BREAKING NEWS: New Revelations Indicate Ginni Thomas Was a Key Author of Trump’s January 6 Coup Plot

A recent NYT report explosively updates past reporting at PROOF on Ginni Thomas’s involvement in January 6. The new revelations—taken in sum—position Thomas as a chief author of the insurrection.

ABOVE: United States Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas (l) with his wife of thirty-five years, Virginia (Ginni) Thomas (r).

{Note: While it is not, strictly speaking, absolutely necessary, Proof recommends that readers of this article be familiar with the first portion of this report before reading the portion below.}

Introduction

The most comprehensive reporting on Ginni Thomas’s involvement in the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol continues to be this exclusive Proof report from January.

However, the New York Times just published a very lengthy feature on the Thomases—Ginni Thomas and her husband, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas—that gave its readers a series of buried ledes about Ginni Thomas and January 6. It’s unclear why the Times did little to highlight these revelations; all are ensconced deep within an article it takes more than an hour and a half to listen to via an audio reading supplied by the newspaper. Whatever the explanation for the odd framing of Ginni Thomas’s role in January 6 by the Times, Proof has decided to update its prior report with a clear summary of the Times feature that focuses only on the elements of the feature that will matter to federal investigators. {Note: The author of this Proof article is a former criminal investigator in the federal criminal justice system in Washington, D.C., and was a longtime criminal defense attorney in Massachusetts and New Hampshire. You can read his bio here.}

These elements, combined with the January Proof report, confirm that Ginni Thomas was one of the chief architects of the events of January 6, 2021.

While it remains unclear whether the House January 6 Committee will now subpoena Ginni Thomas, it is increasingly evident that the Committee is gathering all available data on potential witnesses—including data published in venues like Proof, which the Committee has previously cited in its formal filings. For this reason, the article below may be of assistance to decision-makers wondering if Ginni Thomas has valuable evidence about the January 6 attack on the Capitol to offer both Congress and the FBI.

The short answer: she does. And indeed the evidence curated in the article that follows warrants the immediate issuance of a subpoena to Ginni Thomas for both testimony and documents. It warrants, further, the interrogation of Thomas by agents of the FBI.

Addressing the Elephant in the Room: Clarence Thomas

The New York Times focuses a majority of its article on Ginni Thomas on her husband, Clarence Thomas—a common mistake that Proof warned about at the very beginning of its own feature on Ginni Thomas. While the Times does admirably substantiate long-standing claims that the Thomases don’t segregate their professional careers in anything like the manner they might like observers to think they do, it remains the case that, whatever the framing employed by the Times, Ginni Thomas’s activities are considerably more newsworthy and influential than her husband’s, deserving coverage exclusive from any consideration of Justice Thomas’s arch-conservative jurisprudence.

How could the public and private actions of a political activist be “more influential” than those of a Supreme Court Justice? It seems unlikely, and yet Clarence and Ginni Thomas offer us a unique—even unprecedented—case study in this seeming paradox.

When I studied at Harvard Law School in the 2000s, it was commonly understood—even among conservative students self-identifying as constitutional “originalists”—that Clarence Thomas was perhaps U.S. history’s least interesting Supreme Court Justice, as despite his lofty position he simply had no evident governing judicial philosophy for a law student to analyze, let alone internalize. Indeed, Justice Thomas had made clear by the early 2000s that his tenure on the bench was in substantial part an act of revenge: as punishment for his historically bruising confirmation process, he would thwart the advance of anything he deemed a byproduct of American liberalism at every turn and by any means—not merely because doing so was in keeping with his politics, though it was, but because it’d be a stick in the eye of the very politicians and political party that had only narrowly failed to keep him off the Supreme Court (he was confirmed in the United States Senate with only 52 votes; much more on this later on).

Known for years and years for never asking questions of the parties before him during oral argument—one of the few justices in American history to be so melodramatically passive—many court-watchers assumed that one reason for Thomas’s odd practice was that he simply had no difficulty making up his mind about cases. That is, he didn’t need input from practitioners to know which arch-conservative, doctrinaire position he’d take at the conclusion of a case. Unlike his friend and mentor Antonin Scalia, whose occasional bouts with draconian intellectual integrity made him a favorite of the well-heeled, self-styled intellectuals of The Federalist Society, Thomas was seen by many in the American legal community as little more than a far-right foot-soldier with an ax to grind. The notion that this rather uncharitable view wasn’t far from the mark is bolstered by current facts on the ground: while Justice Scalia was a favorite of the Republican Party while it still existed, Thomas is now the favorite of the principle-free MAGA “movement”, which as a matter of temperament and inclination puts ends above means—and indeed values means not at all.

All of this is to say that from the time he was seated on the Supreme Court in the early 1990s, Clarence Thomas’s influence on the court and position on individual issues has been predictable in advance. Thomas is not so much a jurist who is studied as a reliable vote whose presence is appreciated by those with whom he agrees (and vice versa). So he is “influential” when it comes time to tally votes in the Supreme Court’s private chambers almost exclusively because he offers—as many, even countless others might have done in the very same way—one vote for the conservative position on any legal question, and without fail. Just as a Major League Baseball team could find hundreds of players in its own or other teams’ minor leagues to elevate to its starting lineup and reliably hit .240, Justice Thomas, for all his quite evident intelligence and wisdom, in the final accounting merely admirably fulfills the expectations of his political “team.”

By comparison, Ginni Thomas’s role in U.S. politics is not merely unprecedented but has been influential in a way that never could’ve been predicted—and remains wholly unpredictable. And this fact is still, decades on, woefully under-reported in U.S. media.

It’s a decades-long trend that continued with the recent feature by the New York Times.

The New York Times Feature

Beyond the components of the feature that rehash what Proof readers already found in these digital pages many weeks ago—that Ginni Thomas used her husband’s access to President Donald Trump to gain significant access to the sitting president herself; that she has been a significant influence on her husband, even as he has never recused himself from a case or dispute due to her extensive prior involvement with it; and that she has had leadership roles in at least two profoundly influential far-right operations, Groundswell and the Council for National Policy, both which have unscrupulously sought to influence U.S. politics behind the scenes for many years—the Times mostly focuses on Clarence Thomas’s judicial career and the nature of his marriage, despite the feature’s provocative and somewhat misleading headline and sub-headline, “The Long Crusade of Clarence and Ginni Thomas: The Supreme Court Justice and His Wife Battled for Years for a More Conservative America, [and Now] New Reporting Shows How Far She Was Willing to Go After Donald Trump’s 2020 Election Loss.”

