BREAKING NEWS: New Revelations Further Implicate Ginni Thomas in the Events of January 6, and Usher in What May Be the Gravest Constitutional Crisis Since the American Civil War

The most recent House January 6 Committee hearing didn’t just disclose the most terrifying threat to DOJ in its history—it launched a constitutional crisis like nothing we’ve seen since the mid-1800s.

ABOVE: Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, husband of Ginni Thomas.

{UPDATE: Following the writing of this report, CNN reported that the FBI had executed yet another search warrant on Donald Trump lawyer and Ginni Thomas friend John Eastman, this time in New Mexico—where the FBI took Eastman’s phone as evidence. The warrant was executed the same day that the FBI raided the home of Eastman co-conspirator Jeffrey Clark.}

Introduction

After four months of major media reporting that the House January 6 Committee was divided on whether to investigate Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, on June 16 the Committee announced that it had finally come to a decision: based on the evidence in its possession, it needed to interview Mrs. Thomas.

Within a week, one of the lead investigators for the Committee, Republican attorney John Wood, had announced that he would be unexpectedly leaving the Committee—immediately. Wood is a former law clerk of Justice Thomas, at a minimum an old acquaintance of the Thomases, long had (and may still have) access to Thomas Clerk World (the private listserv on which both Ginni Thomas and Trump lawyer John Eastman posted in late 2020 as heated arguments raged there about Donald Trump’s post-election legal strategy), and may or may not be seriously exploring a run for the U.S. Senate in Missouri, but in any case dropped off the most important congressional committee in modern American political history the moment it decided to investigate his ex-boss’s wife. His sudden exit certainly left America to draw its own conclusions.

But up until Thursday’s nationally televised Committee hearing, the seriousness of the Committee’s interest in Ginni Thomas was unclear. Certainly, Mrs. Thomas herself made quite a show of being positively chipper about giving testimony for the largest federal investigation in U.S. history, going so far as to lay it on perhaps a bit too thick: “I can’t wait” to talk to the Committee, she gushed, though she surely knew that she was being sought as a witness because of recent reports that she illicitly lobbied GOP lawmakers in Arizona to break the law and sent texts to the White House chief of staff advocating conspiracy theories and pushing for a coup of the federal government.

But even as it may have seemed to some U.S. news-watchers that Ginni Thomas was drawing from the same playbook used by Trump congressional ally Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH)—who publicly declaimed that the Committee would get nothing of value from him because he had nothing to hide, only to desperately stonewall giving testimony in the hope of running out the clock until a possible Republican takeover of the House in January 2023 (an event that would end the House January 6 Committee investigation)—certainly the possibility remained that Ginni Thomas was either so confident in her own craftiness or so misguided in her self-righteousness that she would in fact end up sitting for an interview with members of Congress who at least seem to believe she has engaged in wrongdoing.

But whatever chance there was of a voluntary Thomas interview appeared to vanish on Thursday, June 23, 2022, when the Committee implicitly implicated Thomas in the January 6 coup conspiracy without saying her name. While Thomas would not have missed that moment in the hearing, undoubtedly many did, so Proof—importantly, armed with both that footage and critical new information—will here explain why and how Thomas has just found herself deeply embroiled in the worst political scandal in American history. By the end of this article, readers will have received all of the most recent intelligence placing Ginni Thomas at the heart of a conspiracy to overthrow American democracy. You can further prepare for this article, if you like, by reading the two previous investigative reports (1, 2) at Proof about Thomas—both of which preceded the recent Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade. That ruling signalled the end of the John Roberts era at the U.S. Supreme Court, and the beginning of the era of Clarence Thomas. There can be no doubt, now, that the leading power atop the federal judicial branch of the United States government is Ginni Thomas’s husband, the senior-most judge on the nation’s highest court. And given the information below, this is cause for grave concern for all Americans.

1. CNP Action

One of the most powerful and secretive far-right conservative groups in America is the Washington-based Council for National Policy, whose politically militant subunit—still more powerful, secretive, and at the fringes of American conservatism than the outfit of which it is an arm—is an entity known as CNP Action.

CNP Action is led by a Board comprised of just eight individuals, who regularly keep in touch with one another. These eight people are among the most well-connected Republicans in the United States; where they point, money goes and policies change. They have ready access to members of Congress, senators, and Republican presidents. Just as importantly, these eight people play a role in advising Republican presidents on staffing their administrations; in fact on and just before January 6, 2021, Ginni Thomas was one of then-POTUS Donald Trump’s leading advisers in this arena, with her particular focuses being (a) judicial appointments, and (b) the positioning, within the Trump administration, of far-right legal thinkers (think here of those practicing lawyers or academics educated at the Antonin Scalia Law School of George Mason University who have taught at Liberty University and are members in good standing of The Federalist Society—a trio of accomplishments and statuses that mark one as a consummate far-right legal mind in the United States in the twenty-first century).

This article focuses on three of the eight CNP Action heads on January 6, 2021:

• Ginni Thomas;

• Kenneth Blackwell; and

• Kelly Shackelford.

Only one of these people was mentioned at the Friday Committee hearing—and only briefly—but that mention has sent shockwaves through America’s political sphere.

Some necessary background for the remainder of this report: as the House January 6 Committee revealed this past June 23, and as is augmented significantly with new information below, former Department of Justice environmental-law attorney Jeffrey Clark was mysteriously pegged to be Donald Trump’s point man in an attempted coup inside DOJ in December 2020 and early January 2021, a plot that called for replacing the successor to just-resigned Attorney General Bill Barr, Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen, with Jeffrey Clark. Though Clark was universally understood to not only be unqualified to be Attorney General but to be considerably far removed from any future advancement to that position, his unexpected and even preposterous investiture as the nation’s leading lawyer would have allowed him to immediately send a letter to Republican Party legislators in 2020 battleground states falsely declaring that there had been systemic fraud in the 2020 presidential election. This letter, which would first be sent to GOP lawmakers in Georgia—thus it now being known as “the Georgia letter”—urged the Georgia legislature to immediately meet in a “special session” to decertify their Electoral College electors for Joe Biden and replace them with electors for Trump. The Georgia letter, as we’ll soon see, had been written by Trump’s lawyers.

