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      Jan. 6 Panel Is Likely to Seek Interview With Ginni Thomas

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      The committee is preparing to reach out to the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas after the disclosure of her text messages supporting efforts to overturn the election.WASHINGTON — The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol is likely to reach out soon to Virginia Thomas, the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas, to request that she sit for an interview, according to two people familiar with the matter.The decision to ask Ms. Thomas for an interview — after intense internal debate about the matter — came after the revelation last week of Ms. Thomas’s text messages to Mark Meadows, the former White House chief of staff, in which she relentlessly urged him to pursue a plan to overturn the 2020 presidential election.Investigators have also discussed whether to issue subpoenas for any other communications she may have had with the White House or the President Donald J. Trump’s legal team about the election, including a message that she told Mr. Meadows she had sent to Jared Kushner, a former adviser to Mr. Trump, according to people with knowledge of the investigation.After a closed-door meeting of the committee on Monday evening, Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi and the chairman of the panel, emerged to tell reporters that “no decision” had been made about whether to issue a subpoena to Ms. Thomas.Although the committee has been in possession of Ms. Thomas’s text messages for months, not everyone on the panel had seen the documents before they were published in news reports. That prompted debate among the committee’s members, several of whom urged the panel to try to interview her.A person familiar with the discussions said the panel concluded that Ms. Thomas had relevant information, and that it was important for investigators to hear from her. CNN earlier reported the committee’s decision.An adviser to Ms. Thomas did not immediately respond to a request for comment.For at least several weeks, the committee’s senior investigators have discussed whether to call Ms. Thomas, who is known as Ginni, to testify. They also debated sending a subpoena to Ms. Thomas for her communications, with some top investigators initially arguing against it because they viewed her as a minor player in the attempts to subvert the election. But the disclosure of the text messages, first by The Washington Post and CBS News, and public pressure renewed those discussions.A New York Times Magazine investigation last month examined the political and personal history of Ms. Thomas and her husband. That included her role in efforts to overturn the election from her perch on the nine-member board of C.N.P. Action, a conservative group that helped advance the “Stop the Steal” movement, and in mediating between feuding factions of organizers “so that there wouldn’t be any division around Jan. 6,” as one organizer put it.Ms. Thomas acknowledged that she had attended the rally that preceded the violence in an interview with a conservative news outlet this month, but she has otherwise downplayed her role. Then came disclosure of the texts to Mr. Meadows.In the messages, she called the 2020 election a “heist” and even suggested the lawyer who should be put in charge of that effort.Capitol Riot’s Aftermath: Key DevelopmentsCard 1 of 3Judge says Trump likely committed crimes. More

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      Ginni Thomas Pressed Trump’s Chief of Staff to Overturn 2020 Vote, Texts Show