In fact, unless you really know what you’re looking for, you’re likely to miss any utility the Times article offers in revealing “how far [Ginni Thomas] was willing to go after Donald Trump’s 2020 election loss.” Proof is concerned that congressional and federal criminal investigators may take the Times report at face value, therefore, and wrongly deem it the best case possible for Ginni Thomas becoming a federal witness over her role in the events leading up to January 6. Unfortunately, the Times report can’t be readily approached in this way. Instead, it must be deconstructed and networked with other reporting to determine its value—which is surprisingly high when approached in this fashion.

Here, then, are the five key revelations we’ve just gotten from the New York Times.

5 New Revelations About Ginni Thomas and January 6

(1) Ginni Thomas’s 2012 formation of Groundswell, and her role in the controversial Council for National Policy, includes shocking details not previously reported upon—all of which have immediate repercussions for the ongoing January 6 investigation.

It was previously thought that Steve Bannon—then–President Trump’s top adviser on the subject of January 6; a man now being criminally prosecuted by DOJ for refusing to reveal what he knows about that day and the planning for it; and the highest-profile Trump adviser who appeared to have advance knowledge of the violence planned for January 6—was involved in Thomas’s secretive far-right Groundswell cabal only as a sometime speaker. We now know this woefully understates his role in Groundswell.

The Times implies Bannon was quite nearly a co-founder of Groundswell with Thomas, writing that not only did she “found[ ]…Groundswell with the support of Stephen K. Bannon, the hard-line nationalist and former Trump adviser”, but that Bannon was so central to the founding of Groundswell that Ginni Thomas sought an audience with him before she created the group—and apparently did so to get his blessing, support, and endorsement. It is therefore difficult to see the far-right group as anything less than a Bannon co-creation. Here’s what the Times reports on Groundswell’s founding:

A few weeks after Mitt Romney lost the 2012 presidential election, Ginni Thomas called Steve Bannon, then the chairman of Breitbart, and they had lunch at the Washington townhouse that was both Bannon’s residence and Breitbart’s headquarters. Romney’s loss presaged a battle for the Republican Party’s direction, and Thomas wanted to start a hard-right round table to serve as an alternative to an establishment meeting run on Wednesdays by Grover Norquist, the anti-tax crusader. “She had the idea, ‘I think we need something to counter Grover’s Wednesday meeting,’” recalled Bannon, who didn’t know her well at the time. “And I said, ‘That’s a brilliant idea.’”

The implications of this tête-à-tête in Bannon’s home-cum-office are extraordinary.

We know that in the weeks before January 6, Steve Bannon was using every means at his disposal to play a “central role” in ensuring January 6 would be the “hell” he publicly predicted it would be—24 hours before the attack on the Capitol. The House January 6 Committee has found that Bannon occupied “multiple roles” relevant to the planning of the events of January 6. So with the news that he was a seminal partner with Thomas in creating Groundswell, and that Groundswell members Cleta Mitchell and Barbara Ledeen were on-the-ground operators in the insurrection effort (see the prior Proof report on this), it can hardly be doubted that Trump was able to reach out to Groundswell, either directly or through Bannon, to weaponize it in service of his political objectives during November and December of 2020.

But we needn’t speculate on this.

The Times has now confirmed this presumption by noting that, as Groundswell’s head, Ginni Thomas served a specific function in the post-election, pre-January 6 Trumpist camp: as the very glue that held it together. Per the Times reporting, “[Thomas’s] role [in the post-election effort to overturn the 2020 election] went deeper, and beyond [the] Council for National Policy[’s] Action [group]. Dustin Stockton, an organizer who worked with Women for America First, which held the permit for the [January 6] Ellipse rally, said he was told that Ginni Thomas played a peacemaking role between feuding factions of rally organizers ‘so that there wouldn’t be any division around January 6.’”

It is easy to skim through the notion of a “peacemaking role” as constituting little more than some form of handshake-and-smile diplomacy, and surely sometimes the act of “peacemaking” involves little more than this. Here, though, the Times is writing of warring factions inside a criminal conspiracy. To play the “peacemaker” in the midst of a swirl of criminal conduct is to be a veritable consigliere to that conduct. Indeed, in his interview with the Times, Dustin Stockton—a longtime Bannon acolyte who was at the center of the insurrectionist camp for the entirety of Insurrection Week—makes clear that without Ginni Thomas’s hard work there would have been “division” within the ranks of the coup plotters and their soldiers. In other words, the coup would have been substantially less likely to succeed without Ginni’s repeated, willful interventions.

Here’s how Mr. Stockton put it in speaking to the nation’s paper-of-record: “[Ginni Thomas] united these different [insurrectionist] factions around a singular mission on January 6.” It’s unclear how to interpret Stockton’s words if not as positioning Mrs. Thomas as a leader of the January 6 insurrection. Leaders—literally and by definition—are self-tasked with “uniting” people “around a singular mission.” So when Stockton tells the Times that Thomas was “involved” in January 6, his description of her back-channel involvement can only now be described as a leadership position in the effort.

(2) Ginni Thomas had much more access to Trump in the months before January 6 than we knew—and exploited her access repeatedly and even ruthlessly.

In the last Proof report on Ginni Thomas, readers learned she had access to Trump inside the White House on more than one occasion: at a minimum, one time in the company of her husband (who was the one actually invited to the event in question) and once as part of a sit-down with Trump that her previous—arguably gatecrashing—social appearance at the People’s House had netted her.

The Times now reports that the level of Thomas-Trump contact went well beyond this.

According to the Times, “Trump courted Justice Thomas…[and] Ginni Thomas used that courtship to gain access to the Oval Office.” But it is the details of this courtship that are so shocking. The newspaper recounts a slew of “meetings and conversations” between “the Thomases” and the “White House” that occurred because Clarence Thomas being a Supreme Court Justice had “created an opening for his wife” to get close to then–President Trump. And so she did. In fact, Ginni Thomas became such a regular and forceful presence inside the West Wing—and in conversations amongst the president’s top advisers—that not just one such adviser but “several” of them told the Times that they couldn’t even figure out if Thomas had been given wide-ranging access to Trump as an “activist or a paid consultant.” This seemingly simple question remains unresolved to this day, and given the Thomases’ longstanding caginess in their federal filings (see below), it may be a while before the House of Representatives determines whether or not Ginni Thomas was ever paid by the Trump campaign. In any case, what is clear from members of Trump’s inner circle is that Ginni Thomas’s efforts to insinuate herself into the decision-making process of a sitting President of the United States were so “aggressive” that they prompted White House staff to draw up opposition-research documents about her.