{Note: The letter urging Georgia lawmakers to call a special session and withdraw the state’s Joe Biden electors would undoubtedly have been followed by a similar “Arizona letter” and “Pennsylvania letter”, which, as we will see below, was consistent with the roster of states that agents of Trump’s legal team had asked CNP Action to focus its high-end lobbying on. Indeed, perhaps even a “Wisconsin letter” and “Nevada letter” and “Michigan letter” would have followed, too. So when you read of “the Georgia letter” in this report, understand that it stands in for an illicit election-tampering device that was iterable—i.e., could be used multiple times and in multiple places by the same co-conspirators, with the same false imprimatur of DOJ legitimacy and thus with a presumptively similar effect to “the Georgia letter.” Note too that at the time this letter was being advanced by Trump agents inside the Department of Justice, the agents and Trump knew the false claims in the document had been thoroughly debunked by a robust DOJ investigation. So the Georgia letter was, in every possible respect, a risible fraud.}

2. Kenneth Blackwell

On November 13, 2020, Kenneth Blackwell and the other members of the CNP Action board organized an urgent post-election “workshop” entitled “Election Results and Legal Battles: What Now?” One of the speakers at the workshop—in other words, one of the individuals who appeared at the event to give CNP Action board members and followers marching orders on what actions would aid Trump in his legal battles—was Ginni Thomas’s best friend Cleta Mitchell, a key member of Trump’s legal team.

But Cleta Mitchell wasn’t just a member of Trump’s legal team. She was the member who had recruited another friend of Ginni Thomas—John Eastman—to join that team in late summer 2020. So when Mitchell issued instructions to Blackwell, Thomas, and Shackelford and their group in mid-November 2020, just as Trump’s legal team was filing the first of its 61 unsuccessful post-election lawsuits, she was also speaking on behalf of John Eastman. Just so, she would have been speaking on behalf of anyone who at the time was working with Eastman as a legal agent, researcher, or co-counsel.

One such man—who was in fact fulfilling all those roles—was named Ken Klukowski.

The problem that Trump, Mitchell, Eastman and Klukowski were facing in November of 2020 was a recalcitrant Department of Justice; there was simply no evidence at that time that then-Attorney General William Barr, despite being an ally—and sometimes, a historian might argue, an agent—of then-president Trump, was going to take any action to declare the 2020 presidential election fraudulent. Rather, he was going to (a) investigate any claims made by Trump’s legal team but also (if the first week after the election offered any precedent) find them meritless, and so therefore (b) force Trump, Mitchell, Eastman, Klukowski, and other Trump lawyers like Rudy Giuliani to take their “evidence”—such as it was—to the state and federal courts Trump’s legal team had already begun losing in repeatedly.

The question on November 13, 2020, therefore, not just for Trump’s rag-tag legal team (including the aforementioned Ginni Thomas family friends but also such oddities as Sidney Powell, Jenna Ellis, Joe diGenova, and Victoria Toensing) was the same as the question before Ginni Thomas, Kenneth Blackwell, Kelly Shackelford, and their five powerful peers on the CNP Action advisory board: how do we get the Department of Justice, which technically President Trump controls as it’s within the executive branch of the federal government and he’s the head of that branch, to do something to assist Trump’s 2020 campaign that doesn’t require any litigating before state or federal courts?

Fortunately—as discussed in detail below—Trump and his legal team had experience with a problem quite similar to this one. In 2016, then-candidate Trump and his legal team had successfully leaned on the DOJ and FBI to issue a letter influencing the 2016 election, an idea conceived after failed attempts by Trump’s campaign to get the DOJ and FBI to go to court in pursuit of Trump’s then-opponent Democrat Hillary Clinton.

Through machinations authored by Trump’s most unscrupulous lawyers, most notably Giuliani, the FBI indeed issued a letter bolstering Trump’s 2016 campaign; arguably, it even gave him the White House.

Of course, in November 2020 such extreme measures were not yet necessary. It was still possible that litigation could “solve” the fact that Trump had lost the popular vote (as he did in 2016 also) by millions and millions, or the more consequential fact that in this case (i.e., in 2020) he had also lost the Electoral College by a landslide, 306 to 232.

The outcome of Blackwell’s (and Ginni Thomas’s and Kelly Shackelford’s) November CNP Action workshop was a comparatively modest set of recommendations—which included, however, one that would very shortly be consequential. Ginni Thomas and her CNP peers were supposed to, per Cleta Mitchell, “[c]all PA [Pennsylvania], GA [Georgia], [and] AZ [Arizona] legislative contacts to urge their support of litigation calling for an open, fair and transparent accounting of the 2020 Presidential voter ballots.”

We know that Ginni Thomas specifically took this directive from her best friend Cleta to heart, as she thereafter spammed 29 Arizona legislators with her pro-insurrection plea to overturn the will of the state’s voters. There would be no reason for her not to have pursued similar ends with respect to Georgia and Pennsylvania Republicans—and not just state legislators but members of Congress, too. Indeed, we know Ginni Thomas was supportive of the December 2020 “Gohmert lawsuit” (filed on December 27, 2020 by Rep. Louie Gohmert of Texas and several of the very Arizona legislators supportive of Ginni Thomas’s lobbying efforts in Arizona), not to mention the Texas v. Pennsylvania lawsuit drafted by Cleta Mitchell and the rest of Trump’s legal team earlier that month (with the support of certain federal legislators from Pennsylvania).

