited by Presidents coattails?!!!” she wrote in her text message to him late on Nov. 10. She then told him to watch a YouTube video about the power of never conceding.

Meadows might not have been Thomas’s only contact inside the Trump White House that week. On Nov. 13, she texted Meadows about her outreach to “Jared,” potentially a reference to Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior White House adviser. She wrote, “Just forwarded to yr gmail an email I sent Jared this am. Sidney Powell & improved coordination now will help the cavalry come and Fraud exposed and America saved.” The messages provided to the House select committee do not show a response by Meadows.

Kushner did not respond to a request for comment.

Powell was becoming ubiquitous on television — and winning the president’s favor, according to several Trump advisers — as she claimed without evidence that electronic voting systems had stolen the election from Trump by switching millions of ballots in Biden’s favor. She claimed, again without evidence, that hundreds of thousands of ballots were appearing out of nowhere and that a global communist conspiracy was afoot involving Venezuela, Cuba, and probably China.

Still, while Trump cheered some of Powell’s commentary, she was a polarizing figure in his orbit. Her views were considered so extreme and unsupported by evidence that David Bossie, a longtime Trump supporter, told others that she was peddling “concocted B.S.” After Fox News host Tucker Carlson contacted Powell about her claim that electronic voting machines had switched ballots to Biden, he told his viewers that he found her answers evasive and that she had shown no evidence to support her assertion. He stopped having her on his program.

Ginni Thomas stood by her. “Don’t let her and your assets be marginalized instead...help her be the lead and the face,” she wrote to Meadows on Nov. 13.

The following day, Nov. 14, Thomas sent Meadows material she said was from Connie Hair, chief of staff to Gohmert. (Gohmert is a Republican and was part of the Tea Party movement). It is not clear if she was passing on a message from Hair or sharing Hair’s perspective as guidance for Meadows. The text message seems to quote Hair’s belief that “the most important thing you can realize right now is that there are no rules in war.”

“This war is psychological. PSYOP*,” the text from Thomas states.
Hair said Thursday that she did not have any specific recollection of that text message.

On Nov. 19, which would be a crucial day for Powell as she spoke at a news conference at the Republican National Committee, Thomas continued to bolster Powell’s standing in a text to Meadows.

“Mark (don’t want to wake you)… ” Thomas wrote. “Sounds like Sidney and her team are getting inundated with evidence of fraud. Make a plan. Release the Kraken and save us from the left taking America down.”

*Psychological operations are operations to convey selected information and indicators to audiences to influence their emotions, motives, and objective reasoning, and ultimately the behavior of governments, organizations, groups, and individuals.

Tweets:
Maggie McGlothin
@MaggieMcglothin
·Mar 25

If I were a betting woman, I’d bet Ginni Thomas knows the identity of the pipe bomber.

Agolf Twitler Slayer
@bblock29
·Mar 25

Ginni Thomas does not discuss overturning the election with Her husband but texts Mark Meadows and Jared Kushner. Does anyone believe this?