Reading in the Times that Ginni Thomas “positioned herself [within Trump’s inner circle] as a voice of Trump’s grass-roots base” is considerably less important, however, than how she so positioned herself. From her first meeting with President Trump that didn’t involve her husband, she brought “members of Groundswell” into the White House with her—underlining, perhaps, why Trump would later select such members for his “election integrity” team (which was formed the very next year). One Trump aide called the first Ginni Thomas-Groundswell-Trump White House meeting “the craziest meeting I’ve ever been to”, in part because throughout the meeting a contingent of Ginni Thomas’s acolytes were “audibly praying” (in fact, praying so loudly that one Trump aide said it was “hard to hear” anything said in the meeting).

However radical one might deem Trump’s actions in government, the Times reports that Ginni Thomas’s radicalism caught even Trump off-guard. In Groundswell’s first, “crazy” meeting with the president, Trump had to try to “rein it [Groundswell] in” as the meeting became increasingly “chaotic” and Ginni Thomas forcefully demanded a “purge” of the Trump administration’s Personnel Office. Thomas began unfolding far-right conspiracy theories about “closet liberals and Never Trumpers” literally hiding inside the Trump administration—even amongst the corps of political appointees that Trump himself had personally selected. Trump aides have now told the New York Times that at this first meeting, and indeed at a slew of future such meetings, Ginni Thomas was “out of bounds” in her stridency toward President Trump “many times.”

So what was Ginni Thomas’s extraordinarily inappropriate conduct in service of? We now know, thanks to the Times: she was seeking prominent positions of authority for “people [Trump administration job candidates] who couldn’t pass background checks”, “had security-clearance issues”, or “had done a lot of [problematic] business overseas.” In other words, even before the long ramp-up to January 6, Ginni Thomas was identified by members of Trump’s inner circle as the leading lobbyist trying to get Trump to put people in positions of power who even Team Trump didn’t feel belonged in federal service—which, candidly, is saying something.

But the Times also reports that, for all her craziness, aggressiveness, transgressions, and other inappropriate conduct in the White House, Trump indulged her—and even elevated her to special status within his inner circle. After their first meeting, the Times reports, having spoken with “multiple” Trump aides, “The president continued to allow Ginni Thomas access, telling aides that if she were in the White House visiting with other officials, she was welcome to drop by to see him. And she did on several occasions, while also passing notes on her priorities through intermediaries.”

While the existence of “several”—rather than just two—Ginni Thomas-Donald Trump meetings inside the White House in 2019 and 2020 is significant, so too is the notion that Trump repeatedly received “notes” from Thomas establishing her “priorities” for the Trump administration in two critical election years. One wonders if such “notes” were in the materials Trump illegally took with him to Mar-a-Lago; or those materials Clarence Thomas tried to (temporarily or otherwise) block from any public disclosure; or the 11,000 documents the Thomases’ “close friend”, Trump lawyer John Eastman, is now seeking to block from congressional subpoena despite the possibility that his recalcitrance could lead to his incarceration.

Certainly, the Times reporting indicating that in the months before the insurrection Ginni Thomas’s “place in the presidential orbit [was] secure” underscores that we would expect to find substantive content written by Ginni Thomas in tranches of Trump’s most sensitive policy documents. What could having a “secure place” inside a president’s orbit—specifically, in the role of a leading adviser—really mean, otherwise?

Of course, Ginni Thomas didn’t merely have access to Trump because of her husband. As the Times reports, “By 2019, [Ginni Thomas’s] influence in Republican circles was growing” in part because “she took on a leadership role at the Council for National Policy, joining the board of CNP Action, which had become a key cog in the Trump messaging machine.” So apart from her direct preferential access to Trump, she was a leader of a “key cog” in a sprawling, nationwide Trumpist apparatus. How could such a person not be represented in the intimate correspondence of a president she served?

(3) Ginni Thomas (and her husband Clarence) are “close friends” with Trump attorney John Eastman—rather than, as was previously thought, merely acquaintances of his via his past clerkship for Justice Thomas.

Given that it is already universally accepted that John Eastman is a viable witness for Congress and the FBI—not only has Congress subpoenaed him, he’s already invoked his Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination, which surely caught the attention of the Department of Justice and FBI, if Eastman didn’t have it already—a key question in the January 6 investigation has become, “How much contact did Ginni Thomas have, on the subject of January 6, with a man whose written-out plan for that day is now widely deemed documentary evidence of a seditious conspiracy?”

On the answer to this question could hang Ginni Thomas’s own liability for January 6.

Per the Times, the relationship Eastman enjoyed with Ginni Thomas and her husband went well beyond what was previously thought. It had been assumed that, as a former Thomas clerk from decades ago, Eastman enjoyed a cordial relationship with Justice Thomas—much as you would with anyone you worked for many years ago in a way that was not unpleasant to either you or them. It was known, further, that Eastman and Ginni Thomas were “in touch” to the extent any two people who post regularly to a private listserv with approximately 150 members can be said to be “in touch.”

But now the Times has revealed that Eastman and the Thomases are not merely long-time professional acquaintances; they are “close friends.” This changes the calculus considerably for federal investigators wondering how much direct contact Eastman and Ginni Thomas would have had in November 2020, December 2020, and even January 2021 on the topic that was clearly—this much we know for certain—at the top of the agenda for both of them, that being the overturning of a presidential election during the joint session of Congress slated for January 6, 2021.

So while Proof previously reported that Thomas and Eastman were part of “private” conversations on the Thomas Clerk World listserv that were, nevertheless, public in a way—inasmuch as their content could be seen by the 150 or so listserv members—if in fact Thomas and Eastman were “close friends” at all times they were corresponding semi-privately on the listserv and participating in (as Proof reported) forceful debates in that venue (during which they took “the same side” on the matter of the election), there are likely no federal investigators remaining who now doubt that the two “close friends” were also in fully private (off-listserv) contact as well. This is especially likely given that we now know Ginni Thomas “friend” Cleta Mitchell was then working on Trump’s legal team with Eastman, and another longtime Ginni Thomas friend and associate at Groundswell, Barbara Ledeen, was at the time the “business partner” of Don Berlin, one of the “experts” Trump’s team was then employing in presentations to members of Congress. Another such “expert,” Russell Ramsland Jr., was a longtime member of Ginni Thomas’s Groundswell operation.

{Note: Cleta Mitchell isn’t just Ginni Thomas’s friend, the Times reports—she’s also a member of both of Thomas’s secretive groups: Groundswell and the CNP. Thomas and Mitchell have even convened “joint sessions” at which they speak together under the aegis of these groups.}

(4) Eastman’s backchannel communications with Ginni Thomas and the rest of Thomas Clerk World eventually involved an entreaty—one that he would have been sure Ginni Thomas would read—for those reading him (including Ginni Thomas) to “contact him directly.”