Indeed, we see Ginni Thomas and CNP Action spending December of 2020 obsessed with the very three states that Ginni Thomas’s friend Cleta had told them to focus on:

• Pennsylvania

• Georgia

• Arizona

CNP Action specifically wanted to recruit state and federal legislators from these three states to help them compel DOJ to assist the Trump campaign in overturning the 2020 election.

3. Scott Perry

In November and December of 2020, the most ardent of all the open insurrectionists in Pennsylvania’s Republican delegation in the U.S. House of Representatives was a representative by the name of Scott Perry. Perry thus became a natural point-man for efforts to overturn the presidential election results in Pennsylvania. But what about Georgia and Arizona?

Well, in mid-December 2020—in between Donald Trump’s loss in Texas v. Pennsylvania (which surely horrified CNP Action, given the directive it had recently received from Ginni Thomas’s friend Cleta) and the December 27 filing of the Gohmert lawsuit—a newly elected far-right representative from Georgia did something extraordinary: she asked for a face-to-face audience with the sitting President of the United States.

What sort of freshman member of Congress—indeed, someone who hadn’t even been sworn in yet—would have the gumption to ask for an invitation to the Oval Office?

The answer is that then-Rep.-elect Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) had that gumption, though not so much gumption she didn’t shortly thereafter ask Trump lawyer Patrick Philbin to help her get a presidential pardon for criminal conduct she seems to think attached to the meeting she ultimately had with Donald Trump in the White House on December 21, 2020.

That meeting, set up by Greene, was full of GOP legislators from the three states CNP Action was then focusing upon. While the House GOP Caucus thereafter refused to name all the Republican members of Congress who were at the White House that day (or who called into the meeting), we do know that in addition to Greene and Gohmert the meeting was attended by Arizona representatives Andy Biggs (who later sought a pardon, and was named a coup plotter by Stop the Steal co-leader Ali Alexander) and Paul Gosar (also fingered as a coup plotter by Alexander) and Debbie Lesko; Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Georgia colleague Jody Hice (who Trump later pushed into a GOP primary for Georgia Secretary of State that he lost); and Pennsylvanian Scott Perry (who, like Biggs, sought a pardon). Another attendee, Rep. Mo. Brooks (R-AL), would later ask Trump for a presidential pardon for everyone who attended the mid-December meeting at the White House, including Hice and Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida (who also sought a pardon directly) and Rep. Jordan (who asked the staff of Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows if the president would pardon GOP House members at the meeting).

So why did so many people who attended this December 21, 2020 meeting with Trump to discuss the upcoming January 6 joint session of Congress deem themselves open to federal criminal charges? What came up during this meeting that would result in such an extraordinary fear of criminal prosecution arising amongst meeting attendees?

So far, we know only one thing about that meeting—as no one who attended it has yet spoken to Congress, though Brooks, whose political career is over for now, recently announced that he would under certain circumstances—and it involves a GOP House member from Pennsylvania, the aforementioned Scott Perry. Specifically, America learned last Thursday, as a result of the release of emails Trump allies had long fought to keep secret, that on December 21 either Rep. Perry asked Trump if he could bring Jeffrey Clark to the White House or was asked by Trump to do so (per Perry, the latter).

Perry, Clark, and Trump met privately in the White House the next day—December 22.

So why did Perry introduce Trump to Clark? It appears to be a story that could topple a Supreme Court Justice, but for the moment Proof will simply again emphasize this key fact about the meeting: Perry insists that at the December 21, 2020 meeting in the White House, Trump asked him (Perry) to make an introduction to Clark, not the other way around. So either Perry is lying, and he had some connection to Clark that would contribute to him subsequently asking for a presidential pardon for potential criminal conduct, or the sitting President of the United States had somehow come to learn of Clark’s existence from a source we don’t know that isn’t Rep. Perry. We’ll return to this question shortly.

4. Ken Klukowski

On December 15, 2020, one week before Jeffrey Clark met the President of the United States, Eastman’s legal research and trial litigation partner Ken Klukowski was hired to work at the Department of Justice. Klukowski—Proof notes—had been educated at the Antonin Scalia Law School of George Mason University, had taught at Liberty University, and was a member in good standing of The Federalist Society. He was all the things that a CNP Action advisory board member scouting the ranks of far-right lawyers for prospective Trump administration hires could possibly have asked for.

Ken Klukowski’s assignment at DOJ? To work with Jeffrey Clark.

It was a bizarre hire, as it occurred during the pre-Biden-inauguration presidential transition period—meaning that Klukowski quite possibly would only be at DOJ for 38 days following his hire, hardly enough time to engage in any meaningful work—and Klukowski, as noted, had been working with Eastman as part of Trump’s post-election legal team, meaning that he didn’t appear to have any experience with environmental litigation of the sort Clark specialized in (nor did Clark himself have any experience in election law).

So how did Klukowski get a job at DOJ under such strange circumstances? While we may not know for sure, we can look at the operations of the Trump administration from 2017 onward to gain some understanding of how it could have happened. For instance, we know who was—at the time—Trump’s most engaged presidential adviser on the subject of placing far-right lawyers in important roles inside his administration.

It was Ginni Thomas.

And we know who got the man who directly handled such personnel matters inside the Trump White House—a young man by the name of John McEntee—his job.

It was Ginni Thomas.

And we know who’d helped organize an event just thirty days before Klukowski’s hire in which a member of Trump’s legal team asked CNP Action to help Trump lawyers like Eastman and Klukowski advance federal litigation aimed at overturning the 2020 presidential election.

It was Ginni Thomas.

And we know that Cleta Mitchell, the main speaker at that CNP Action event—and the Trump lawyer who asked CNP Action to help other Trump lawyers like Eastman and Klukowski advance federal litigation aimed at overturning the 2020 election—was not only best friends with someone atop CNP Action, but was aware that Klukowski’s partner John Eastman was also good friends with that same person atop CNP Action.

