NEW: The Coming Collapse of Donald Trump’s January 6 Conspiracy, Part 5: Ginni Thomas
NEW: The Coming Collapse of Donald Trump’s January 6 Conspiracy, Part 5: Ginni Thomas
This shocking new PROOF series details mounting evidence that Trump's seditious January 6 conspiracy is at the point of collapse because of the cowardice, fear, and perfidy of his co-conspirators.
Introduction
On Insurrection Eve—January 5, 2021—the epicenter of Trumpist coup plotting in the United States, the White House excepted, wasn’t the now-infamous Willard Hotel in Washington, but rather Trump’s so-called “private residence” in the nation’s capital: the Trump Town House at Trump International Hotel. Presiding over the war room in the Town House was none other than Donald Trump Jr., the president’s eldest son. Just as crucial to the plotting under way that fateful night was Trump Jr.’s then–secret fiancée Kimberly Guilfoyle, a leading presidential adviser who spent part of the hours-long war-room session speaking by phone with domestic terrorist Ali Alexander, co-leader of the Stop the Steal “movement” with Trump friend and adviser Roger Stone.
Within the Trump Town House on Insurrection Eve, the epicenter of the epicenter was a blue-walled conference room with a flag at one end echoing Ali Alexander’s (and other insurrectionists’) favored refrain on Insurrection Eve: “1776!” Alexander’s favored use of the date has long been the phrase, “1776 [violence] is always an option!”
Below you can watch the infamous Arizonan Alexander on Insurrection Eve—wearing one of the blaze-orange hats his Arizona Proud Boy friends wore as they launched the attack on the Capitol (even as Proud Boys from outside Arizona wore the same color on their armbands and combat helmets)—shortly before Donald Trump Jr.’s betrothed called him from Trump’s private residence at Trump International. In the video, he is again using “1776” as code for a violent revolution against the federal government:
The photo below this paragraph was taken 36 months before the Trump International war room opened its doors. In it, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Ginni Thomas, stands beside the leader of Trump’s preeminent Insurrection Eve war room. The two are posing in the very room that would become, it appears, the seat of a seditious conspiracy to overthrow a democratic election. In the background you can see the “1776” meme which would, years later, be a harrowing call to rebellion against America. Innocuous as it may seem at first blush, in retrospect the photograph below seems like a foreshadowing.
Of course, January 2018 isn’t January 2021. A photo of Ginni Thomas in a room later used as part of a seditious conspiracy, even if she appears in it beside a leader of the said conspiracy—Trump Jr.’s speech on January 6 was just as incendiary and aimed at insurrection as his father’s, as Proof has detailed—doesn’t indicate that Thomas was involved in efforts to overturn the 2020 election. That would require evidence that, in late 2020 and early 2021, Thomas worked to advance the cause the photo above echoes.
Increasingly, it appears such evidence exists. This article will detail a great deal of it.
Before it does, however, Proof must debunk the most widely spread myth about Ginni Thomas’s participation in Trump’s insurrection: that she helped organize the busloads of insurrectionists who arrived in Washington on Insurrection Eve, doing so to aid the aforementioned Alexander and Turning Point USA chief Charlie Kirk. While it’s true that Alexander has now confirmed he and Kirk orchestrated such busing in advance of the storming of the Capitol—and while it’s clear that some of those so aided by Kirk and Alexander later committed federal crimes on January 6—there is no evidence that Ginni Thomas was part of that effort, so this Proof report does not address it at all.
The reason many Americans believed Thomas was involved in the logistics of January 6 at such a granular level is partly owing to her reputation—an unfair extrapolation—and partly owing to her own public statements about January 6, for which, of course, she is directly responsible. As Slate has correctly reported via journalist Mark Joseph Stern, Ginni Thomas’s declarations on Insurrection Day gave many Americans pause:
As Proof has exhaustively detailed—for instance, in recounting the violent rhetoric of Ali Alexander in the weeks leading up to January 6, the equally violent rhetoric of the insurrection’s leaders (including Alexander) on January 5, the Trumpist riot at Black Lives Matter Plaza just 15 hours before the Capitol was stormed, the Secret Service report informing the White House that the Capitol would be unsafe by January 6, and the near-universal knowledge of federal legislators that there was danger all around them on January 6 even before the Capitol was breached—by the morning of January 6 anyone with any political savvy, a group that certainly includes Ginni Thomas, knew that events at the Capitol could get bloody. For the wife of a Supreme Court Justice to have publicly declared her “LOVE” for a huge mob gathering in and around the White House Ellipse on January 6; for her to have then added to that already inappropriate adulation, “GOD BLESS EACH OF YOU STANDING UP”; and for her to have done all this despite being an attorney and thus an “officer of the court” is truly appalling.
But it is not, in itself, criminal. And it has nothing to do with any buses that arrived in Washington carrying the soon-to-be criminals to whom Thomas sent her ex ante love and blessing. These words require of Thomas an apology, but not a DOJ investigation.
In the event, Ginni Thomas did issue an apology—though not to the nation to which she owed it.
Rather, as the Washington Post reported a month after the attack on the U.S. Capitol, Thomas sent a private apology to a listserv of former federal employees—ex-clerks of her husband—that she had been spamming with insurrectionist rhetoric in the lead-up to Insurrection Day. While Thomas’s self-admittedly unwelcome spread of such rhetoric in a space frequented by former federal employees underscores her state of mind in the weeks before the Capitol was breached, it still does not a crime make.
As for Thomas’s post-riot statements on Facebook the morning of the insurrection, they were less conciliatory: she merely appended a clarifier to them (“[Note: written before violence in US Capitol]”), then made her Facebook feed invisible to the public.
Ginni Thomas: A History
Ginni Thomas’s far-right activism well predated her marriage to Clarence Thomas, so she was certainly under no obligation to brook it simply because she and now-Justice Thomas fell in love with one another. This said, Proof takes the same view many U.S. journalists do in opining that Justice Thomas has committed serious ethical violations by consistently failing to recuse himself from cases directly or indirectly involving his wife’s activism. This is not the same, however, as declaring Ginni Thomas ineligible for such activism. Indeed, Thomas has had an impressive professional career that has seen her be, as a Washington Post feature once observed, “a staffer for a Republican congressman, a[ ] spokeswoman at the U.S. Chamber of [Commerce], and a[ ] deputy assistant secretary at the Department of Labor.” The New Yorker writes that Thomas “has held so many leadership or advisory positions at conservative pressure groups that it’s hard to keep track of them.”
If there is a reason to take Ginni Thomas to task for her decades of activism it is that it has, in many instances, been immoral and dangerous. And, as the Post notes, citing an EEOC official familiar with her marriage to Justice Thomas, not only is she “very smart and a very good lobbyist” but someone who is willing to “discuss[ ]” (and thus, implicitly, lobby for) political positions with her husband—even those that might be relevant to his work. Another friend of the couple who is also from the EEOC, Ricky Silberman, told the Post the following on the question of whether Ginni Thomas has exerted influence on her husband regarding matters that might come (or already are) before the Supreme Court:
I’m married to a federal judge and he influences me and I influence him. That’s part of being close to someone—we certainly have discussions about cases [before Silberman’s husband’s federal court]….[the Thomases are] great intellectual soul mates who talk a lot about ideas and social policy.
With this said, here’s just a brief overview of how Ginni Thomas’s “ideas” have been reflected in her own work.
Ginni Thomas’ Far-Right Activism
(1) Thomas publicly professed a belief in an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory insisting that Jewish philanthropist George Soros led a “coup against [then-president] Trump.” She has also approvingly cited the false and anti-Semitic claim that the foreign-born Soros is “really running the Democratic Party.” (More.)