By the late summer of 2020, when John Eastman first joined Trump’s legal team at the urging of Ginni Thomas’s close friend and associate Cleta Mitchell, Thomas’s online biography—written, apparently, by her—crowed that she personally “set agendas with President Trump’s White House for quarterly conservative leader briefings”, which we can take to mean she was one of Donald Trump’s primary liaisons to the #MAGA “grassroots.” It was this same grassroots that Trump would rely upon to illegally delay a joint session of Congress on January 6, 2021.

But by the time Eastman had become heavily involved in Trump’s post-election legal maneuvers—this would be in December of 2020—he was apparently regularly posting on the intimate Thomas Clerk World listserv he well knew his “close friend” Ginni frequented, and he wasn’t merely posting pleasantries but engaging actively in debates over the 2020 presidential election and his own course of advocacy as a Trump lawyer.

All these missives would have been, he well knew, read by Clarence Thomas’s self-declared soulmate.

By mid-January 2021—after the attack on the U.S. Capitol, but while Trump was still president, and far-right hope for an eleventh-hour coup hadn’t diminished—Eastman wasn’t just posting messages; he was serving up open invitations, too. He wrote Ginni Thomas and the 150 or so others on the listserv that “those of you interested in more information” about Team Trump’s post-election strategy should “get in touch” (as the Times summarized it) to discuss the effort to overturn the 2020 election. It is difficult, reading this January 17 invitation, to imagine that Eastman hadn’t sent an identical one to his good friend Ginni Thomas in the days and weeks before January 6.

{Note: The day after Eastman’s entreaty, Ginni Thomas decided that things had deteriorated sufficiently within the group that she needed to issue an apology of sorts to its many members, writing, “I have likely imposed on you my lifetime passions. My passions and beliefs are likely shared with the bulk of you, but certainly not all. And sometimes the smallest matters can divide loved ones for too long. Let’s pledge to not let politics divide THIS family, and learn to speak more gently and knowingly across the divide. I am certainly on the humble side of awareness here” (emphasis in original). While intended as an apologia, Thomas’s mea culpa contained within it an important admission: that the effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election was indeed a key part of her pursuit of her “lifetime passions.”}

Indeed, in the days and weeks immediately preceding January 6, the Times reports, the actions of Trump’s “team, allies, and [GOP] lawmakers”—a cadre that included John Eastman—were “echo[ing]” the “call put out [in November 2020] by [Ginni Thomas’s CNP Action] to challenge swing-state outcomes.” This would seem to confirm that Thomas and her group had launched the very charge that Eastman was simply picking up as he became heavily involved in Donald Trump’s legal gambits in December 2020.

So by the time of his January 17, 2021 invitation to Thomas and others, Eastman had already spent many weeks neck-deep in an effort to woo almost the entirety of Ginni Thomas’s inner circle. On December 10, 2020, for instance, he’d made an appearance on Groundswell co-founder Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast to strongly urge Clarence Thomas and his peers to intervene in the aftermath of the 2020 election. Meanwhile, “behind the scenes”, writes the Times, Eastman was “advising Trump and his campaign on a new proposal to change the outcome of the election” that mirrored Ginni Thomas’s “alternate-electors” plot. And of course Ginni Thomas’s CNP Action peer and friend Cleta Mitchell was working with Eastman on Trump’s legal team, not only appearing on a now-under-criminal-investigation phone call between Trump and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) but authoring documents like the now-infamous “Five States” pre-January 6 report, which argued—just as her friend and peer Ginni Thomas had argued the month before—that “There is historical, legal precedent for Congress to count a slate of electors different from that certified by the Governor of the state.”

In fact, observes the Times, by December 2020 “a number of longtime friends and associates of the Thomases were involved in efforts to overturn the election results or helping plan the January 6 rallies”—a group that went well beyond Eastman, Bannon, and Mitchell. From Turning Point USA (on whose advisory board Ginni Thomas had served) sending buses of insurrectionists into Washington on January 6, to the heavy involvement of the Tea Party Patriots, a far-right group with which Mrs. Thomas “had long ties” that was “headed by Jenny Beth Martin, a fellow Council for National Policy activist [with Thomas]”, Ginni’s political allies seemed to be in all the positions of authority and influence in the days and weeks before the January 6 attack—consistent with the job she’d set for herself starting in early 2019 in the Oval Office, namely ensuring that it was largely people of her selection in Trump’s political orbit.

Caroline Wren, the top aide of top Trump adviser (and then-secret Donald Trump Jr. fiancée) Kimberly Guilfoyle, told Dustin Stockton that Jenny Beth Martin’s group and Women for America First—the latter the insurrectionist outfit behind the January 6 event that incited the attack on the Capitol—were only able to work together because Ginni Thomas, who’d served as an “early Tea Party activist” with Women for America First leader Amy Kremer, had worked diligently to make that cooperation possible.

Without Ginni Thomas, the Times indicates, the “years[-long]…bitter legal dispute” between Kremer and Martin would have made their cooperation impossible—and thus the January 6 White House Ellipse event that launched an insurrection a non-starter.

(5) Ginni Thomas used one of her operations to promote the effort that ultimately came to be known as the “Green Bay Sweep”—the coup plot.

While the Times doesn’t reference the Peter Navarro–drafted coup plot by its name, that it was the “Green Bay Sweep” that Ginni Thomas began working on as soon as Trump lost the 2020 election in a popular-vote and electoral-college landslide is clear.

As the Times writes,

The [November 2020] call to action [sent out by Ginni Thomas’s Council for National Policy] was titled “Election Results and Legal Battles: What Now?”….[and] it urged the members of [the] influential if secretive right-wing group to contact legislators in three of the swing states that tipped the balance for Biden—Arizona, Georgia and Pennsylvania. The aim was audacious: Keep President Donald J. Trump in power.

The notion that state GOP legislators in the battleground states Trump lost could overturn the 2020 presidential election and “keep Trump in power” would be taken up, a few weeks later, not only by Navarro but Thomas’s “close friend” John Eastman in his capacity as legal counsel for Donald Trump.

Those who might deem it overstatement to call—as Proof has, above—the Council for National Policy “Ginni Thomas’s” operation should consider this Times reporting:

[In November 2020] one of [the Council for National Policy’s] newest leaders was Virginia Thomas, the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas and a longtime activist in right-wing circles. She had taken on a prominent role at the council during the Trump years and by 2019 had joined the nine-member board of CNP Action, an arm of the council organized as a 501(c)4 under a provision of the tax code that allows for direct political advocacy. It was CNP. Action that circulated the November “action steps” document, the existence of which has not been previously reported. It instructed members to pressure Republican lawmakers into challenging the election results and appointing alternate slates of electors: “Demand that they not abandon their Constitutional responsibilities during a time such as this.”