The person in question who was atop CNP Action at the time? It was Ginni Thomas.

So how did Ken Klukowski get his job? We’ll return to that question in a moment.

{Note: According to on-air political and legal analysis at MSNBC over the last week, the only other person besides John McEntee with the power to install Klukowski at DOJ would have been White House Counsel Pat Cipollone—the man in the White House who was perhaps most ardently and consistently and vocally opposed to Trump’s coup planning, meaning that the odds of him green-lighting putting Eastman’s partner Klukowski at DOJ are roughly zero. Notably, the only prospective federal witness the House January 6 Committee has called out by name as needing to testify in public is Cipollone. Hours before Proof published this report, the House January 6 Committee announced a surprise June 28 hearing at which a witness will testify who—for the first time—the Committee will not name in advance. While Jonathan Karl of ABC News reports that it is not Cipollone, if and when Cipollone testifies before the House January 6 Committee he will be in a position to confirm that he was not the one who green-lit Klukowski’s hire, putting Trump’s former body man and ultimate personnel director, the indebted-to-Ginni-Thomas John McEntee, on the hot seat. McEntee has spoken to the Committee before, but it is unclear if he did so with respect to these recently disclosed facts.}

5. Jeffrey Rosen

In his testimony last Thursday, the attorney who was Acting Attorney General of the United States in late December 2020, Jeffrey Rosen, says that on his first day on the job—Christmas Eve 2020, just two days after Trump first met Clark in the Oval Office and the day Barr left DOJ—he spoke with Donald Trump by phone, and Trump asked him an astonishing question: did he know Jeffrey Clark?

As Rosen testified to Congress, his reaction following this strange question was this: “How does the president even know Mr. Clark? I wasn’t aware that they’d even met.”

It appears, in retrospect, that Rosen was asking the wrong question. If he’d known the part of the January 6 timeline we now know, he surely would have asked the right one.

• November 3, 2020–December 13, 2020: Ken Klukowski is working with Trump lawyer John Eastman to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

• December 14, 2020: Biden’s election victory is certified by 50 states and D.C., enraging Trump and putting his legal team in dire straits—as litigation is now unlikely to reinstall Trump in the Oval Office (because the “safe harbor” date for such litigation has now officially passed).

• December 15, 2020: Ken Klukowski is hired to work with Jeffrey Clark at DOJ.

• December 21, 2020: Trump asks Rep. Perry to introduce him to Jeffrey Clark.

• December 22, 2020: Clark meets with Trump and Perry in the Oval Office.

It is clear from the above, of course, that President Trump had no interest in Clark until one of the attorneys working for Trump—Ken Klukowski—had infiltrated DOJ under false pretenses by being hired to work with Clark. And when we add to the timeline above these further and newly discovered facts, all suddenly becomes clear:

• December 15, 2020–December 20, 2020 (precise date unknown): Klukowski presents his new boss Clark with a letter that he has written with Trump lawyer John Eastman: the now-infamous “Georgia letter.” The production of this letter to Clark occurred during the span of time a just-elected Georgia representative—Marjorie Taylor Greene—mysteriously asked for an urgent audience with the president, during which audience Trump either learned about Jeffrey Clark’s existence or suddenly had an excuse to ask a congressional ally to introduce him to Clark.

• December 22, 2020: As Trump meets with Clark and Perry in the Oval Office, he does so contrary to both White House and DOJ regulations. That is, the meeting is private, is kept secret from AG Rosen, and is a violation of the longstanding policies honored by both the White House and DOJ regarding the independence of the two institutions. Indeed, the Trump-Clark meeting was unprecedented, which may explain why it was orchestrated via a December 21 meeting in the Oval Office that would thereafter be the subject of direct or indirect pardon requests from everyone who attended it.

Armed with this information at the time, Jeffrey Rosen would have understood quite easily what was happening: having lost every single state and federal lawsuit (barring a single inconsequential one) it had brought following the 2020 presidential election, and having seen Joe Biden’s landslide election victory certified by every state and D.C. the day before Klukowski was hired at DOJ, Trump’s legal team had determined that the only option left in its playbook was the one that had given Trump the presidency four years earlier: getting DOJ to issue an unprecedented letter that would tamper with the election and require (or permit) no intercession by state or federal judicial branches.

In short, Trump’s legal team had inserted one of its members into DOJ so that either (a) an internal DOJ lobbying campaign would convince then-Attorney General Rosen to send “the Georgia letter,” or (b) if the Attorney General stubbornly insisted that it would be tampering in a federal election to send the letter—as it manifestly would be, given that the letter contradicted the Department’s own evidentiary findings on the safety and security of the 2020 election—Klukowski and Clark would stage a coup of Rosen’s administration at DOJ, take power for themselves, and issue the letter. It was especially important that this happen before January 6, so that Trump could wave the Georgia letter about during his speech at the White House Ellipse and use it to coerce VP Mike Pence and any House GOP holdouts to support his attempt to postpone the January 6 joint session of Congress and replace Joe Biden’s battleground-state electors with Trump electors.

But Trump could not plot a coup with Jeffrey Clark by phone—it needed to happen in an illicit, face-to-face meeting—hence his December 22, 2020 tête-à-tête in the Oval with only him, Clark, and Perry, after which Perry sought a presidential pardon and Clark pleaded the Fifth Amendment (his right against self-incrimination) 100+ times under questioning by congressional investigators. Meanwhile, Trump has taken to his social media platform Truth Social to demand “equal time” before the House January 6 Committee, but still refuses to testify under oath or even answer any questions at all.

Trump’s role on the back end of the Trump-Clark-Klukowski coup plot is clear. But what happened on the front end? Who participated in this conspiracy to get a man who’d written a seditious and false letter into the hands of someone at DOJ (Clark) who Trump could then elevate to Attorney General under fraudulent pretenses and with criminal intent? It matters, as whoever helped install Ken Klukowski inside DOJ participated in a criminal conspiracy.