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      The messages between Ms. Thomas and Mark Meadows are the first evidence that she directly advised the White House in efforts to reverse the election results.In the weeks between the 2020 presidential election and the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, Virginia Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, sent a barrage of text messages imploring President Donald J. Trump’s chief of staff to take steps to overturn the vote, according to a person with knowledge of the texts.In one message sent in the days after the election, she urged the chief of staff, Mark Meadows, to “release the Kraken and save us from the left taking America down,” invoking a slogan popular on the right that refers to a web of conspiracy theories that Trump supporters believed would overturn the election.In another, she wrote: “I can’t see Americans swallowing the obvious fraud. Just going with one more thing with no frickin consequences.” She added: “We just cave to people wanting Biden to be anointed? Many of us can’t continue the GOP charade.”The contents of the texts were reported earlier by The Washington Post and CBS News. They were among about 9,000 pages of documents that Mr. Meadows turned over to the congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack. The texts detailed Mr. Meadows’s interactions with Republican politicians as they planned strategies to try to keep Mr. Trump in office in the weeks before the riot.The committee obtained 29 texts between Ms. Thomas and Mr. Meadows — 28 exchanged between Nov. 4 and Nov. 24, and one written on Jan. 10. The text messages, most of which were written by Ms. Thomas, represent the first evidence that she was directly advising the White House as it sought to overturn the election. In fact, in her efforts to keep Mr. Trump in power, Ms. Thomas effectively toggled between like-minded members of the executive and legislative branches, even as her husband, who sits atop the judiciary branch that is supposed to serve as a check on the other branches of government, heard election-related cases.Justice Thomas has been Mr. Trump’s most stalwart defender on the court. In February 2021, he wrote a dissent after the majority declined to hear a case filed by Pennsylvania Republicans that sought to disqualify certain mail-in ballots. And this past January, he was the only justice who voted against allowing the release of records from the Trump White House related to the Jan. 6 attack.Ms. Thomas has actively opposed the Jan. 6 committee and its work, co-signing a letter in December calling for House Republicans to expel Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger from their conference for joining the committee. Ms. Thomas and her co-authors said the investigation “brings disrespect to our country’s rule of law” and “legal harassment to private citizens who have done nothing wrong,” adding that they would begin “a nationwide movement to add citizens’ voices to this effort.”Many of Ms. Thomas’s postelection texts are rambling, with little attention to punctuation, and they run the gamut. She calls Nov. 3, Election Day, a “heist,” and repeats debunked conspiracy theories, including one pushed by QAnon that falsely alleged that voter fraud had been discovered in Arizona on secretly watermarked ballots.The texts show she was communicating not only with Mr. Meadows, but also with Connie Hair, the chief of staff to Louie Gohmert, the Texas Republican congressman who sued Vice President Mike Pence to force him to certify Mr. Trump as the victor of the 2020 election.Mark Meadows, left, and Jared Kushner, with whom Ms. Thomas also appears to have been in contact.Doug Mills/The New York TimesThe text traffic also suggests that Ms. Thomas was in contact with Jared Kushner, the former president’s son-in-law and adviser. Sidney Powell, the lawyer advising Trump’s campaign team known for unleashing wild theories about voting fraud, comes up repeatedly. On Nov. 13, for instance, Mr. Trump included Ms. Powell in a tweeted list of his team’s lawyers. That same day, Ms. Thomas urged Mr. Meadows to support Ms. Powell, and said she had also reached out to “Jared” to do the same: “Just forwarded to yr gmail an email I sent Jared this am,” she wrote. “Sidney Powell & improved coordination now will help the cavalry come and Fraud exposed and America saved.”When some of the president’s other lawyers began distancing themselves from Ms. Powell, Ms. Thomas warned Mr. Meadows not to “cave” to the “elites.”In one text exchange right after the election, she tells Mr. Meadow that he needs to listen to Steve Pieczenik, a onetime State Department consultant who has appeared on Alex Jones’s Infowars to claim, among other things, that the Sandy Hook school massacre was a false-flag operation.She also quoted language circulating on pro-Trump sites that said, “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.” She added: “I hope this is true.”Ms. Thomas and Mr. Meadows have been like-minded associates for years, and she bestowed an award on him at a 2019 gathering of conservatives. While Ms. Thomas already had access to the president, White House aides said her influence increased after Mr. Trump named Mr. Meadows chief of staff in March 2020.Mr. Meadows is no longer cooperating with the committee; a lawyer for Mr. Meadows, George J. Terwilliger III, did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Nor did Ms. Thomas or the Supreme Court. Mr. Terwilliger has argued that Mr. Meadows cooperated as much as he could without violating Mr. Trump’s assertions of executive privilege, and Mr. Meadows has filed suit against the panel to seek a court ruling to determine the validity of those assertions of executive privilege. Others challenging the committee’s subpoenas in court include John Eastman, a conservative lawyer and former clerk to Justice Thomas who wrote a memo arguing that Mr. Pence had the power to reject Electoral College votes for President Biden. Both cases could end up before the Supreme Court.A The New York Times investigation published in February highlighted Ms. Thomas’s postelection activities, including her role on the board of CNP Action, a conservative group that worked to advance efforts to overturn the election even as she was texting Mr. Meadows. In one document, it instructed members to pressure Republican lawmakers into challenging the results and appointing alternate slates of electors: “Demand that they not abandon their Constitutional responsibilities during a time such as this.”Capitol Riot’s Aftermath: Key DevelopmentsCard 1 of 3Requests to “rescind” the election. More