{Emphasis supplied.}

In short, it appears that as one of the nine “leaders” of the CNP in November 2020, Ginni Thomas used her license to engage in “direct political advocacy” via an IRS-blessed 501(c)4 institution to push a coup plot identical to Peter Navarro’s, and did so well before Navarro had passed around his own document—and likewise before her good friend John Eastman, who she was at a minimum indirectly in touch with in late 2020, pursued a strategy identical to the course she had already charted. That strategy, now known as the Green Bay Sweep, had five distinct components easily identifiable to federal investigators and provably traceable to Ginni Thomas’s CNP Action efforts.

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The 5 Components of Ginni Thomas’s November 2020 Coup Plot (the “Green Bay Sweep”)

{Note: Proof does not endorse or agree with any of the five core principles enumerated below.}

1. State GOP legislators are entitled to replace the votes of citizens with their own judgment, and may do so pursuant to their own unilateral understanding of their “Constitutional responsibilities”, whether or not these alleged legal responsibilities have ever been exercised this way before in American history.

2. Backchannel political lobbying of state GOP legislators to cajole them into viewing their “Constitutional responsibilities” in this way is appropriate, as it falls under the general heading of legitimate “direct political advocacy”—itself an acknowledgment that such lobbying (as well as any of its fruits) are partisan rather than grounded in legal principle or the investigations of duly appointed fact-finding entities.

3. Legislative challenges of election results, influenced by such direct partisan lobbying, can themselves be partisan—that is, not based in any analysis of the results of an election that has been accepted by any court or fact-finding entity.

4. State legislators can send alternate slates of electors to Washington whether or not their actions are approved by state elections officials. The purpose of this gambit is to throw a national election to the House of Representatives, where members vote by delegation for President of the United States. In 2020, the GOP controlled more House delegations than the Democratic Party did.

5. It is acceptable partisan conduct—not seditious conspiracy—for a group of Americans to come to a “meeting of the minds” (element #1 of a criminal conspiracy); develop “action steps” for the said group to take (element #2 of a criminal conspiracy); then execute these steps with illegal purpose (element #3 of a criminal conspiracy). In the case of the so-called “Green Bay Sweep,” the illegal purpose constituted one or more of the federal crimes of Conspiracy to Defraud the United States, Obstruction of An Official Proceeding, Seditious Conspiracy, and Voter Fraud.

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Had Ginni Thomas and her two semi-clandestine advocacy groups developed and acted upon the plot outlined above only after developing substantial and credible evidence of voter fraud or election fraud—which evidence of course has still not emerged as of February 2022—an argument could perhaps be made that their final ambition was not to defraud the United States. But the fact that the conspiracy was formed and began taking “action steps” in November 2020, at a time that none of its members had any evidence that the results of the election just past were inaccurate, confirms that their goal was to commit fraud and subvert the will of voters they’d no reasonable basis to suspect had done anything but exercise their most sacred civic duty.

Lest anyone deem it unlikely that a woman so prominent in far-right circles would act not only in ignorance of—but indeed in defiance of—hard evidence in the pursuit of her political aims, here’s the Times reporting on Ginni Thomas’s own recitation of her family’s political ethos: “Our family didn’t believe [former president Richard] Nixon did anything wrong in [the] Watergate [scandal] until way after he admitted guilt. We believed any Republican until all the evidence was in, and then a little more.”

That CNP Action began its approach of state legislators in November of 2020, before even Team Kraken had established fraudulent and false evidence of a “stolen election,” confirms that Ginni Thomas believed GOP state legislators didn’t need to have any basis at all for overturning the results of a democratic election on nakedly partisan grounds.

So What Does It All Mean?

In view of the foregoing, Ginni Thomas can rightly be seen as the “first author of the insurrection”—a title she clearly deserves much more than the men (Peter Navarro and John Eastman) who heretofore have been seen as the key progenitors of Trump’s coup plot. That Eastman may have been acting on marching orders from a close friend who ran a group he’d been associated with for years further burnishes Ginni Thomas’s credentials as a chief architect of January 6.

Perhaps most stunning, however, is that Clarence Thomas may well have been Ginni Thomas’s co-conspirator. Unless it turns out that Mrs. Thomas was hiding her actions from her husband—a possibility it appears every friend of the two who’s ever spoken to American media immediately discounts—Clarence Thomas had some knowledge of the plot his wife put in motion in November 2020. As the Times reports, Clarence Thomas and his wife have for decades now “worked in tandem from the bench and the political trenches to take aim at [progressive policy] targets.” In the post–2020 election period in particular, writes the Times—as “the effort to overturn the 2020 election” was in full swing—“the lines between the couple’s interests” got “blurred.”

As for Ginni Thomas’s awareness that her plot would ultimately be put before the judgment of the man married in 1987, here’s what the Times has to say on that score:

[The CNP Action] plan, if carried out successfully, would have almost certainly landed before the Supreme Court—and Ginni Thomas’s husband. In fact, [President] Trump was already calling for that to happen [by December 2020]. In a December 2 [2020] speech at the White House, the president falsely claimed that “millions of votes were cast illegally in swing states alone” and said he hoped “the Supreme Court of the United States will see it” and “will do what’s right for our country, because our country cannot live with this kind of an election.”

Did President Trump know that the plot he wanted to see before the Supreme Court had been devised by the spouse of a Supreme Court Justice? On the facts above, it is nearly impossible to imagine how he could have been unaware of this.

Lest anyone doubt that Ginni Thomas was far and away the most important of the nine leaders of CNP Action—given her special access to the President of the United States and her unique access, moreover, to his legal team—any doubt on this score must be erased by the fact that, of the nine CNP Action ringleaders, only Ginni Thomas’s husband was going to be in a position to directly influence whether the course CNP Action had embarked upon would be retroactively blessed by the U.S. Supreme Court. As the Times notes, Justice Thomas is not just the judicial hero of the MAGA movement, he is the accepted leader of the current conservative majority on the Court.

Per the Times, “With Trump’s three [SCOTUS] appointments reshaping the Supreme Court, [Ginni Thomas’s] husband finds himself at the center of a new conservative majority poised to shake the foundations of settled law.”

Unlike Chief Justice John Roberts, in December 2020 Thomas was perfectly placed to influence the newest members of the Court—Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett—into forming, along with him and Justice Samuel Alito, an impenetrable far-right bloc willing to protect Ginni Thomas and her co-conspirators. It is unthinkable that Ginni Thomas would have been anything less than a co-leader of the CNP Action effort on these grounds alone, even if she didn’t have a direct line to the president and his lawyers and a significantly more impressive and voluminous resume as a far-right lobbyist than most of her CNP peers.

And has Clarence Thomas spent the last twenty years staying away from the Council for National Policy, given its evident radicalism? No, reports the New York Times:

Justice Thomas headlined an event for the group in 2002, and in 2008 he attended one of its meetings and was photographed with a gavel behind a lectern bearing the group’s name.