6. Ginni Thomas

It goes without saying that anyone who helped install Klukowski at DOJ would have to (a) be very powerful, well-connected, and radical; (b) be aware that Ken Klukowski and John Eastman had written the Georgia letter; and (c) be aware that the secret operation installing Ken at DOJ was also an illicit one, and therefore had be kept quiet until the moment the coup plot sprung—lest “Ken” and his Georgia-letter-co-author “John” be “exposed” as participating in a potentially seditious conspiracy.

Which brings us to “the Blackwell letter”—as important a piece of this story as “the Georgia letter” was and is.

This past Thursday, the House January 6 Committee revealed the content of a letter sent electronically on December 28, 2020 by Ginni Thomas and Kelly Shackelford’s CNP Action peer Kenneth Blackwell. In the letter—sent just thirteen days into Ken Klukowski’s tenure at DOJ, six days after the President of the United States had met with Klukowski’s new boss Jeffrey Clark, and the day after Gohmert’s last-ditch effort at federal litigation, the Gohmert Lawsuit, was launched—Blackwell requests that Vice President Mike Pence’s office meet two men: Ken Klukowski and John Eastman.

Much like Greene’s demand for a pre-swearing-in audience with Trump, and Clark’s audacious agreement to meet with Trump secretly and counter to DOJ policy in the Oval, Blackwell’s ask—that Team Pence meet with Ken Klukowski and John Eastman—was an astonishing one.

Given that Pence was the Vice President of the United States, Klukowski an unknown new hire at DOJ, and Eastman an attorney for a sitting president involved in post-election litigation—and therefore a man who under no circumstances should be involved in private meetings with DOJ employees outside the presence of the Attorney General—and given that DOJ was at the time aggressively investigating claims of election fraud made by Trump’s 2020 campaign (which Pence sat atop, with Trump), there could be no legitimate reason for a hush-hush Eastman-Klukowski-Pence meeting, or even a meeting with Pence’s staff, that did not include Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen or Deputy Acting Attorney General Richard Donoghue or Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Legal Counsel Steven Engel (or better still, all three of these men).

Besides, Ken Klukowski was nothing more than the legal counsel for an environmental lawyer at DOJ, so why would Pence’s people need to meet with him, let alone do so at CNP Action’s backchannel urging?

An excerpt from Blackwell’s email to the Office of the Vice President offers a big clue as to why CNP Action might have gotten involved in the 2020 election at this time and in this way:

“As stated last week, I believe the Vice President and his staff would benefit greatly from a briefing by John and Ken. As I also mentioned, [it] makes sure we don’t overexpose Ken given his new position.”

Or the excerpt may be read slightly differently, lending it an even more conspiratorial tone:

“As stated last week, I believe the Vice President and his staff would benefit greatly from a briefing by John and Ken. As I also mentioned, makes [sic] sure [NB: ‘make sure’] we don’t overexpose Ken given his new position.”

Either way, from just these two sentences federal investigators discovered at least five pieces of astonishing new evidence:

1. CNP Action’s board lobbied Pence directly to overthrow American democracy;

2. CNP Action’s board began this lobbying sometime between December 21, 2020 and Christmas Day of 2020 (with the decreased amount of business on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day making it more likely the lobbying began between December 21 and December 23, that is, either the day Trump met with members of Congress in the Oval Office, the day he met “Ken’s” boss Jeffrey Clark, or the day after the latter meeting);

3. CNP Action’s board was on a first-name basis with not just Trump lawyers Cleta Mitchell and her Trump-legal-team recruit John Eastman (“John”) but also with John’s legal partner “Ken” (Ken Klukowski);

4. CNP Action’s board not only knew that Ken Klukowski had gotten a mysterious and unexpected placement with Clark at DOJ a week (or even less than a week) after it happened, but also knew that the placement was politically sensitive, making it necessary to limit Ken’s “exposure” to public scrutiny; and fifth and perhaps most astounding,

5. CNP Action’s board knew why Klukowski had been hired at DOJ, at a time this would have been entirely opaque to anyone else in the federal government, as both the timing of the hire and the “fit” with Jeffrey Clark made no sense on paper whatsoever—suggesting CNP Action’s board had non-public knowledge of not just “the Georgia letter” Eastman and Klukowski wanted to present to Team Pence but how and why the Eastman-Klukowski document had ended up in the hands of Jeffrey Clark, the very man Trump recruited to participate in a coup with him on December 22, 2020 (possibly the very day Blackwell referred to having reached out to Pence’s office about Clark’s new assistant, “Ken”, the first time).

We might add still another stunning revelation in this email: that CNP Action had a clear understanding of the case Klukowski could make to the sitting Vice President of the United States about his importance as a political player in the post-election period.

Note too the use of the first-person plural, “we.” Who is “we” in the Blackwell letter?

Nearly all the organizations we know Blackwell to be a part of—thus, the we we might imagine him referring to here—are organizations that Ginni Thomas leads or co-leads, as is detailed further in the section of this report following this one.

So it certainly looks like Ginni Thomas’s advisory board knew in advance the pitch that Klukowski was in a unique position to make as a new hire at DOJ. That pitch would have of course concerned, in part, the Georgia letter, but if it happened after Trump’s December 22 meeting with Klukowski’s boss, it also could have concerned the unique place Klukowski’s boss was about to occupy. In short, the Blackwell letter is evidence that CNP Action knew Jeffrey Clark was possibly days away from becoming the next Attorney General of the United States, and exhibited such knowledge at a time that (a) Ginni Thomas was a top presidential adviser on the subject of Trump hires at DOJ and throughout the Trump administration, (b) she was acting in other ways in concert with directives she’d received from her Trump-lawyer friend Cleta (who was working with yet another of her friends, “John”), and (c) she was in secret email contact with “John” himself during the period of time her peer Blackwell emailed VP Mike Pence’s office.

