Supreme Court justice Thomas's wife urged Trump White House to overturn 2020 election -report | Reuters
By: Noeleen Walder and Rosalba O'Brien (Reuters)
ladies and gentlemen, the trump teabag/Q-nut cults of the republican party...
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Virginia Thomas, the wife of conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, urged former Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows to work to overturn the results of the 2020 election in a series of text messages, the Washington Post and CBS News reported on Thursday. The messages, sent in the weeks following the Nov. 3 presidential election, show that Thomas advised Meadows to "make a plan" and "release the Kraken" in a bid to preserve Donald Trump's presidency, the Post and CBS News reported. Virginia Thomas, a conservative activist and attorney, could not immediately be reached for comment. Now-President Joe Biden was projected to win the race on Nov. 7, 2020. "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," she said in one of 29 messages shared between the two, according to the Post. Sidney Powell, who represented Trump's campaign when he sought to overturn the election result, filed lawsuits challenging counts in multiple states in support of Trump's false claims of widespread election fraud. She had previously vowed to "release the Kraken" to expose the alleged fraud, a reference to the sea monster of Scandinavian folklore. The messages were handed over to the congressional committee investigating the …
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I'm sure republicans have a plausible explanation. /s
>gag< no wonder larry was so hot for anita hill. ginni best avoid beaches lest green peace tries to drag her back into the ocean and the ghost of captain ahab spots her.
Clarence Thomas should resign from the Supreme Court or be impeached.
there's going to be some hard questions for him about his non-recusal of certain SCOTUS decisions.
The wife of a sitting member of the United States Supreme Court was spreading lies instigated by a bizarre political cult, Q Anon.
It sounds like the plot of a Stephen King horror novel.
America has been laid low, and it is still happening. Wake up people.
Agreed. Wake up from this fucking nightmare you all have unleashed on us.
[Deleted] We are tired of the coddling of these insane seditionists.
keep wearing that maga hat and make sure the gadsden flag decal and trump '24 bumper sticker are prominently displayed on your vehicle.
[Deleted]
Don't do flags and bumper stickers. [deleted]
the maga hat is good enough...
You do know that commenting on a post after flagging it negates the flag right? Your moderator mindset needs a reset.
[you do know that I delete meta and I certainly don't need any group moderation lessons from you. I'll leave your comment up as an example. you're free to participate on the competing seed.]
Justice Thomas is clearly compromised.. What would you suggest?
This story from Bob Woodard and Bob Costas repeats some of the already covered information, but also has some new and further points about this disgusting far right sedition.
www.washingtonpost.com /politics/2022/03/24/virginia-thomas-mark-meadows-texts/
Virginia Thomas urged White House chief to pursue unrelenting efforts to overturn the 2020 election, texts show
Bob Woodward, Robert Costa 16-20 minutes 3/24/2022
The messages — 29 in all — reveal an extraordinary pipeline between Virginia Thomas, who goes by Ginni, and 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.”
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 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. 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.”
“Release the Kraken” had become a catchphrase on the far right after the election, used as shorthand for the anticipated exposure of a voter fraud conspiracy that would upend Biden’s victory with the same force as a “Kraken,” a mythical giant sea monster.
In that same exchange, Thomas also at one point offered Meadows advice on managing the West Wing staff.
“Suggestion: You need to buck up your team on the inside, Mark,” Thomas wrote. “The lower level insiders are scared, fearful or sending out signals of hopelessness vs an awareness of the existential threat to America right now. You can buck them up, strengthen their spirits.”
“Monica Crowley,” Thomas said, referring to the conservative commentator, “may have a sense of this [from] her Nixon days.” Crowley, a top official in Trump’s Treasury Department, had been an aide to former president Richard M. Nixon years after he resigned from office in 1974 because of the Watergate scandal.
Thomas then wrote, “You guys fold, the evil just moves fast down underneath you all. Lots of intensifying threats coming to ACB and others.” Justice Amy Coney Barrett, sometimes called “ACB” by her supporters, had joined the Supreme Court in October, shortly before the election. It is unclear to what threats Thomas was referring.