{Emphasis supplied.}

While the two intersections noted above may seem rather remote in time and limited in scope, they confirm that in December 2020 the CNP would have had some cause (beyond the inescapable fact of Ginni Thomas’s leadership of it) to see Clarence Thomas as an ally—indeed, an ally willing to publicly connect himself to their cause(s).

Note too that the Thomases’ social circle is very much a CNP social circle. As the Times notes, Leonard Leo, a member of both the CNP and Groundswell, is a “close family friend of the couple’s.” In fact, Clarence Thomas is the godfather of one of Leo’s children. Could there ever have been any doubt, as CNP formed its coup plot, that Justice Thomas would seek to provide its members and leaders—like Leo and his own wife—any cover they might ultimately need? And wouldn’t CNP’s plotters have believed Thomas, the “north star” of the current GOP according to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, could bring along Alito and Trump’s three Supreme Court justices with him? It certainly would have if its leadership held the view held by CNP “stalwart” (and notorious Islamophobe) Brigitte Gabriel, who said in December 2021, per the Times, that Clarence Thomas is the U.S. Supreme Court’s “real chief justice.”

Ginni Thomas’s After-the-Fact Consciousness of Guilt

In criminal investigations, we often look at how various parties acted after a crime was committed. Such actions may indicate what those who traffick in trial evidence term “consciousness of guilt”—an awareness that one has done something illicit (a form of self-awareness often accompanied by an intense desire to make sure no one else sees what one has done). The Times report details the actions of Thomas’s CNP outfit after January 6, and they couldn’t possibly speak louder about how Ginni and her group saw their own conduct:

In the weeks that followed January 6, as public condemnation of the insurrection grew to include some Republican leaders like Senator Mitch McConnell, the Council for National Policy circulated in its newsletter another previously unreported memo, written by one of its members, that outlined strategies to make the Capitol riot seem more palatable. “Drive the narrative that it was mostly peaceful protests”, a leading member of the [CNP] advised. “Amplify the concerns of the protestors and give them legitimacy.”

But the prolonged cover-up effort by Ginni Thomas’s CNP Action didn’t stop there.

Ginni Thomas co-signed a letter in December [2021] calling for House Republicans to expel Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger from their conference for joining the [House] January 6 Committee. Thomas and her co-authors said the [House January 6 Committee] investigation “brings disrespect to our country’s rule of law” and “legal harassment to private citizens who have done nothing wrong”, adding that they [the signatories of the letter] would begin “a nationwide movement to add citizens’ voices to this effort.”

It’s now clear that Ginni Thomas herself was among the “private citizens” she sought to protect with her letter demanding an end to any congressional probe of January 6.

And following January 6, Justice Thomas began acting—even for him—stranger than usual, abandoning his conservative peers on the Supreme Court to take a position (in effect) on Trump’s right to hide the identities of co-conspirators via document-production refusals that not one of his stalwart allies on the Court would condone.

As the Times reports,

[In January 2022], the Supreme Court ruled 8 to 1 to allow the release of records from the Trump White House related to the January 6 attack. Justice Thomas was the sole dissenter.

If congressional and federal criminal investigators ever had cause to wonder whether Ginni Thomas shared her clandestine post-election activities with her husband—as she’s universally said to share everything else with him (one of the Thomases’ closest friends, Armstrong Williams, calls Ginni indisputably Clarence’s “closest confidant”)—perhaps Thomas being so off-the-grid on a historic SCOTUS holding should now remove that doubt. Or one could listen to the words of Mitch McConnell, who calls the supposedly neutral Thomas (per the Times) a “leader” in the era of Trump’s GOP.

The Times even notes that in public speeches Clarence Thomas implicitly alludes to the fact that he and the far-right movement his wife co-leads have a “shared purpose.”

As the Times writes of Clarence and Ginni Thomas,

If Thomas has been laying the groundwork for a conservative revolution, so has his wife, who once worked at [the] Heritage [Foundation] herself. Groundswell, the group she founded, plotted what it called a “30-front war” on hot-button issues and seeded talking points throughout the right-wing media, including with [Steve] Bannon’s publication at the time, Breitbart News. “She’s an operator; she stays behind the scenes”, Bannon said in an interview. “Unlike a lot of people who just talk, she gets shit done.”

The Thomases have long emphasized how little distance there is between them. As Justice Thomas once wrote, his searing 1991 confirmation, buffeted by sexual-harassment allegations, brought them closer together: “The fiery trial through which we passed had the effect of melding us into one being—an amalgam, as we like to say.”

….

[Clarence Thomas] has frequently appeared at highly political events hosted by advocates hoping to sway the court. He and his wife sometimes appear together at such events, and their appeal is apparent: He fulfills the hard right’s longing for a judge—and especially a Black judge—oblivious to the howls of the left, while she serves up the red meat the base wants to hear in her speeches. They often portray themselves as standing in the breach amid a crumbling society.

It Gets Worse

Per the reporting of Politico reporter Kyle Cheney, Eastman—the author of a so-called “coup memo” who has refused to send certain subpoenaed documents to Congress and asserted his Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination—“was first recruited to advise [Donald] Trump on election matters on September 3 [2020] by Cleta Mitchell, who he says was tasked by Trump in August [2020] with assembling an ‘election integrity working group’ to prepare for post-election litigation.”

This means that at a time Ginni Thomas was directly advising the president on whom to appoint to key roles in his political operation, Trump selected a person—a person there’s no present evidence to suggest he knew previously—who is a good friend of Ginni Thomas. Ginni’s friend Cleta, having been so selected by her advisee Donald Trump, then chose another “close friend” of hers, John Eastman, to work with her.

In the map of interrelationships that launched Donald Trump’s post-election “legal” efforts, Ginni Thomas sits at the very center of the web.

Despite all this—and quite shockingly—when the House January 6 Committee set out to send John Eastman a list of names to search for in his subpoenaed materials, the words “Ginni” and “Thomas” were nowhere to be found. See for yourself, below:

The list of individuals the House January 6 Committee expressed an intense interest in—without even once mentioning Ginni Thomas—is stunning in its length and breadth.

It includes Trump, Bannon, Navarro, Vice President Mike Pence, former Attorney General Bill Barr, President Joe Biden, Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ), Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL), Arizona state representative Rusty Bowers (R), former White House Counsel Pat Cipollone, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), Arizona state representative Mark Finchem (R), Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX), Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ), Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), former (now deceased) Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-MS), Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL), Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL), Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA), former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows (R-NC), former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-WY), Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA), former federal judge J. Michael Luttig, former Trump deputy counsel Patrick Philbin, former Pence chief of staff Marc Short, former Trump press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, former Acting Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Division of the Department of Justice Jeffrey Clark, former Trump White House lawyer Eric Herschmann, Pennsylvania state representative Doug Mastriano (R), former North Carolina Supreme Court Chief Justice Mark Martin, and others with names less well-known to domestic U.S. politics-watchers.