(2) She falsely claims “the Obama administration illegally spied on Trump’s 2016 campaign, then tried to rig the election against him.” This particularly insidious piece of disinformation underscores that Ginni Thomas supports Trump’s Big Lie—which predates the 2020 presidential election inasmuch as its central metanarrative is the falsehood (pushed not just by Trumpist insurrectionists but the Kremlin) that the Democratic Party has been working to steal presidential elections for years. (More.)
(3) During the 2020 general election, Thomas falsely alleged “corrupt [collusion]” between the national media and the Biden campaign. Meanwhile, as the Associated Press reports, she was “using her Facebook page to amplify unsubstantiated claims of corruption by Joe Biden” long known to originate in a Kremlin disinformation campaign (see the thousands of citations in Macmillan’s Proof of Corruption). (More.)
(4) During the 2020 presidential campaign she also amplified a Kremlin-supported disinformation campaign called Walk Away, which, per Slate, “purport[ed] to spotlight Democrats who became Republicans under Trump. At least two individuals featured in the ‘Walk Away’ series, both Black, were actually models from royalty-free stock photos.”
(5) Her public writings cite a far-right anti-vaxxer group which claims Bill Gates has secretly conspired with unnamed entities to “use the COVID vaccine to kill people.” (More.)
(6) She has called Black Lives Matter a consortium of “radical extremists seeking to foment a cultural revolution because they hate America.” (More.)
(7) Decades years after her husband Clarence sexually harassed his federal-employee subordinate Anita Hill, she decided to call up Hill out of the blue and—if you can believe this—initiate a new course of harassment against the now–professor. (More.)
(8) As reported recently by Jane Mayer in the New Yorker, Thomas, who “runs a small political-lobbying firm, Liberty Consulting”, has “declared that America is in existential danger because of the ‘deep state’ and the ‘fascist left,’ which includes ‘transsexual fascists.’”
One particularly illuminating anecdote reported by the New Yorker regarding Ginni Thomas’s political activities is worth reciting in full, as it relates to an organization—Groundswell—that will shortly become central to this Proof article. It also references an award Ginni Thomas apparently devised to advance her own political interests (a chit called the Impact Award) which likewise features in the second half of this report.
Frank Gaffney, a defense hawk best known for having made feverish claims suggesting that [former president Barack] Obama is a Muslim and that [former Iraqi president] Saddam Hussein’s regime was involved in the [1995] Oklahoma City bombings….was a colleague of Ginni Thomas’s at Groundswell as far back as 2013. Gaffney was a proponent of Trump’s reactionary immigration policies, including, most vociferously, of the Administration’s Muslim travel ban. As these restrictions were hit by lawsuits, Gaffney’s nonprofit, the Center for Security Policy, signed the first of two big contracts with [Ginni Thomas’s] Liberty Consulting. According to documents that Gaffney’s group filed with the IRS, in 2017 and 2018 it paid Ginni Thomas a total of more than $200,000.
It’s not entirely clear where Gaffney’s nonprofit got the funds to hire Liberty Consulting. But….one of the biggest donors to Gaffney’s group in 2017 was a pro-Trump political organization, Making America Great, whose chairman, the heiress Rebekah Mercer, was among Trump’s biggest backers. While $200,000 was being passed from Trump backers to Gaffney to Ginni Thomas, the Supreme Court agreed to hear legal challenges to Trump’s travel restrictions. In August, 2017, Gaffney and six other advocates submitted an amicus brief to the Court in support of the restrictions, arguing that “the challenge of Islam must be confronted.”
That December, as the case was still playing out, Ginni Thomas bestowed one of her Impact Awards on Gaffney, introducing him “as an encourager to me and a great friend” but giving no hint that his group was paying her firm [over $200,000]. The Impact ceremony was held at Trump International Hotel, and, according to another guest….Justice Thomas was in attendance.
….
Justice Thomas, in his [federal financial] disclosures in 2017 and 2018, failed to mention the payments [to his wife] from Gaffney’s group. Instead, he put down a curiously low book value for his wife’s lobbying firm, claiming in both years that her company was worth only between $15,000 and $50,000.
That Ginni Thomas would later successfully lobby Donald Trump—in major part via a private dinner at the White House with the president and Melania Trump, a dinner Justice Thomas attended with her—to “give in to [her] months-long campaign to bring her, [fellow Groundsweller] Gaffney, and several other associates to the White House to press the President on policy and personnel issues” underscores how her Groundswell operation played into her dealings with Trump in particular (see below for more). It also presages broader themes in Ginni Thomas’s private encounters with Trump.
{Note: The New Yorker has done tremendous work detailing how frequently Ginni Thomas works with entities filing amicus curiae (“friend of the court”) briefs with her husband and his peers. As Jane Mayer writes, “[Ginni] Thomas currently serves on the advisory board of the National Association of Scholars, a group promoting conservative values in academia, which has filed an amicus brief before the [Supreme] Court in a potentially groundbreaking affirmative-action lawsuit against Harvard.”}
Ginni Thomas and Donald Trump
The New Yorker reports that the meeting Ginni Thomas, Frank Gaffney, and others ultimately had with Trump and his political team saw Thomas open by “press[ing] Trump to purge his Administration of disloyal members of the ‘deep state’” and “handing [Trump] an enemies list that she and Groundswell had compiled.”
This event, in itself, underlines several key elements of this report: Ginni Thomas’s paranoia; the concordance of her paranoia with Trump’s; her level of access to the then-president; and the brazenness of her efforts to influence national events on a grand scale.
While the New Yorker also reports (oddly, using third-hand information from a Trump ally) that at the time the former president dined with Justice Thomas and his wife he saw Ginni Thomas as a “wacko” he had to humor to please and placate her husband—a sentiment troubling for a whole different set of reasons—in fact there’s little daylight between the ideas Ginni Thomas has expressed in private and those Donald Trump would express in public both before and indeed on January 6, 2021.
In one particularly unnerving 2018 address to the Council for National Policy, Ginni Thomas opined that “the deep state is serious, and it’s resisting President Trump”, adding that those opposing her (and presumably Trump) aimed to “kill people”—which circumstance required, she said, that “we all have guns and ‘concealed carry’ [laws] to handle what’s coming!” The implication that Clarence Thomas’s wife felt that a Second Civil War was inevitable was unmistakable, even as it was also shocking.
But it is the many indications that Ginni Thomas had exclusive access to Trump that are even more troubling:
(1) During Trump’s presidency, Ginni Thomas had “an extraordinary amount of access to the Oval Office.” As importantly, the reason for this access was in part Thomas’ stewardship of Groundswell, the secretive far-right organization discussed in much more detail in the following section of this article. As head of this organization, Slate reports, Ginni Thomas made multiple trips to the Oval Office to see Trump. (More.)
(2) The Washington Post reports that Thomas’ many meetings “with [President Trump] at the White House [were in part] to advise [him] on political appointees.” (More.)
(3) And yet Thomas’ focus, in her private meetings with Trump, wasn’t simply on who Trump could bring into his administration. It was—as importantly—on who needed to be removed from it. Slate reports that Ginni Thomas was one of the individuals most ardently focused on rooting the supposed “deep state” out of Trump’s administration, “compil[ing] lists of federal employees whom she deemed insufficiently loyal to the president. She sent her lists to Trump, urging him to fire the disloyal employees…”
(4) While Trump may not always have taken Thomas’ direct advice on appointees—many of whom were her friends and associates—she remained close enough to him throughout his presidency that, for instance, the Washington Post reports, “When Trump gathered supporters at the White House to celebrate his acquittal at his first Senate impeachment trial, she was among those invited.” (More.)