That’s right—Ginni Thomas and John Eastman were emailing this entire time.

In short, unless Kenneth Blackwell—a subordinate of Ginni Thomas’s inside the latter’s Groundswell group (see below) and a peer of hers on the eight-member CNP Action board—was going around behind Ginni Thomas’s back on a matter she knew substantially more about than he did, Blackwell may have sent the letter excerpted above, but it almost certainly was sent with Ginni Thomas’s knowledge and with the benefit of her own clandestine activities and idiosyncratic knowledge base.

And since the letter in question, as detailed above, exhibited consciousness of guilt about the necessary secrecy and unprecedented inappropriateness surrounding any meeting between Pence (or his top staffers) and Eastman and Klukowski, and indeed knowledge of the coup plot itself that Klukowski was at the heart of, we are now at the doorstep of locating Ginni Thomas in the midst of a coup conspiracy it’s unthinkable she would’ve hidden from her lifelong “soulmate” and “best friend”, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

Indeed, it is this last connection that is of the utmost importance, as Eastman’s public statements and private correspondence from late 2020 and early 2021 indicate that he believed his machinations could have the effect of getting a case before the Supreme Court via an extraordinary direct appeal—a legal maneuver that would’ve been aided immeasurably by the unprecedented issuance of a letter declaring the 2020 election fraudulent by the Attorney General of the United States. So if Ginni and her friends Cleta and John were trying to help their friend Ken get his letter published to the nation by new Attorney General Jeffrey Clark, they did so knowing that the result would be a case going before her husband Clarence.

But it gets worse.

We now have new evidence that CNP Action was in fact the launch from which “Ken” Klukowski set sail on his coup plot—not merely a passive observer of his activities.

7. Kelly Shackelford

Proof can now reveal that Ken Klukowski wasn’t merely a far-right attorney who had achieved the vaunted far-right-legal trifecta—Antonin Scalia Law School, Liberty University, and The Federalist Society—and therefore was someone to be admired by CNP Action; in fact, when he arrived at DOJ as Clark’s new senior legal counsel on December 15, 2020, he came to that role directly from being de facto legal counsel to CNP Action itself.

Specifically, we now know Klukowski was senior counsel for First Liberty Institute, whose president was none other than CNP Action board member (with Ginni Thomas and Kenneth Blackwell) Kelly Shackelford. Indeed, “Ken” Klukowski was acting as legal counsel to Shackelford at the same time he was working with “John” (Eastman).

Which means that as Shackelford was involved in high-powered political lobbying alongside Ginni Thomas and Kenneth Blackwell, she was receiving legal advice from Ken Klukowksi. That is, until First Liberty Institute and CNP Action “lost” Klukowski to DOJ, which explains how they knew about Klukowski’s jump the moment that it happened in addition to being clearly placed to have made it happen. (Certainly there is no suggestion that Clark orchestrated the Klukowski hire; over the last few days, on both CNN and MSNBC, Clark has been anonymously called clueless and incompetent by his former colleagues—thus, the perfect stooge for Trump and his co-conspirators.)

So the Rasputin at DOJ who was behind DOJ’s participation in Trump’s coup attempt not only wasn’t Jeffrey Clark—it was Ken Klukowski, pulling Clark’s strings—but he did so in conjunction with former Clarence Thomas law clerk and decades-long close family friend of Ginni and Clarence Thomas John Eastman, who at the time was in secret email contact with Ginni Thomas as she executed directives from Eastman’s Trump-legal-team peer (and fellow Thomas family friend) Cleta Mitchell. In short, it is impossible that Ginni Thomas didn’t have the same degree of knowledge of what “John” and “Ken” were doing at DOJ as fellow CNP Action board member Blackwell.

{Note: Proof notes that First Liberty Institute was the entity behind the just-decided Kennedy v. Bremerton School District case, in which Clarence Thomas and his five ultra-conservative peers on the Supreme Court held that a government employee, in the midst of taxpayer-funded employment, can audibly lead a prayer on government property—specifically, the 50-yard line of a public high school football game—even under circumstances in which the players for which he is acting in loco parentis might feel compelled to participate in their coach’s personal religious expression in order to stay in his good graces and continue getting playing time. FLI was also the entity behind this week’s so-called “Maine School Choice” case, in which Justice Thomas and his five ultra-conservative peers on the Supreme Court took a historic bite out of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution by requiring that a government body give taxpayers’ money to religious schools in certain cases.

Though Kelly Shackelford, the head of FLI, may be in possession of correspondence that could incriminate Justice Thomas’ wife in a conspiracy, Thomas didn’t recuse himself in either case.}

8. Groundswell

Kenneth Blackwell is not merely a co-equal leader of CNP Action with Ginni Thomas, he’s also a Ginni Thomas subordinate at Groundswell, the still-more-secretive-than-CNP-action entity Ginni Thomas runs, which—as previously reported by Proof, citing a deep investigation by David Corn of Mother Jones—has also been connected to Steve Bannon and hosted as an active participant Stop the Steal co-organizer Ali Alexander.

Another member of Groundswell is John Eastman.

In other words, Ginni Thomas had more connections with “John” and “Ken” than Blackwell did—and as to the former, more than Shackelford—meaning that Blackwell and Shackelford would have had to be conspiring behind Ginni Thomas’s back for her not to know that Ken had been planted at DOJ to aid John and Donald John (Trump) with a coup. For that matter, Ginni Thomas would have to have been keeping a secret from her husband for perhaps the first time in her life—every profile of the couple describes them as “soulmates” and “best friends” who share political agendas and everything else two people of like mind can share—for Clarence Thomas not to be aware that his wife was at the heart of a plot to get an unprecedented election case before him and his peers on an expedited basis.