Later on Nov. 19, Meadows replied to Thomas’s long text message by saying, “Thanks so much.”
But Thomas’s high aspirations for Powell quickly collapsed that afternoon. Instead of capturing the nation’s attention at the RNC news conference, where she spoke alongside Giuliani and other Trump advisers, Powell was criticized for spreading a false theory about electronic voting machines as a tool for communists. Some Trump aides were horrified by her and Giuliani’s performances and felt they had embarrassed the president by becoming a parody of his post-election fight.
As Giuliani spoke, a dark brown liquid mixed with beads of sweat rolled down his cheek. “Did you watch ‘My Cousin Vinny?’ ” he asked reporters, tying a legal reference to the 1992 comedy.
Thomas wrote to Meadows, “Tears are flowing at what Rudy is doing right now!!!!”
“Glad to help,” Meadows replied.
By Nov. 22, Trump gave his blessing for Giuliani and another Trump lawyer, Jenna Ellis, to issue a statement claiming that Powell “is not a member of the Trump Legal Team.”
Thomas reached out to Meadows that day with concern. “Trying to understand the Sidney Powell distancing,” she wrote.
“She doesn’t have anything or at least she won’t share it if she does,” Meadows texted back.
“Wow!” Thomas replied.
Meadows did not respond.
On Nov. 24, Thomas engaged Meadows again by sharing a video from Parler, a conservative social media website, that appeared to refer to conservative commentator Glenn Beck.
“If you all cave to the elites, you have to know that many of your 73 million feel like what Glenn is expressing,” Thomas wrote.
She said Trump risked his supporters growing disenchanted to the point of walking away from politics. “Me included,” she wrote. “I think I am done with politics, and I don’t think I am alone, Mark.”
Meadows replied three minutes later: “I don’t know what you mean by caving to the elites.”
Thomas responded: “I can’t see Americans swallowing the obvious fraud. Just going with one more thing with no frickin consequences... the whole coup and now this... we just cave to people wanting Biden to be anointed? Many of us can’t continue the GOP charade.”
After continued back-and-forth, Meadows wrote, “You’re preaching to the choir. Very demoralizing.”
The text exchanges with Thomas that Meadows provided to the House select committee pause after Nov. 24, 2020, with an unexplained gap in correspondence. The committee received one additional message sent by Thomas to Meadows, on Jan. 10, four days after the “Stop the Steal” rally Thomas said she attended and the deadly attack on the Capitol.
In that message, Thomas expresses support for Meadows and Trump — and directed anger at Vice President Mike Pence, who had refused Trump’s wishes to block the congressional certification of Biden’s electoral college victory.
“We are living through what feels like the end of America,” Thomas wrote to Meadows. “Most of us are disgusted with the VP and are in listening mode to see where to fight with our teams. Those who attacked the Capitol are not representative of our great teams of patriots for DJT!!”
“Amazing times,” she added. “The end of Liberty.”
So, after reading all of those comments by Ginni Thomas, WHO here believes that she turns off her 'rabid' when she walks into the house or communicates with her husband through the plethora of methods we use today?
It's just not credible that they don't 'share' an ideology or at least their position with each other. I for one have never known a couple that could 'compartmentalize' that effectively. Judge Thomas has expressed his adoration for his wife. I can't see him shutting her out when it comes to what she is passionate about.
I can't believe that your link doesn't include this text:
“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."
That's some bat shit crazy shit right there...
The right will have two excuses, either it's ''fake news'' or she didn't break any law.
The congressman questioning Judge Jackson on CRT and her religious beliefs really show what a fucking farce the right is, I'll bet not one of them has a word to say about this and their favorite justice or his traitor wife.
it's starting to look like it won't be too long now before the war against autocracy moves to this hemisphere and the unamerican oligarchs willfully ignorant supporters are rotting in the streets here.
All you have to do is look at the RW comments on here, there is a vast separation of brains and reality.
now an endless display of unconstitutional ideals...