(5) Thomas has traded on her husband’s name, status, and influence to advance her far-right activism, even as Clarence Thomas has—major media reports confirm—never recused himself from a Supreme Court case owing to his wife’s involvement in issues that came before the Court. The New York Times reports that, during the period of time Ginni Thomas had “extraordinary” access to Trump, and became one of Trump’s leading advisers on the matter of political appointments, then-President Trump, who was “facing several decisions before the Supreme Court personally and in terms of administration policy…made clear [to aides that] he [was] conscious of whom she is married to.” Slate reports that Ginni Thomas’s “advocacy group Groundswell got an audience with the president in early 2019….a meeting…arranged after Clarence and Ginni Thomas had dinner with the Trumps. Clarence Thomas and Trump appear to be quite friendly: the justice took his clerks to meet with the president in the Oval Office at least once; Ginni attended as well.”
Yet all this is just the barest hint of Ginni Thomas’s influence inside Trumpworld.
Ginni Thomas, the 2020 Presidential Election, and the Coup Plot
We move, now, closer to January 6, 2021. What does any of the above have to do with the days and weeks leading up to Election Day in November 2020, and the period of sixty-four days from Election Day to Insurrection Day? Consider the following facts:
(1) Ginni Thomas was in contact with Trump attorney John Eastman before the coup attempt. Eastman, who wrote the now-infamous “Eastman Memo”—a possibly criminal coup-plot outline intended for use in conjunction with the seditious “Green Bay Sweep” conspiracy devised by top Trump adviser Peter Navarro—is a former Clarence Thomas clerk who regularly posted messages to the very Thomas Clerk World listserv Ginni Thomas was spamming with ardent pro-insurrection rhetoric as Eastman was preparing the document that has now forced him to assert the Fifth Amendment before Congress. And indeed, the Washington Post confirms that Ginni Thomas and John Eastman were sending messages to the listserv on the same topic: Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election. One of Eastman’s messages, which would have been seen by Ginni Thomas just as her messages were seen by him, read, “Rest assured that those of us involved in this [legal battle to overturn the 2020 election through lawsuits aimed at the Supreme Court] are working diligently to ascertain the truth.”
Eastman, an insurrectionist with designs on putting the 2020 election in the hands of Clarence Thomas and his colleagues, could have found no better plausibly deniable channel to the most conservative Supreme Court Justice than through the Ginni Thomas–dominated Thomas Clerk World digital network. One member of the listserv, University of Notre Dame law professor Stephen F. Smith, became so angry at one message by Eastman to the group that he responded with the following: “I hope (and trust) that you—and everyone on this list—agree that the search for truth doesn’t in any way justify insurrection, trying to kidnap and assassinate elected officials, attacking police officers, or making common cause with racists and anti-Semites bent on wanton violence and lawlessness.”
Were Eastman and Thomas aware of one another’s messages on the listserv? Yes, says the New Yorker. It reports that in the debates about overturning the 2020 election that raged on the listserv in the lead-up to the January 6 attack on the Capitol, Trump’s attorney and Clarence Thomas’ wife “[were] on the same side.” Per the New Yorker, law professor Artemus Ward—author of a history of Supreme Court clerks—has said of the approximately 120-person-strong Thomas Clerk World that it is “an élite right-wing commando movement” within which ecosystem Ginni Thomas “is advocating for things [policies and courses of action] directly.” He adds, “It’s unprecedented. I have never seen a Justice’s wife as involved.”
Whether Ginni Thomas communicated with Eastman more directly prior to January 6 remains unknown. However, the mere fact that a Supreme Court Justice’s wife who was also a Trump political adviser was willing to directly and privately email a Trump attorney intending to bring lawsuits before her spouse on the matter of the peaceful transition of power in America itself requires a congressional investigation. (More.)
(2) In 2020, Ginni Thomas also campaigned for Trump in person—and, according to the Intercept, spearheaded a dark-money operation to support the then-president. Cleta Mitchell, the GOP lawyer who infamously participated in Trump’s shakedown of Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger, led Ginni Thomas’s project, thus establishing her as not only one of Trump’s most trusted co-conspirators but one of Trump adviser Ginni Thomas’s closest political associates.
(3) Ginni Thomas and Groundswell (see more below) held weekly meetings during the Trump presidency to both prospectively and retrospectively “vet” Trump appointees for past or potential “disloyalty”, with Thomas herself serving (per the New Yorker) as the “tip of the spear”—the field marshal—for federalizing Trumpism in this respect.
An example of retrospective targeting orchestrated by Ginni Thomas and her peers and subordinates at Groundswell involves Trump-Ukraine scandal hero Alexander Vindman, a soldier and federal official and whistleblower who Thomas’s outfit sought to destroy after he came forward to testify against Donald Trump in the latter’s first impeachment trial. The coordinated Groundswell campaign, which the now-retired Vindman says was “chilling”, “harmed my [military] career”, and was an “un-American….political vendetta [intended] to retaliate against officials who were dutifully serving the public interest”, also underscored that Ginni Thomas would be willing to go to extraordinary lengths to protect Trump’s political career and attack anyone who might hinder it. This sort of mindset would become not just relevant but urgent in Trumpworld the moment Trump lost the 2020 presidential election in an electoral and popular-vote landslide that he and his fans adamantly refused to accept.
But how deep did Groundswell’s operations run during Trump’s presidency—and how far has it been willing to go to aid Trump’s political ambitions in ways that were once unthinkable?
Groundswell
We know that Ginni Thomas is a director at CNP Action (“a dark-money wing of the conservative pressure group the Council for National Policy…[it] connects wealthy donors with some of the most radical right-wing figures in America”, the New Yorker reports) and an advisory board member for Charlie Kirk’s far-right Turning Point USA, which is confirmed to have helped populate (via busing) Trump’s January 6 mob.
We know that Ginni Thomas’s activities with these and other hyperpartisan entities have prompted legal ethicist and NYU law professor Stephen Gillers to call Thomas’s actions—in view of her husband’s position—“horrible” and “reprehensible”, adding that Justice Thomas’ eight peers on the Court without question deem Ginni Thomas’ conduct “appalling.” Another professor and legal ethicist, Bruce Green, calls Ginni Thomas’ actions “awful”, adding that they make she and her husband look like “a mom-and-pop political-hack group.” Ominously, a very close friend of the two once told the Washington Post that “the one person Clarence really listens to is [Ginni].”
We know that around 2019 Ginni Thomas launched, with James O’Keefe (of the Erik Prince–trained Project Veritas), a project called Crowdsourcers. The self-described “journalist” O’Keefe was famously raided by the Federal Bureau of Investigation just 72 hours after the 2020 presidential election on allegations that he and Project Veritas had tried to sway the election by improperly acquiring Joe Biden’s daughter’s diary (Ashley Biden had reported a burglary of her home weeks earlier). Columbia Journalism Review reveals that Project Veritas—to which Thomas has yoked herself by partnering with O’Keefe—is “known to publish surreptitiously recorded and selectively edited videos.” That Project Veritas’ biggest funding source, the Bradley Impact Fund, is particularly focused on “perceived [2020] election fraud” is notable in that the sort of election fraud cases the far right is now most interested in are those that would end up in front of Ginni’s husband Clarence. The New York Times has written of Project Veritas that it rides “the line between journalism and political spying”, noting that internal communications from the group reveal “the extent to which the group has worked with its lawyers to gauge how far its deceptive reporting practices can go before running afoul of federal laws.”
All of this is valuable background information for any attempt to understand Ginni Thomas’s possible willingness to be involved in 2020 election shenanigans or—at a minimum—to consort professionally with those responsible for them. Indeed, here’s what the Department of Justice has had to say about Thomas’s partner’s operation: “[O’Keefe’s] Project Veritas is not engaged in journalism within any traditional or accepted definition of that word. Its ‘reporting’ consists almost entirely of publicizing non-consensual, surreptitious recordings made th[r]ough unlawful, unethical, and or/dishonest means.” Even O’Keefe has called his outfit “a political spying operation.” His group remains under FBI investigation for Conspiracy to Transport Stolen Property Across State Lines, Interstate Transportation of Stolen Property, Aiding and Abetting [a Federal Crime], and Accessory After the Fact [of a Federal Crime].