9. James Comey

In a 2017 investigative report entitled “The Comey Letter Probably Cost Clinton the Election”, one of America’s premier polling-analysis entities—FiveThirtyEight—revealed that an unprecedented mid-election-cycle decision by the Department of Justice to issue a letter profoundly impacting the candidacy of the Democratic Party nominee changed the course of the 2016 presidential election in the United States in favor of Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.

We now know that Trump’s 2020 presidential campaign attempted to orchestrate precisely the same ploy that had worked so well for it four years earlier—indeed worked so well that a GOP candidate who lost the popular vote by 3 million votes ended up winning the Electoral College by about 70,000 votes in three states.

If you read the last sentence of the first paragraph in this section and simply change the date to “2020,” it aptly summarizes Donald Trump’s plot to permanently desecrate the Department of Justice in early January 2021: he personally, as well as through his various agents within and without the Department of Justice, one of them apparently being his presidential adviser Ginni Thomas, tried to force “an unprecedented mid-election-cycle decision by the Department of Justice to issue a letter profoundly impacting the candidacy of the Democratic Party nominee to change the course of the 2020 presidential election in the U.S. in favor of his presidential campaign.”

Trump even used some of the same agents for this illicit purpose.

As the Proof project detailed in articles at HuffPost back in 2017, clandestine efforts by Trump lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Joe diGenova that looked exceedingly like some sort of blackmail effectively coerced then-FBI director James Comey into sending an election-meddling letter of the sort no member of the joint DOJ-FBI apparatus should ever send. At the time, Proof pushed for there to be legal consequences for Giuliani and other Trump lawyers, but there were none—leading Proof to predict that the illicit behavior would be repeated at some point in the future.

And now it has been. In late 2020, Rudy Giuliani was part of the Trump legal team that conspired with John Eastman (who in turn conspired, it appears, with Ginni Thomas) to place Ken Klukowski inside DOJ, even as Joe diGenova was part of John Eastman’s Team Kraken outfit along with Michael Flynn, Sidney Powell, Patrick Byrne, and Michael Lindell, which outfit was advised on “intelligence” matters on a pseudo-professional basis by paramilitary unit The First Amendment Praetorians (whose leader, Robert Patrick Lewis, was subpoenaed by Congress the same day it subpoenaed current Seditious Conspiracy defendants Enrique Tarrio of the Proud Boys and Stewart Rhodes of the Oath Keepers, and who has admitted to meeting regularly with John Eastman during the period of time federal judge David Carter has now said it’s more likely than not John Eastman and Donald Trump were participating in a criminal conspiracy. {Note: Lewis remains under congressional subpoena, but has not as yet been accused of any wrongdoing stemming from his clandestine meetings with Eastman.}

And just as Trump fired Comey in part for being so recalcitrant about sending what came to be known as “the Clinton letter” in 2016—Giuliani and the rest of Trump’s lawyers wanted the letter published in early October of 2016 to distract from the then white-hot “Access Hollywood” scandal Trump found himself embroiled in—in 2020 Trump didn’t just threaten to fire Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen but appears to have actually done so in response to Rosen being unwilling to send what in 2022 has come to be called “the Georgia letter.”

In its June 23, 2022 hearing, the House January 6 Committee revealed that by the afternoon of January 3, 2021, the White House had already begun producing official presidential records delineating Jeffrey Clark as “Acting Attorney General”—which means Trump indeed fired Rosen on that pre-insurrection Sunday but had simply declined to tell Rosen (though it appears that he did tell Jeffrey Clark on the phone that day that he was the nation’s new Attorney General). Instead, Trump let Rosen unknowingly lobby to get his old job back—despite not knowing he’d lost it—at a meeting in the Oval just 48 hours before the attack on the Capitol, on January 4.

Why did Trump give Rosen a chance to outline for him in person, along with Rosen’s deputy Richard Donoghue, the potential consequences for firing a sitting Attorney General because he refused to publish a letter tampering with a presidential election?

The question answers itself: the consequences of Trump firing Jim Comey in part for his weeks of hemming and hawing over sending the Clinton letter in 2016 (a letter Trump would falsely claim in 2017 he opposed the sending of, despite his legal team having worked illicitly for weeks to compel it) were sufficiently dire—the now-much-lied-about Robert Mueller investigation—that Trump wanted to know in advance what would happen if he, as a sitting president rather than merely a candidate, were to orchestrate his own Saturday Night Massacre (or in this case a Sunday Morning Massacre which actually happened but was then quietly rescinded the following day).

In short, Trump’s concurrent attempt to stage a coup inside the Department of Justice as he was orchestrating a coup of the entire federal government teaches us that if men who commit crimes do not face punishment for those crimes they will reoffend, but also that if there is any measure of accountability whatsoever it will at least modify their future conduct. Had there been no Mueller investigation, Trump quite possibly would have kept Rosen fired on Monday, January 4, 2021, and America would quite possibly be under the thumb of an authoritarian Trump regime that had declared martial law in January of 2021. The nation might even be in the midst of a civil war. But Trump, terrified at the notion of his entire Department of Justice collapsing—Donoghue told Trump in no uncertain terms that if Rosen were replaced with Clark it would likely result in “hundreds” of U.S. Attorney and AUSA (Assistant United States Attorney) resignations across the country, and a DOJ that was little more than a “graveyard”—decided to abandon his DOJ coup plot and bank everything on a violent attack on the Capitol (which the U.S. Secret Service had already warned him was coming two days hence).

{Note: As this report was being written, British filmmaker Alex Holder revealed that he was told by Trump’s son Eric Trump that the Trumps felt “inciting violence” on January 6 was “fair game” because the election had been stolen—disinformation they received, and spread, from the likes of Ginni Thomas friend John Eastman and his legal associate Ken Klukowski.}

Conclusion

The chances that Ginni Thomas speaks to the Committee now appear to be almost nil.