This all calls to mind The Manchurian Candidate, where a deranged authoritarian woman tried to manipulate her influence over a man to undermine American democracy.
The Justice Dept. should be investigating all of this, immediately.
Reading these unhinged text message exchanges makes it clear that the Thomas family is living in an alternate reality. It makes me wonder how much actual fiction there is in Hunter S. Thomason’s story Fear and Loathing in Elko, or the Anita Hill revelations. Judging by Clarence’s choice in a spouse, this guy shouldn’t be in the position he is in.
Clarence Thomas , Ginni Thomas , and Mark Meadows , are not fringe figures in conservative circles, they are at the heart of it.
We as a nation have spent years underplaying and underestimating the evil emanating from the far right, and now we have a Supreme Court wife, who is said to have great influence over her husband, advocating sedition against this country.
When will the media go after these people in any sort of significant way?
Turned up via a fishing expedition that democrats had no valid right to.
[deleted]
You are so out of gas.
Don't talk about the unhinged Ginni Thomas, talk about the people uncovering her sedition. lol.
Her husband should resign from the Supreme Court today. He broke his oath by not recusing himself from the SC vote on the White house archives.
Lol. The wife of a staunchly conservative Supreme Court Justice is fully immersed in a sea of Q conspiracy theories and was in direct communication with WH Chief of Staff, and her husband is the sole dissenter in a SCOTUS decision regarding Jan. 6 with no explanation. You are a joke.
The SC voted 8-1 to give the material to the Jan 6 committee, so they had a "valid" right to it. The invalid aspect was supplied by Clarence Thomas, the sole dissenter who knew his wife was implicated as un American in the material.
They have so much to do and so little time to do it. Soon those gavels will be in Republican hands.
[deleted]
Please, continue giving yourself away. Tell us again how you are not a Trump supporter. We need more laughs today.
[deleted]
Nope. They were never investigating a Justice's wife as I recall. This is why they want all the info they can get their hands on. Nixon used burglars, they are using "Jan 6th" and every normal human being knows it.
They were investigating wherever the trail of insurrection led. Now we learn it also led to a Supreme Court justice.
[deleted]
ginni's texts were in the material that meadows turned over to the J6 investigators. try again.
You are running on fumes Vic.
[deleted]
[deleted]
autocrats are no where near normal.
Remember when Vic was insinuating here that the Jan. 6 insurrectionist crowd wasn’t chanting “Hang Mike Pence”? I guess the “normal human beings” were hearing “Let’s Go Brandon”.
trumpism has devolved into mental illness. mass hysteria among the room temperature IQ crowd.
"That's a lie!!!"
recognize that comment?
What "every normal human being knows", other than where the bathroom is, is a joy not worth knowing, and the greatest of those joys is found in not conflating I with we.
You're getting rusty.
I've been looking forward to it for several years and am hoping to add cantankerous to the bucket.
... and you're toeing the line.
Hey, no hallux jokes!
So the information is not valid because it was gathered because they had no right to the "bad" information? Are you fucking kidding me?
So if there is an investigation, and it turns up other crimes, those crimes get a pass? Is that what you're saying?
RELEASE THE KRAKPOT !
I just do not know what to say anymore.
id say me neither, but, i wish not to lie
but certainly agree with and understand your feelings
There is now a competing article, knew that was going to happen.
There are actually three articles on this story, I seeded one last night. Not that good of an idea to seed things at night though, they get lost in the shuffle.
This should be the biggest story , domestically, of the week if not of the month or year. It is stunning in its importance to politics in this country.
and I can't keep this one on the front page, wtf?
That's kind of weird. With all the comments you would think it would stay on the FP.
It's still on the FP. Just not in the top 5. [deleted]
the site software has been tweaked. no biggie, when this seed dies off I'll lock it and go kamikaze the fascist seed.
me too. it's his normal progression. off topic comment, meta comment, competing article...
maga is a disease that seems to infect the brain.
... by rotting it.