Lest one think Ginni Thomas’s decision to partner with an election fraud–obsessed political spy was a one-off instance of bad judgment, consider another of her partners in the “Crowdsourcers” project: Cleta Mitchell. Putting aside that Mitchell’s Public Interest Legal Foundation has business before Ginni Thomas’s husband and the rest of the Supreme Court, there’s the more troubling fact that when Trump called Brad Raffensperger to demand that Georgia “find” enough votes to give that state to the Trump campaign—a call which is soon to be the subject of grand jury proceedings—Mitchell was on the phone, too. This means she’s either a key witness in a federal criminal investigation involving historic election fraud or—depending upon how the facts shake out—was an accessory to President Trump as he committed that crime.
But it gets worse.
In 2019, the year before the last presidential election, Ginni Thomas secretly worked with then-congressman and soon-to-be Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows—a man now facing possible federal contempt charges in a seditious conspiracy investigation pursued by the House January 6 Committee—on Donald Trump’s first impeachment.
The Thomas-Meadows partnership was only (semi-)publicly revealed as Meadows was accepting an Impact Award from Thomas; as noted above, Ginni Thomas invented the award, designed to acknowledge “culture warriors” fighting progressives, in 2018. At the time Meadows said, “Ginni was talking [in her introduction of me] about how we ‘team up,’ and we actually have teamed up. And I’m going to give you something you won’t hear anywhere else—we worked through the first 5 days of the impeachment hearings.” The New Yorker notes that it was “soon” after Meadows got an award from Thomas’s hand—remembering, here, that Thomas was at the time one of Trump’s chief advisers on appointments—that the president appointed Meadows his new chief of staff. Meadows would play a critical role in the planning of January 6, and is playing a key role right now in helping obscure Trump’s involvement in the events of that day.
Like Meadows, Thomas associate Cleta Mitchell is now fighting her congressional subpoena with the aim of getting the issue before Thomas’s husband, Clarence; and like Meadows, the New Yorker writes, referring to the former Trump chief of staff’s recent referral to DOJ for the crime of Contempt of Congress, “The same thing [a criminal referral to the Department of Justice] may well happen to Mitchell.”
Even as Justice Thomas was the sole Supreme Court Justice to dissent from an order requiring that Trump hand over certain documents involving Mark Meadows—the New Yorker notes that Meadows, the recent Ginni-Thomas-devised-Impact-Award winner, himself filed an amicus brief in the case—Ginni Thomas was working (as a self-described “active” member) with Conservative Action Project, a far-right outfit that is demanding Reps. Liz Cheney (R-WY) and Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) be thrown out of the Republican Party for investigating Trump and Meadows’ election fraud and, not for nothing, demanding documents from former President Trump in the case that went before Ginni Thomas’s husband. The Project takes the view that those who planned January 6 “have done nothing wrong”, and that all subpoenas issued by the committee Cheney and Kinzinger sit on—which, presumably, could one day issue a subpoena to Ginni Thomas herself—are illegal.
{Note: Jane Mayer of the New Yorker adds, “A current member of the Conservative Action Project told me that Ginni Thomas is part of the group not because of her qualifications but ‘because she’s married to Clarence.’ The member asked to have his name withheld because, he said, Ginni is ‘volatile’ and becomes ‘edgy’ when challenged. He added, ‘The best word to describe her is ‘tribal.’ You’re either part of her group or you’re the enemy.’”}
Ginni Thomas’s consulting firm, Liberty Comsulting, also makes use of individuals alleged to have been involved in election fraud. Her website long featured a glowing testimonial from insurrectionist Kimberly Fletcher of Moms for America; Fletcher was one of the primary January 6 organizers, and has been a “political associate” of Ginni Thomas for over a decade, per the New Yorker.
But all of these Ginni Thomas engagements are a mere preface to her most important prospective role in the insurrection: as the self-described “chairman” of Groundswell, the infamous “secretive, invitation-only network that…coordinate[s] with hard-right congressional aides, journalists, and pressure groups.”
One known past participant in Groundswell? Domestic terrorist Ali Alexander, one of the masterminds of the January 6 plot.
Perhaps it is no surprise, then, that in a 2013 report on Groundswell, David Corn of Mother Jones reported that Ginni Thomas’s operation was a “hush-hush coalition” with no less a goal than “fundamentally transforming the nation” (an aim that so happens to be what far-right activists like Thomas routinely accuse progressives of being dangerous and/or un-American for wanting to do).
Yet given Ginni Thomas’s baseless and highly public claims of collusion between the Democratic Party and U.S. media, perhaps just as surprising here is the breathtaking hypocrisy of Thomas’s Groundswell being—in point of fact—an actual clandestine conspiracy between leading Republicans and organizations allegedly journalistic in character. As Corn reported in 2013, Thomas’s Groundswell saw her secretly colluding with “journalists from Breitbart News and the Washington Examiner” to “concoct talking points, coordinate messaging, and hatch plans” for (as internal Groundswell documents confessed, Corn reported) “a 30-front [culture] war.”
If you are unnerved by the idea of a Supreme Court Justice’s wife secretly conspiring with far-right activists–cum–domestic terrorists like Ali Alexander, as well as men and women claiming to be journalists but intending to instead be political operatives, and doing so with the aim of launching a “war” to “transform” our democracy—if, indeed, that notion sounds perilously close to what the insurrectionists (led by past Groundswell participant Ali Alexander, and aided by individuals falsely claiming to be journalists like Christina Bobb) were trying to do on January 6, unfortunately it gets worse.
Inside Groundswell
During the last decade, Thomas’s secretive outfit met in the offices of an entity that is regularly engaged with issues before the Supreme Court: Judicial Watch, one of the most litigious entities in America. These hush-hush meetings also included—another echo of the January 6 conspiracy—“aides to congressional Republicans.” As Corn details Groundswell’s backroom activities, all were focused, as was the January 6 conspiracy, on changing the outcome of major developments in American politics, from immigration reform bills to sensitive congressional investigations like Benghazi.
The group Ginni Thomas “guid[ed]” included future Trump National Security Advisor John Bolton; Max Pappas, a top aide to the man who in 2021 led the fight to overturn the 2020 election results in Congress, Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX); current extreme-right Texas gubernatorial candidate and former GOP congressman Allen West, one of the masterminds behind Texas’s present push to suppress non-white votes; and the man many deem to have single-handedly rigged the 2004 presidential election for George W. Bush, former Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell—whose partisan and logistically groundless redistribution of voting machines in majority-minority Ohio districts led to ten-hour voting lines in some Cuyahoga County precincts, and gave Bush Ohio (and the White House) by the attendance of an Ohio State football game. At other points Groundswell “collaborated” with Trump’s first Attorney General, Jeff Sessions—a key member of Trump’s 2016 campaign—and the aforementioned Cruz.
Corn also reports that “Among the conveners listed in an invitation to a May 8 [2013] meeting of Groundswell [was] Stephen Bannon”—the very man who was advising Donald Trump in the lead-up to January 6, and who seemed to know in advance that “all hell” (his prescient words) was going to “break loose” in Washington on that day.
Internally, Groundswell at times seemed like an intelligence operation. One document reviewed by Mother Jones informed members of the group that certain members’ names should be removed from all communications for “OPSEC reasons.” (“OPSEC” is short for “operational security.”) Other documents spoke of “strategic growth”, winning the “propaganda battle”, and ensuring all visitors to Groundswell meetings—who could, presumably, later identify members of the secretive group—got “cleared” in advance. Another internal memo informed Groundswell members that the group had tasked itself with “develop[ing] action from reports and information.” One 2010s initiative recorded that Groundswell had been activated to “collect[ ]…[information] to provide to Cruz”—exactly what Groundswell participant Ali Alexander was doing, and with respect to the same acknowledged Groundswell “collaborator,” on Insurrection Eve.