Coupled with everything else we know Ginni Thomas has done—not just her lobbying GOP lawmakers as part of the “Green Bay Sweep” coup plot and urging Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows to pursue the “Sweep” plot but also, as Proof has reported with sourcing, appearing to be a key co-author of that plot with Trump advisers Peter Navarro and (to hear Navarro tell it) Bannon—her apparent involvement in planting Ken Klukowski at the Department of Justice to further the very coup plot she had co-authored marks her as not just “a” witness in the January 6 congressional and criminal investigations but maybe one of the most important witnesses in the whole investigation.

What is most terrifying, of course, is that Ginni Thomas’s husband serves at the top of a branch of the federal government that has no actionable ethics rules governing recusal, meaning that Clarence Thomas can continue to do as he has already done—been the most militant Supreme Court Justice in seeking to aid Trump as he seeks to cover up his coup conspiracy after the fact. Proof uses the term coverup advisedly here; Thomas has ruled that Trump shouldn’t have to disclose any of the correspondence in his possession that relates to his coup conspiracy, correspondence we now can only imagine would in some way, direct or indirect, either inculpate his wife or further send investigators down a path that would later lead to her incrimination. And there appears to be nothing that anyone in America can or will do to legally and peacefully remove Thomas from his perch, as it’s likely too late for this Congress to initiate an impeachment probe of Thomas given the likelihood the House falls into Republican—that is to say, insurrectionist—hands just seven months from the date of this report.

It’s no wonder that Ginni Thomas must think herself invincible. Her husband is on the highest court in America, and will apparently never recuse himself from any case that involves her. A political party in which she is one of the most powerful figures is about to take over the U.S. House of Representatives, per the cable pundits, thereby ending the brief lifespan of the very House select committee that wants to interview her. For her to be prosecuted by DOJ, the Department would have to be willing to risk the permanent ire of a powerful Supreme Court Justice it appears before regularly who will never recuse himself from any case involving DOJ because there’s no regulation a Supreme Court Justice is bound to honor saying he must. And Ginni Thomas can say as often as she likes that she’ll speak to the House January 6 Committee, because she has already seen how easy it is for anyone powerful to stonewall the Committee for six months or more—and at this point six months of stonewalling is about all she needs.

And yet.

The sudden Thursday announcement by the House January 6 Committee that it will be postponing further public hearings until July because of newly discovered evidence it must pursue—an announcement that coincided with the Committee declaring that it now wants to talk to Ginni Thomas—suggests it’s not done with her by a long shot, whether or not she’s just stringing them along in her public remarks on an interview.

Indeed, the recent revelation that the FBI raided the home of the very man at DOJ the apparent CNP Action agent Ken Klukowski was sent to DOJ to steer—remembering here that Ginni Thomas’s specialty, not Kenneth Blackwell’s or Kelly Shackelford’s, is advising Trump on when and where to place far-right radicals, particularly lawyers, in positions of power in his administration—suggests that DOJ may be in possession of correspondence that mentions (in some fashion, though precisely what that it can’t be known yet) all four of Blackwell, Shackelford, Eastman, and Ginni Thomas. While the House January 6 Committee doesn’t currently enjoy the sort of comity with DOJ that would ensure it gets ready access to whatever if anything DOJ has just found, clearly the Committee has some hope of new evidence concerning Ginni Thomas emerging in the next two or three weeks, hence its postponement of further hearings until then.

Proof notes here that the publicly announced subject of the coming July Committee hearings is how then-president Trump helped coordinate the armed January 6 mob, a narrative that can only be told, as Proof readers will be aware, via a discussion of Stop the Steal and its leader, former Groundswell participant Ali Alexander—who has met behind closed doors with the Committee and just testified before a federal grand jury.

While we of course have no idea what Alexander has told the Committee, we know from his public statements that he was planning to pin the blame for his involvement in January 6 on a presidential adviser named Katrina Pierson, with the specific source of Alexander’s upset with Pierson being that she booted him, his Stop the Steal co-organizer Alex Jones and certain other fringe radicals from the January 6, 2021 White House Ellipse stage and that, to his surprise—and under the influence, he avers, of unnamed third parties—Pierson replaced him and his co-organizers with a slate that included Ginni Thomas’s friend John Eastman. {Note: As observed above, Ali Alexander would know Ginni Thomas from Groundswell, and needless to say Katrina Pierson would have encountered Thomas as a fellow Trump presidential adviser, a longtime well-connected supporter of Senator Ted Cruz of Texas—which Ginni Thomas had once been as well—and a central figure in the same 2010s Tea Party circles in which Ginni Thomas was influential.}

This is not to say that Alexander has any information on Ginni Thomas, but simply to underscore that any of Committee witness, including one with only attenuated ties to Ginni Thomas like Alexander, could potentially offer evidence about her involvement in January 6. She is, quite simply, that profoundly entrenched in Trumpworld. Her text message–level access to Mark Meadows—shared by Katrina Pierson of course—is just the tip of the iceberg.

So where do we go now? If there’s insufficient time and/or insufficient political space for an impeachment investigation into Clarence Thomas this fall (which should not be the case; the view of this author is that if an investigation is warranted it must always be conducted, regardless of the political calendar) should Democrats call in vain for future recusals by Thomas, or even his resignation? Such calls are likely to have no effect, nor would more unhinged proposals like Keith Olbermann’s truly bizarre and dangerous insistence—in response to Justice Thomas’s recent majority opinion in a New York state gun-safety case—that the Supreme Court should be “dissolved.” Yet a more reasonable proposal by far, expanding the Court to reflect GOP malfeasance in Senate nominations over the last eight years, has been discarded out of hand by Joe Biden. So what is a nation beset by an active insurrection to do? It can start by issuing a subpoena to Ginni Thomas—and revealing to all Americans the danger posed by this far-right insurrectionist and her recusal-refusing Supreme Court Justice husband.

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