The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward and CBS News’s Robert Costa landed one of the week’s bigger D.C. scoops with a report that Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, texted then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows urging him to contest the election results.
“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,” Thomas wrote to Meadows on Nov. 10, after Joe Biden had been declared the projected winner by the networks, according to the the Post and CBS News report.
In the days that followed, Thomas advanced a number of conspiracy theories about the election while pushing for attorney Sidney Powell to take the lead in the Trump campaign’s challenge of the election results. Powell, though, made a series of wild and unsupported claims in multiple TV appearances and at a Nov. 19 news conference, to the point that Fox News’ Tucker Carlson told viewers that, after his inquiries, she could not produce evidence. Trump eventually distanced himself from her.
In a text message that Thomas sent to Meadows on Nov. 5, she wrote, quoting from 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 texts were among those turned over to the January 6th Committee, Woodward and Costa report. They write, “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.”
Earlier this month, Ginni Thomas told The Washington Free Beacon, “Clarence doesn’t discuss his work with me, and I don’t involve him in my work.” But her involvement in the post-election challenge, including her attendance at the January 6th rally that preceded the siege on the Capitol, has put new scrutiny on when Supreme Court justices should recuse themselves from certain cases. Clarence Thomas did not recuse when the Supreme Court weighed in on the Pennsylvania Republican Party’s election challenge. He dissented from the justices decision not to hear the challenge, writing, “The decision to leave election law hidden beneath a shroud of doubt is baffling.”
Costa joined CBS News from the Post in January. At the time, the network said that he would continue to do joint special projects with the Post.