The notes from one February 2013 Groundswell meeting sound like they could have been ripped from any meeting of Trump’s antifa-obsessed Willard Hotel “war room” years later: “[The] radical left is dedicated to destroy[ing] those who oppose them….[via] vicious and unprecedented tactics. We are in a real war; most conservatives are not prepared to fight.” Notes from a meeting held the next month said Groundswell needed to be activated to ensure that Republican “leaders” would “be shamed into doing the right thing”—the very theme Trump harped upon in his now-infamous “incitement to insurrection” speech at the Ellipse on January 6, and the very endeavor Ali Alexander had dedicated himself to following the 2020 presidential election. One can imagine how much Trump would have admired this group run by a top adviser of his, given that, as Corn reports, “Venting about weak and squishy GOP leaders was a regular feature of Groundswell gatherings.”
Corn reports, ominously, that another “high-priority cause” for Ginni Thomas and her “Groundswellers” is “voter identification efforts—what progressives would call voter suppression.” This focus, too, presumably drew Trump’s notice, as would have the general tenor of the group’s operations, which the New Yorker termed “warlike.”
{Note: Corn adds that “In one post [to a Google communication channel used by her Groundswell group], Ginni Thomas encouraged Groundswell members to watch ‘Agenda: Grinding America Down,’ a documentary that claims that progressives (including Obama) seek ‘a brave new world’ based on the ‘failed policies and ideologies of communism’ and that an evil left is purposefully ‘destroying the greatest country in all of world history.’” Thomas later greenlit a political ad pitched to the group that implied Obama’s ideologies and policies were going to lead the U.S. into nuclear war. Trump and—in particular—Alexander coconspirator Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL) sounded identical notes in his Insurrection Day speech.}
At yet another Groundswell meeting in 2013, it was decided to, as described by Mother Jones after a review of the meeting’s minutes, “ask…Stephen Bannon to arrange for his media organization ‘to get senators on the record regarding their support [or non-support]’ of [a] filibuster that GOP Sens. Mike Lee [R-UT], Rand Paul [R-KY], and Ted Cruz were threatening to mount…” That as of January 2021 Ginni Thomas’s group had a history of working with Bannon to lobby GOP senators on controversial actions—notably, a filibuster isn’t so far from what Ted Cruz aimed to do at the joint session of Congress on January 6, via protracted objections to certain Biden electors—is unnerving. Indeed, Mother Jones reports that Thomas’s group had a “particularly” close and abiding relationship with Bannon’s media operation. Groundswell had even more contact with Bannon employee Matt Boyle, who by 2017 was being described by the Washingtonian as “Breitbart’s (other) man [besides Bannon himself] in the White House.” The DC-focused media outlet reported at the time that Boyle “has the ear of the [Trump] White House….[including] flying on [President] Trump’s private jet and interviewing him in the Oval Office.” Indeed, Trump became so close with top Ginni Thomas collaborator Boyle that the then-president habitually called him “my Matty.”
As for his relationship with insurrectionist guru Steve Bannon, Boyle would describe Bannon as the Bill Belichek to his Tom Brady—a “coach” and his “quarterback.” A former boss of Boyle’s told the Washingtonian that as a political operator “Boyle has two modes: murder and blowjob.” Presumably while in the former of these modes, Mother Jones reports, Boyle shared with Ginni Thomas’s Groundswell “his suspicion that many government agencies—State, the CIA, the Pentagon, the EPA, and more—[are] conspiring with ‘far left wing groups.’” If this pap sounds like a precursor to the Deep State conspiracy theories that animated the insurrection, that’s because it is.
As she was fighting to destroy Obama initiatives like Obamacare, Ginni Thomas was said to be particularly focused, during the Obama presidency, on the notion that the nation’s soft-spoken first black president was a “tyrant”—the same overheated term with which Groundswell participant Ali Alexander would be obsessed as he recorded Periscope video after Periscope video urging his followers to launch a “loud war” on the Capitol grounds on January 6. That Ginni Thomas helped launch Groundswell as a reaction to “the November [2012] elections” (per Mother Jones) and that it was founded on the idea that “our country is in peril” (per an internal Groundswell document) only further echoes the November 2020–relaunched Stop the Steal campaign that evolved into a dangerous march on the Capitol Ginni Thomas applauded until suddenly her Facebook feed went private.
When not seeking to change GOP minds on Capitol Hill in much the same way Ali Alexander claimed he intended to do on January 6, Groundswell focused on Ginni Thomas’s husband’s place of work, David Corn reports, as her operation “zeroe[d] in on contentious issues that come before the Court, including voting rights, abortion, and gay marriage.”
So these are the types of causes—and types of people—Ginni Thomas has invested in, along with those of a similar bent, like the Erik Prince–associated James O’Keefe.
Whether Ginni Thomas used the Thomas Clerk World listserv that included Trump attorney John Eastman the same way she used Groundswell’s private Google group is unclear, though her post–January 6 apology to her husband’s former clerks strongly suggests that she did—and that her conduct with Groundswell may well have been a prelude to communications with Eastman in the weeks leading up to January 6.
But do we have evidence that Groundswell members, participants, or collaborators—besides Alexander, Cruz, Bannon, and Cleta Mitchell, that is (and accepting that these four individuals were among the most important behind the insurrection and the events leading to it)—were involved in clandestine planning before that terrible day?
Yes, we do.
The McMaster Plot and Barbara Ledeen
Ginni Thomas’s story takes a turn toward possible sedition in 2018, just as Trump and his team were gearing up for the 2020 election by seeking to ally themselves with pro-Kremlin Ukrainians promising manufactured dirt on the man Trump believed would be his November opponent: Joe Biden.
{Note: All of this is covered in exhaustive detail in the nearly 600-page nonfiction book Proof of Corruption, published by Macmillan in 2020, so I won’t unpack it further here.}
It was in 2018 that, according to the New York Times, Ginni Thomas conspired with one of the most prominent members of Groundswell, Barbara Ledeen, to formulate a conclusive “enemies list” for Trump to use in targeting opponents outside (but even more so, inside) the federal government. Ledeen is married to Michael Ledeen, the co-author of Michael Flynn’s first book, The Field of Fight: How We Can Win the Global War Against Radical Islam and Its Allies (St. Martin’s / Griffin, 2017).
Flynn—the former highly controversial intel official (at the DIA) and Trump National Security Advisor, a federal indictee, and now an open insurrectionist—is very close to the Ledeens, and has been for years. Indeed, in May of 2021 Proof published the “lost chapter” of Proof of Corruption, entitled “Flynn and the Ledeens”, which detailed how Flynn turned to the Ledeens in 2016 after Trump ordered him to get Hillary Clinton’s “missing” emails, even if doing so meant conspiring with or paying Russian criminals. Barbara Ledeen’s work with Flynn on this clandestine project—which continued after it was universally known that the Kremlin was waging cyberwar on the United States and using “cut-outs” to dump data it had stolen from federal officials—underscored her willingness to skirt the line of legality in trying to help Trump win a presidential election (and Flynn’s equal willingness in this regard). Indeed, Ledeen ultimately made contact with individuals she believed to be Russian hackers on the “dark web”, and—despite America being in a cyberwar with Russia—sent materials transmitted to her by these “Russians” to Erik Prince. Ledeen has since posted on Facebook, “We owe a lot to Erik Prince.”
That the wife of a Supreme Court Justice would have any professional contact with someone like Barbara Ledeen, let alone secretly conspire with her to draft a “list” of the sort held by the the corrupt, nearly-impeached U.S. president Richard Nixon—who avoided impeachment only by resigning from office—is stunning. But in fact Ginni Thomas’s work with Ledeen appears to have gone much deeper than even this.