All of the names on the Committee’s list are well-deserved selections—and not one of them attaches to a person closer to John Eastman than Ginni Thomas.

Conclusion: The “Cone of Silence”

In what is sure to be one of the less-noticed components of the Times report—perhaps one whose importance even the Times didn’t consider, buried as it is amidst thousands of words of lesser significance—the paper’s journalists offer a tantalizing view of how Ginni Thomas and her jurist husband might have perceived a 2020 presidential victory by Joe Biden over the man Ginni Thomas had advised for years and Clarence Thomas had to thank for finally getting a far-right SCOTUS majority he’d wanted for decades.

Keeping in mind that it was Joe Biden who presided over Justice Clarence Thomas’s historically contentious Supreme Court confirmation hearings in 1991, consider the following sentence from the Times report:

Friends and associates said that the couple’s rage over the [1991] confirmation battle came to both define and unify them.

“Rage”? Indeed, not just rage but a rage that “define[s]” you and actually cements the most important relationship in your life? And a rage of this magnitude that has now lasted decades? And attaches—singularly—to an event that Joe Biden presided over?

In considering the likelihood that Ginni Thomas chose to intimately involve herself in the battle to overturn Joe Biden’s election as president, and then in considering the further likelihood that Ginni Thomas kept her husband apprised of all her activities in this regard, the fact that both husband and wife have for decades been “defined” and “unified” by their “rage” at an event that Joe Biden conducted cannot be overlooked.

Indeed, it is valuable evidence for congressional and criminal investigators of a very common sort: evidence of bias, temperament, and motive.

The Times even goes so far as to note more esoteric reasons the Thomases might have found common cause with Donald Trump: just as Trump has been publicly accused of both sexual harassment and sexual assault, so too, the Times notes, has Mr. Thomas been accused of sexual harassment and sexual assault. Like Trump, Clarence Thomas denies the allegations and has made his denials a part of his public identity and ethos.

And just as Trump has often been deemed an embarrassment to America’s wealthiest citizens—a premise that’s launched a thousand thinkpieces—Clarence Thomas, fairly or otherwise, has faced accusations for decades (accusations, it’s worth noting, that he has spoken about publicly for decades) that he is and should be a pariah in America’s Black community. It is not hard to see why Trump would not only “court” Thomas, as the Times reports he did, but that he would be as successful in doing so as he was. And for the entirety of the Donald Trump-Clarence Thomas courtship, Ginni Thomas was by her husband’s side and—in some cases—even well out in front of him.

Nor can it be said that the Thomases’ have been as open about their allegiances and activities as their supporters would have the American public believe. Per the Times,

[In 2011], [Ginni] Thomas’s activism drew scrutiny of her and her husband, when Common Cause, an advocacy group, reviewed IRS filings and criticized Justice Thomas for failing to disclose his wife’s income—nearly $700,000 over five years from the Heritage Foundation—as required by federal law. He subsequently amended twenty years of filings.

Has any Supreme Court Justice ever hidden two decades of far-right political activism by his spouse in federal filings? Let alone done so under circumstances in which he would have known—as one of America’s leading lawyers—he was effectively hiding hundreds of potential conflicts of interest? Who in the public eye to the degree Justice Thomas is hides $700,000 of marital income, requiring 20 years of amended tax filings? This history, too, must have given Ginni Thomas and Clarence Thomas a sense of déjà vu—and empathy—when tax disclosures became a central component of the public discourse surrounding Donald Trump.

Ginni Thomas, writes the Times, even “briefly ran her own advocacy group called Liberty Central, which campaigned against a planned Islamic community center and mosque in Lower Manhattan near ground zero”—an echo of Donald Trump’s own campaign to turn September 11, 2001 into a locus for anti-Muslim hatred (in Trump’s case, by lying repeatedly, and in the most vile fashion imaginable, about U.S. Muslims publicly “celebrating” the deadly attacks on the Twin Towers on that day).

So while Ginni Thomas may have at first supported Ted Cruz for president in 2016, it’s not so hard to understand why she came around on Trump as quickly as she did.

No wonder Steve Bannon now says, of the organization that he helped Ginni Thomas grow, Groundswell, that it represents “all the stuff that became the foundational stuff of the Trump movement.” No wonder the Times notes, in calling “voting…an early focus” of Groundswell, that Ginni Thomas’s outfit quickly attracted the far-right Ramsland—who not only ended up as one of the top election “experts” on Trump’s legal team but was photographed inside Trump’s Insurrection Day “command center” at the Willard Hotel.

Nor is it any wonder that the same year Donald Trump decided to run for president (2013, as established, with detailed sourcing, by the 2018 Simon & Schuster book Proof of Collusion) Ginni Thomas was as obsessed in private as Trump was on Twitter about how elections are won and lost in America. The Times mentions a message Thomas sent to her Groundswell subordinates that year that “list[ed] key House staff members working on elections matters and asked, ‘Who else are key working group members on ELECTION LAW, ELECTION REFORM and THE LEFT’S NARRATIVES, Groundswell???’” (emphasis in original).

That same year, the Republican Party released an autopsy of the 2012 presidential election—the election that prompted Trump to run for president, according to his longtime aide Sam Nunberg—stating that the GOP needed to broaden its appeal. Ginni Thomas’s reaction was identical to Trump’s and Bannon’s, the Times recounts:

[The autopsy’s] prescriptions—[that the GOP needed] to broaden [its] base and appeal to minorities and gay people—were roundly rejected by Ginni Thomas and Bannon. “It’s a joke, and it has nothing to do with what happened”, Bannon said in an interview, recalling how he reacted to the report. “We have to have something to counter it.”

Fortunately, Bannon and Ginni had just co-founded Groundswell a few weeks earlier—and done so with the precise ambition of countering prevailing narratives in the GOP.

As the Times notes, “Groundswell, in a message circulated among its members after the autopsy, said that ‘[RNC chairman Reince] Priebus is sending messages to the party….[suggesting that] if we were all gay illegal aliens, the party [would] like[ ] us. He is preparing the way for a change on social issues by giving a warning: “Don’t go Old Testament.”’” Groundswell’s contrary view was one that Trump—an indifferent Christian who couldn’t correctly name even a single book of the New Testament— would eagerly (and very publicly) adopt.

Even in initially supporting Cruz over Trump in 2016, Ginni Thomas indicated an odd indifference to the fundamentals of voting, “back[ing] a [2016 RNC] convention-floor effort to overturn the will of Republican primary voters by awarding Trump’s delegates to Cruz.” Just 48 months later, Thomas would be advocating again for the overturning of the will of U.S. voters: this time, however, the votes of every American were at stake.

