Virginia "Ginni" Thomas, the conservative activist and wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, told the House that she regretted texting and emails she sent in the aftermath of the 2020 election.
According to a newly released transcript of her September interview with the committee investigating the attack on the U.S. Capitol, Thomas said she regretted the fact that the messages became public.
Thomas told congressional investigators that he didn't know how many of them wanted their texts to be public. I didn't want my texts to be made public.
A trove of records that the chief of staff provided to the select committee was revealed to contain 29 text messages that the chief of staff had exchanged with Thomas in the days and weeks following the election. When the messages were sent, Trump and his allies were promising to take their election challenges to the Supreme Court, raising potential conflicts of interest for Justice Thomas.
In the messages, Ginni Thomas urgedMeadows to make sure Trump did not concede defeat to Joe Biden, as well as parroting many of the falsehoods and conspiracy theories that were spreading among Trump supporters. Thomas pushed a number of fringe claims, including a baseless theory that Trump watermarked mail-in ballots to track fraud, and a claim that the Biden crime family and ballot fraud co-conspirator were behind it.
After the text messages came to light, Thomas sat for an interview with the committee. On Friday, the transcript of that conversation was made public. After the release of the final report on the committee's 18-month investigation last week, the transcripts of conversations with over 1,000 witnesses have been made public.
In her interview with the panel, Thomas expressed regret, not just about her messages toMeadows, but about other emails and texts the committee obtained that she had sent regarding the election results and efforts to investigate alleged fraud
Thomas told the committee that she regretted the tone and content of the texts and that she wished she had not sent them. She said only that it was an emotional time and that she objected to the content of the messages themselves.
Thomas told the panel that it was really embarrassing to go back to the old days. I just wanted to make it public.
Thomas, whose career as a conservative activist spans decades, began her conversation with the select committee by trying to assure them that her pro-Trump advocacy wouldn't conflict with her husband. Thomas told the committee that she and her husband don't discuss pending Supreme Court cases or her political work with him.
She told the committee that her husband was unaware of the texts until they were reported by the press.
She told the committee that on Nov. 9, 2020, she decided to take a sabbatical from some of the conservative nonprofits she works with because their activities around the election were becoming too legal. However, the terms of this sabbatical seem to have been loose, and Thomas acknowledged that she continued not only to receive emails regarding the organizations activities during this time but even invited the lawyer John Eastman, whom the committee has accused of conspiring with Trump to illegally overturn the election results, to speak at
During her interview with the committee, Thomas claimed to have no recollection of her activities in the weeks leading up to the 2020 election. What appears to be clear, however, from her answers to the committee's questions, is that Thomas, like many other supporters of the former president, was convinced that the official results of the 2020 election were not legitimate. She said that Thomas was motivated to attend the rally by the belief that it was going to happen. Even as she acknowledged that Biden is the president, she continued to hold onto this view.
In an exchange with the committee's vice chair, Thomas said she didn't think her view of the election would have changed if she'd known.
It wasn't uncovered in a timely way, so we have President Biden.
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