At a time when she was a “close friend” of Ginni Thomas, per the Times—and had worked with Thomas on at least one secretive plot (the “enemies list”) intended to aid Trump—Barbara Ledeen acted as a “messenger” in a national security–implicating plot to blackmail the nation’s sitting National Security Advisor, H.R. McMaster. The plot mirrored Kremlin intelligence operations, inasmuch as it intended to use a “honey trap” (an attractive woman tasked with seducing the plot’s intended victim) to gain info from McMaster that could be used to extort him into resigning from one of the top national security positions in the U.S. government. Though the criminal plot, as reported by the Times, was run by “a network of conservative activists…[who had] mounted a campaign during the Trump administration to discredit perceived enemies of President Trump inside the government”—precisely the project Ginni Thomas was then working on with the implicated Barbara Ledeen—Ginni Thomas’s name was never brought into reporting on the scheme. This may be for the simple reason that the scheme was never executed; McMaster resigned his job before the unnamed “network of conservative activists” could run their counterintelligence op on him, so that illegal scheme was never the subject of the sprawling federal criminal investigation that would undoubtedly have turned up everyone who was involved in it.
Anyone inclined to think Ginni Thomas was unaware of what “close friend” Barbara Ledeen was doing—as part of a broader gambit (regarding Trump’s enemies) Thomas is now confirmed to have been involved in with Ledeen—would be hard-pressed to maintain that view in light of a second “undercover operation” the Times uncovered, this one also of dubious legality and spearheaded by a Ginni Thomas associate: James O’Keefe. Per the New Yorker, this plot “targeted government employees, including F.B.I. agents, suspected of trying to thwart Trump’s agenda.” The magazine notes that Thomas had given O’Keefe an “Impact Award,” just as she had Mark Meadows.
The Times report notes that the O’Keefe operation was styled as an intelligence plot—a “sting operation” involving “secret surveillance” and “undercover operatives”—which means it mirrors the “warlike” intelligence ops run by the Groundswell group (to which O’Keefe was tied via his association with Ginni Thomas, its chairwoman). Indeed, in a seeming echo of Thomas’s own political obsessions, this second scheme targeted, the Times reports, individuals who likely were on the Thomas-Ledeen-built “enemies list,” as it betrayed the “obsession some of Mr. Trump’s allies had about a shadowy ‘deep state’ trying to blunt his agenda.” There could be no more precise recitation of O’Keefe associate Ginni Thomas’s own post-2016 political obsession.
Anyone who doubts whether it is appropriate to call these operations run by people so close to Ginni Thomas “intelligence” operations must read the New York Times article in full, as it explains (emphasis supplied) that
[c]entral to the effort, according to interviews, was Richard Seddon, a former undercover British spy who was recruited in 2016 by the security contractor Erik Prince to train Project Veritas operatives to infiltrate trade unions, Democratic congressional campaigns and other targets. He ran field operations for Project Veritas until mid-2018.
Last year, The New York Times reported that Mr. Seddon ran an expansive effort to gain access to the unions and campaigns and led a hiring effort that nearly tripled the number of the group’s operatives, according to interviews and deposition testimony. He trained operatives at the Prince family ranch in Wyoming.
So how high up did these Ledeen- and O’Keefe-involved intelligence operations go? The Times reports that “Ledeen…said she was brought on by someone ‘with access to McMaster’s calendar’”—a telling detail, given the grave national security implications of the minute-by-minute whereabouts of one of the nation’s foremost intelligence officials. The fact that Ledeen has been unwilling to name any of the others who were involved in the plot she participated in raises the real possibility that a top adviser to Trump who ran one of the foremost civilian intelligence-gathering ops in D.C., Ginni Thomas, would have been revealed as at least one of the individuals with knowledge of the operation.
Lest this seem mere inflammatory speculation, consider what the New York Times has to say on who recruited Ledeen to the McMaster operation, as well as Ledeen’s clear unwillingness to reveal that person’s name: “Who initially ordered the operation is unclear. In an interview, Ledeen said ‘someone she trusted’ contacted her to help with the plan. She said she could not remember who.” Ledeen added that her role in the events reported on by the Times was to “pass[ ] [a] message to a man she believed to be a Project Veritas operative during a meeting at the University Club in Washington” (a place it appears Ginni Thomas has frequented). What sort of meeting in D.C. was it that Ledeen both (a) refused to identify, and (b) saw then–congressional staffers meeting with far-right activists to share intelligence? It’s certainly possible that other groups besides Groundswell answered to this description in 2018, but Ledeen’s involvement in that group, her “close” friendship with its chairwoman, her unwillingness to speak about the provenance of the meeting, and the known activities of Groundswell all suggest that Ginni Thomas’s operation may well have been the original epicenter of the McMaster sting. Much more investigation would be required to confirm this, of course, but it is noteworthy that—consistent with the caution that Ledeen’s Groundswell group displayed in revealing the names of anyone who attended its meetings—Ledeen claimed to the Times (rather improbably) that not only could she not remember who had passed her intelligence about McMaster’s schedule, but that the person she gave that intelligence to had used a “fake name”, so there was no point in repeating it. Would a Project Veritas employee really have used a fake name at a private gathering with friendly congressional staffers like Ledeen? One would be hard-pressed to see why—or, for that matter, why Project Veritas’s founder would’ve been working closely with Groundswell’s longtime chairwoman in 2018 and 2019 but for some reason eschewed her intelligence-gathering operations in 2018—but these too remains unsolved mysteries that no one appears to be looking into at the moment.
We do, however, have some indications about the role Ginni Thomas may have played in the McMaster operation.
In early 2020, the perpetually arch Wonkette attributed McMaster’s ouster to Ginni Thomas and Groundswell, writing that “After Groundswell’s early success [in] getting rid of National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster….[Ginni] Thomas scored a meeting with the president in January 2019, where he ‘listen[ed] quietly as members of the group denounced transgender people and women serving in the military.’” Salon issued a similar verdict, reporting that Groundswell “led a successful effort to oust former national security adviser H.R. McMaster, who [had] replaced [Michael] Flynn.” The unstated implication to be taken from these and other similar reports, in view of reporting on the Project Veritas sting operation against McMaster, is that the operation allegedly intended by Ginni Thomas associate James O’Keefe was “Plan B” to a more conventional lobbying/disinformation action by Thomas and Groundswell.
Additional evidence in this regard comes from reporting by Axios, which dates the beginning of the formalized Ginni Thomas-Barbara Ledeen “hit list” to approximately the middle of 2018, only a matter of weeks after McMaster’s April 9, 2018 resignation (and a matter of days after the last known email regarding the McMaster plot, which the Times reports was inexplicably still a going concern in May, well after its target had left the Trump administration). Times reporting indicates that at that time Ginni Thomas associate James O’Keefe was just beginning what he publicly claimed would be a “series” of undercover operations against “deep state” figures; the list Thomas and Ledeen were then compiling certainly included prime candidates for a project of that sort, and therefore represents a temporal nexus between the two efforts. Just so, Ginni Thomas’s “Crowdsourcers” partnership with O’Keefe reportedly unfolded at some point between mid-2018 and the end of 2019, meaning that it likewise coincided with the “series” of undercover operations against Trump enemies O’Keefe promised.
So was Groundswell’s success in pushing out McMaster one of the inspirations for Ginni Thomas and Barbara Ledeen formalizing their partnership—or even expanding it into new partnerships with associated parties like Project Veritas? Describing the enemies list Groundswell’s leader began producing in 2018, Axios reports (emphasis supplied) that
[b]y the time President Trump instructed [John McEntee], his 29-year-old former body man and new head of presidential personnel to rid his government of anti-Trump officials [in February of 2020], he’d [already] gathered reams of material to support his suspicions.
While Trump’s distrust has only intensified since his [early 2020] impeachment and acquittal, he has long been on the hunt for “bad people” inside the White House and U.S. government, and fresh “pro-Trump” options. Outside advisers have been happy to oblige.