And yet it was by 2018—well before 2020—that Ginni Thomas had already become such a Trump fanatic that she could seamlessly entwine Trump, her husband, and Trump’s second pick to be a new Supreme Court colleague for her husband, Brett Kavanaugh. At an event that was supposed to be kept secret (recording devices were prohibited), she thundered, “Even if [Kavanaugh] gets in [to the Supreme Court]—I believe he’ll get in, I’m hoping he gets in—they’re not going to leave him alone. They’re trying to impeach him [already]! They’re coming for my husband! They’re coming for President Trump!” The Thomases’ cause had become Trump’s, and vice versa; the purported suffering of the men Ginni Thomas had put in Trump’s path as ideal federal appointments had synchronized itself with the Thomases’ own history of (as they saw it) suffering at the hands of their enemies. The Times recounts that it was the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings that first brought the Thomases and Trumps into one another’s social orbits—an unsurprising concurrence, given that contentious Court confirmation hearings “define” the Thomases’ decades-long history of “rage.”

And yet, none of this evidence is needed to make Ginni Thomas a prime suspect in the planning of Trump’s coup plot. While there is no evidence excluding Mrs. Thomas from suspicion, there is a mountain of evidence placing her at the scene of the crime. Her January 6 Facebook messages ardently supporting the rally at which Mr. Trump incited an insurrection via enraged partisans who later attacked the U.S. Capitol seem quaint by comparison to the hard evidence of her relevant involvements with Trump, Mitchell, Ledeen, Eastman, Meadows, Bannon, Kremer, Martin, Rich Higgins, and indeed almost every coup plotter at the heart of Donald Trump’s insurrection scheme. As Proof has reported, even Ali Alexander has been a Groundswell “participant.”

So the question remains: what is the House January 6 Committee waiting for? Why is Ginni Thomas sacrosanct in a way no other witness is? Certainly it is not that she is a woman, nor even that she’s associated with a key figure in American public life; many of the Committee’s subpoenas have been sent to women, and some to men or women even more powerful and well-connected than Ginni Thomas (though the list of those answering to this description is short indeed).

In 1995, the Times recounts, Ginni Thomas told a U.S. News & World Report journalist, “I wouldn’t be in [Washington] if I wasn’t on a mission.” Does the Committee—or anyone in America, including Ginni Thomas’s most ardent friends, advocates, and supporters—believe she would abandon her “mission” just as it came to a head after Trump’s landslide election defeat at both the polls and in the Electoral College? We must not forget, here, that Ginni Thomas has always spoken in the language of radical revolution, confirming that the events of January 6 would indeed have been the apex of her political career. In 2010, during that period she was co-founding the far-right Tea Party movement, she told a crowd of activists at the 2010 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) that “I adore all of the new citizen patriots who are rising up across this country, and I’m happy to help show you the ropes in the Washington area, ’cause we need help.” Those words— “patriots”; “rising up”—echo the rhetoric that would ring across The Mall and in the halls of the Capitol just over a decade later.

In a 2021 email Ginni Thomas never thought would become public, she assured agents of the man most likely to be the 2024 GOP presidential nominee if Trump doesn’t (or can’t) run for the White House again—Florida governor Ron DeSantis—that her long-standing Groundswell outfit offered all those within its ambit a “cone of silence.” Thomas’s assurance to DeSantis’s people that Groundswell not only regularly acts with secrecy but apparently engages in the sort of activities one must regularly hide was accompanied by what—in retrospect—serves as a sort of “proof of concept”: that is, Thomas’s acknowledgment, in her email to to DeSantis’s camp, that her husband Clarence “had been in contact with the governor ‘on various things of late.’” Though we can’t know for certain, this may have been Ginni Thomas’s way of assuring the governor’s aides that—because her emails (and Groundswell’s emails) would never be seen by the public—she could make such bold, even tawdry admissions within them that would, in any subsequent public reading of them, be quickly deemed scandalous.

And this—this precisely—is what is now at stake in the continued refusal of the FBI or Congress to publicly acknowledge that Ginni Thomas was one of the key architects of the January 6 insurrection. These investigative entities are ensuring for Ginni Thomas precisely the cone of silence and cloak of secrecy she (and for that matter her husband) have enjoyed for decades, within which cone and under which cloak it now appears they both have done things that’d make any American blanch. As the Times notes, at the time of Ginni Thomas’s wink-wink nudge-nudge email to DeSantis about secret contacts between him and her husband, “DeSantis was in the midst of a number of high-profile federal court battles.”

No person who believes they can be held accountable for their actions sends an email like the Thomas-DeSantis email. The most charitable reading of such communications is that Ginni Thomas is certain that nothing she does will influence her husband, and that she feels this certainty for the simple reason that the two think so alike that she can be sure of how he’ll rule in a given case without ever speaking to him about it. As the Times reports, in one February 2021 lawsuit involving the Trump campaign’s legal team, Clarence Thomas “sharply dissented when a 6-to-3 majority rejected the case brought by Pennsylvania Republicans that the court had refused to take up in December”, in doing so “echoing the arguments advanced by [Ginni’s] CNP Action.”

In the case in question, Thomas took the view, as had his wife beginning in November 2020, that during the 2020 presidential election “non-legislative officials in various States took it upon themselves to set the rules [for the election].” Thomas even went so far as to say that it didn’t really matter whether the claims of “fraud” being made by Trump partisans—his wife, he didn’t say, chief among them—were true or not, as they should automatically be heard by the Supreme Court even if they facially lacked merit.

CNP Action and Ginni Thomas, if ever they’d doubted that Justice Thomas would’ve looked favorably on their coup plot in November and December of 2020 (not that there is any indication they feared this), must have been enormously heartened by Thomas’s extraordinary statements about baseless allegations of a “stolen election.” Even when Thomas, in an easily missed footnote, acknowledged the weakness of Donald Trump’s post-election litigation, he would say only that the 2020 election had been “free from strong evidence of systemic fraud” (emphasis supplied). That there might have been some evidence of systemic fraud—as his wife was then loudly claiming—went implied but unwritten.

While the focus of the recent New York Times feature on the Thomases takes a long-range view of their ambitions, Congress cannot now afford—nor can America—such bespectacled tunnel vision. The evidence that Ginni Thomas was at the heart of the planning of the events of January 6 is now overwhelming; the evidence that she kept clear of the pinnacle moment of her life’s “mission” is non-existent. Her apparent lifetime of arrogant, “out of bounds” political advocacy has left her open to the ambit of responsible congressional and federal criminal investigations—if only Congress and the FBI will lift the “cone of silence” the Thomases have so carefully constructed.

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