In reporting this story, I have been briefed on, or reviewed, memos and lists the president received since 2018 suggesting whom he should hire and fire. Most of these details have never been published.
A well-connected network of conservative activists with close ties to Trump and top administration officials is quietly helping develop these “Never Trump”/pro-Trump lists, and some sent memos to Trump to shape his views, per sources with direct knowledge. Members of this network include Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and Republican Senate staffer Barbara Ledeen.
The big picture: since Trump’s [February 2020] Senate acquittal, aides say the president has crossed a psychological line regarding what he calls the “Deep State.” He feels his government—from Justice to [the] State [Department] to [the] Defense [Department] to [the Department of] Homeland Security—is filled with “snakes.” He wants them fired and replaced ASAP.
This reporting strongly contradicts any notion—pushed exclusively, to this point, by anonymous White House insiders seeking to (for unknown reasons) distance Trump from Ginni Thomas—that Trump saw Thomas as a “wacko” he listened to only out of concern for her husband’s opinion of him. Rather, it suggests that, as the 2020 Trump presidential campaign churned into high gear in February 2020, both Ledeen and Ginni Thomas were deemed critical Trump advisers who could regularly liaison with the White House—in the person of McEntee or with Trump directly—to advance the then-president’s ongoing “war” on the “Deep State.”
It was this war that Trump would frame as being continued in the “protest” he helped orchestrate on January 6, 2021. As he said in his White House Ellipse speech that day, speaking of government employees around the country, “In every single swing state, local officials, state officials…made illegal and unconstitutional changes to election procedures without the mandated approvals by the state legislatures. These changes paved a way for fraud on a scale never seen before. I think we [have to] go a long way outside of our country [to find fraud on this scale].” He called what “they” were doing a matter of “national security”, adding that he’d committed himself—in an imagined second term in office—to “drain[ing] the Washington swamp…[and] clean[ing] up the corruption in our nation’s capital. We’ve done a big job on it, but you think it’s easy? It’s a dirty business. It’s a dirty business. You have a lot of bad people out there [in Washington].” Not long after Ginni Thomas posted on Facebook her support for the armed mob gathered before Trump at the Ellipse, Trump told that mob that it was an unnamed “group of people” who were then trying to “illegally take over our country.”
All of this may explain why, when major media outlets write about Groundswell even in passing, it is referred to as a “network of conservative activists…[with] close ties to Trump and his senior officials.”
The Fallout From Ginni Thomas’s “Groundswell Purge”
Ginni Thomas and Barbara Ledeen’s influence over Trump’s administration, via John McEntee and direct contact with Trump, had more far-reaching an impact than many realize. By pushing Trump to launch a comprehensive sweep of his administration—which effort the president initiated by first rehiring McEntee (who had previously been let go because he couldn’t pass a national security background check)—Thomas and Ledeen helped usher in a new era of the Trump administration, one that would have profound implications for the post-election period that began in November 2020.
As the New York Times reports, the Groundswell-backed purge led to a “freeze on all political appointments across the government” and a new Trump policy under which “cabinet secretaries [were to be told] that the White House would be choosing their deputies from now on.” This latter policy was be in evidence just nine months later, when Trump installed two young and ill-prepared—but unwaveringly loyal—political operatives, Kash Patel and Ezra Cohen-Watnick, as top deputies inside the Pentagon.
Patel thus became the chief of staff for new Secretary of Defense Chris Miller—who wasn’t permitted to choose his own top aide—with Cohen-Watnick becoming Miller’s acting undersecretary for intelligence and security. Both men were in their roles by January 6, when the Pentagon inexplicably failed to relieve the Capitol for nearly four hours, doing so only after the building had already been cleared of the insurrectionists who had intended to occupy it. It is reasonable to ask, now, whether Patel and Cohen-Watnick would have been in a position to influence the conduct of the United States military on January 6 if Ginni Thomas had not led a clandestine effort to ensure that only unflinchingly loyal Trump acolytes were serving under Trump cabinet members.
As CNN reported at the outset of McEntee’s purge, which extended through Election Day and encompassed the installation of Patel and Cohen-Watnick at the Pentagon,
Trump has told aides he wants fewer people working for him in the White House and only loyalists installed in key administration positions, several people familiar with the matter say. Trump’s allies have provided him lists—not always solicited—of people they’ve identified as disloyal and of names they say would work better toward advancing his agenda. The lists have been generated over the past three years, but some are being dusted off in the post-impeachment purge.
….
[A]fter hearing for three years from acquaintances and confidants about various people deemed disloyal, [Trump’s] efforts seem to have newfound urgency. Trump told people recently he wants to take action on removing some people who he’s been “warned about,” according to one person who’s spoken to him. Some of the conservative activists who have been working on the effort to compose the lists include Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and Senate staffer Barbara Ledeen.
(Emphasis supplied.)
Most tellingly, however—with respect to the connection between the Groundswell-pushed purge and the Patel and Cohen-Watnick appointments—is this reporting from CNN: “McEntee indicated he plans to first focus his efforts on personnel at the State Department and Defense Department.” As Proof has reported, at the very moment Patel and Cohen-Watnick were dithering at the Pentagon on January 6, a militant associated with Donald Trump’s legal team, Joe Oltmann, was in the State Department lobbying loyalist Trump political appointees to seize voting machines.
It may not be too much to say, therefore, that the insurrectionist government Trump headed on January 6—“insurrectionist” as to its leadership cadre—was one that had been orchestrated by Ginni Thomas over a years-long lobbying effort that involved multiple meetings with President Trump himself. Indeed, in a February 2020 NPR interview, Axios reporter Jonathan Swan indicated that Trump had been an active partner of Thomas’s, rather than merely a passive recipient of her work product. According to Swan, who had by then reviewed never-before-seen administration documents to compile his report, “Over the last 18 months [a period of time ranging from the first Thomas-Ledeen ‘enemies list’ to the hiring of McEntee], the president has been asking for names of people within his government who are disloyal, who are, quote-unquote, ‘Never Trump’ or anti-Trump, or, quote-unquote, ‘the bad people.’ He’s told aides that he feels that there are ‘snakes everywhere,’ quote-unquote” (emphasis supplied). Swan added that Trump was specifically targeting DOJ, the Pentagon, and the Department of Homeland Security, but “also…the White House. He has a network outside the White House, which is comprised of very well-connected conservative activists. One of them in particular is Ginni Thomas, who is the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.” Axios even explained that it was a Groundswell memorandum that had first aimed its sights at the then-head of the Presidential Personnel Office, Sean Doocey, whose eventual ouster led to his replacement with none other than John McEntee.
In other words, it now appears that Ginni Thomas didn’t just want to direct Trump’s government-wide purge from outside the government, she wanted to influence who would execute the purge from inside the government. And she was successful in these clandestine efforts.
Swan summarizes his early 2020 findings—issued well under a year before the attack on the Capitol—by observing that “Ginni Thomas has put an extraordinary amount of energy and time into a project of shaping the president’s thinking on the staffing of his government.” Dahlia Lithwick of Slate, one of the most highly respected Court-watchers in U.S. media, would go even farther the following day, writing that Ginni Thomas “is paid to staff up the Trump administration with [her] friends and cronies, even as her husband [Justice Clarence Thomas] sits on cases that involve [Trump] and the agencies she seeks to reshape.”
{Note: As Proof has reported, in addition to the now-infamous Trump plot to install Jeffrey Clark as Attorney General, Oltmann’s lobbying of Trump loyalists in the State Department, and Trump’s installation of Patel and Cohen-Watnick at the Pentagon, the Department of Homeland Security was critical to the insurrection because Trump’s legal team had tasked Christina Bobb—a former DHS employee—with lobbying her former boss to overturn the 2020 presidential election. And so it was that every Trump administration unit targeted by Ginni Thomas for purging, from DOJ to DHS, became part of the administration’s coup plot.}
Barbara Ledeen and January 6
At the time Barbara Ledeen was involved in the plot against the nation’s National Security Adviser, she was—incredibly—also a federal employee herself. Specifically, she was a staff member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which was then led by Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA). Reports indicate that though Ledeem served the Committee generally, she was deemed to be a staffer for Senator Grassley in particular.
Given that Ginni Thomas’s lobbying of President Trump focused on appointments, and that Ledeen was a regular collaborator with Thomas on secretive Groundswell projects, it is deeply concerning to learn that Ledeen was in the “judicial nominations unit” of Grassley’s office up until 2019, whereafter she continued this work (for the same Senate committee) under Trump golfing partner Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC).
{Note: Just prior to January 6, Ledeen returned to service with Grassley. More on this below.}
One reason Proof calls this coincidence concerning is because when Donald Trump rushed Amy Coney Barrett’s Supreme Court nomination to a vote virtually on the eve of the November 2020 presidential election, he did so, and openly, with an eye toward cases that might come before that Court in the near term—including post-election cases addressing an issue Trump had had with the conduct of the election since before Election Day: mail-in ballots.
None of these interrelationships and power dynamics would matter much to a probe of the January 6 insurrection were it not the case that the recent article on Chuck Grassley at Proof was continually forced to refer to anonymous persons in the Senate office of Chuck Grassley making critical decisions about how to respond to reports Grassley may have been involved in the January 6 coup plot in some way. Proof was forced into this position because only the official spokesman to Grassley, Taylor Foy, would speak to the press for attribution on this issue. Other Grassley staffers refused to speak for attribution, even as they repeatedly made claims to the media that turned out to be untrue.
So who was one of the leading staffers in Chuck Grassley’s office in September 2021, when he faced his toughest questioning yet over his actions on Insurrection Eve?
Barbara Ledeen.
Chuck Grassley and Barbara Ledeen: Two Experienced Republican Operatives with a Very Long History
The questions Grassley faced last September focused on one issue in particular: what did his staffers or others tell him about Trump’s coup scheme prior to January 6? What did he know about the plot, and from whom did he hear it, and when? But a second question—one raised by Grassley staffers’ unproven, self-aggrandizing claims that in September 2021 they had sifted through Grassley’s January 2021 correspondence and found no evidence of wrongdoing—was this one: why would reporters take Grassley’s staffers’ word on this point, when some of the people doing the searching may well have been the same operatives who initially briefed Grassley on Trump’s coup plans?
There is, of course, a necessary (and a far more specific) third question, as well: what role did Barbara Ledeen play in either briefing of Grassley prior to Insurrection Day—during which time she was a staffer for Lindsey Graham but still working for the Senate Judiciary Committee (on which Grassley was the senior Republican)—or in aiding Grassley’s ultimately self-exculpating September 2021 search of his files for potentially incriminating documents?
In answering these three questions, it’s important to first understand that the “purge” project Ginni Thomas and Barbara Ledeen were leading from outside the White House was being led inside the White House, per reporting from CNN, by top Trump adviser Peter Navarro. Navarro was also one of the authors, with Trump attorney John Eastman, of the “Green Bay Sweep” coup plot that in September 2021 Grassley’s staff—including Ledeen—assured the press Grassley knew nothing about.
With this denial, the suggestion must be, therefore, that either Peter Navarro kept from Ledeen his ambitions for January 6 despite them being the central players (with Ginni Thomas) in a massive, government-wide pro-Trump project to eliminate non-loyalists from Trump’s inner circle, or that Ledeen was briefed by Navarro or Eastman about the “Green Bay Sweep” but decided to hide that information from her boss in the United States Senate. Worth noting here, too, is that only two people (out of more than two dozen) who appear to have attended the Trump International Hotel war room on Insurrection Eve felt the need to lie about that attendance and maintain that lie over time: (1) Peter Navarro, and (2) Barbara Ledeen’s close friend, Michael Flynn. While this could be mere coincidence, it could also indicate that two insurrectionists in Ledeen’s orbit fear with great particularity any inquiry into what they were doing on the day Chuck Grassley attempted to remove Vice President Mike Pence from the January 6 equation.
{Note: In identifying these connections, Ginni Thomas’s orbit cannot be forgotten, either. Thomas appears to have been essential in pushing Mark Meadows into Trump’s inner circle, and it is Mark Meadows who, the New York Times reports, led a “band of loyalists…[who] fought to keep Trump in power….[by] taking on an outsize role in pressuring the Justice Department [over the election results], amplifying conspiracy theories and flooding the courts in an attempt to overturn the 2020 election.” Trump’s man at DOJ, Jeffrey Clark, has already asserted the Fifth Amendment to protect himself from self-incrimination, as has Eastman, who sent his coup outline to Meadows. So in considering how ignorant Ledeen would have to have been of a plot advanced by those in her orbit, we must also consider how ignorant Thomas would have to have been of a plot likewise advanced by those in her orbit.}
For his part, Grassley has vacillated on his own degree of knowledge of the coup plot.
As Proof has reported, when Grassley was pressured, in September 2021, on whether Trumpist partisans “approached” him with the Eastman-Navarro coup plot prior to his declaration that he would be in charge of the January 6 joint session—a claim made in the 2021 book Peril by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa—Grassley’s hedging could only be described as epic. “I [was not] ‘approached’ in the situation as you described it”, he replied cagily (emphasis supplied). By leaving the door open, indeed wide open, to the implication that he had been approached about the coup plot in some way other than the precise one Woodward and Costa had detailed, Grassley allowed the implication that he might have been briefed on the plot by either his own staffers (many of whom were connected to Barbara Ledeen via the Senate Judiciary Committee), Judiciary Committee staffers like Ledeen herself, or outside agitators like Thomas. Grassley’s denial of the reporting in Peril appeared to cover only an approach from Trump’s legal team (e.g., Eastman) or administration advisers (e.g., Navarro). All of which only heightens the scrutiny on those Eastman or Navarro might’ve thought to use as interlocutors with Grassley—a list of people that undoubtedly has Thomas and Ledeen at its top.
Recall, now, that in the days leading up to Grassley’s astonishing declaration that Pence would not be at the Capitol on January 6, Ginni Thomas was in contact with John Eastman—her husband’s former law clerk—via the Thomas Clerk World listserv.
In short, if, as Grassley implies, he caught wind of Trump’s coup plot before he took a public action that clearly aimed to advance it, there are no more obvious suspects in the matter of who briefed him on that plot than Barbara Ledeen and Ginni Thomas—which makes it astonishing that thus far it seems neither have been interviewed by the House January 6 Committee. That public records appear to indicate that Grassley rehired Ledeen on January 3, 2021—the day the post-election Congress was sworn in—underscores that he would have been in contact with her in the days leading up to his Insurrection Eve gambit, and also that it was during this period of time that Ledeen would have been in the position of wanting and needing to underscore to Grassley her utility to his staff. Her ready access to Trump’s inner circle, and intelligence regarding its January 6 designs, would surely have been one of her primary chits in this regard.
As indicated above, Ledeen has a very long history of being interested—much like Ginni Thomas is—in clandestine intelligence-gathering, and in the dissemination of such intelligence. That she would have wanted to pass on Eastman and Navarro’s plans to her new (or, rather, both former and “new”) boss Grassley cannot be doubted, if in fact she had access to those plans. Consider the sort of schemes we have seen from Barbara Ledeen in the past:
On the other end of Ledeen’s second stint as a Grassley staffer, it must be noted that, as the New York Times has reported, Ledeen “retired” from her position with Grassley almost immediately after Grassley’s staff was forced to answer questions about which of them, if any, had briefed the senator about Trump’s coup plot. Given that Ledeen’s first employment with Grassley lasted for seven years, the fact that her second was cut short after only a matter of months is certainly worthy of some additional investigation.
Telling, as well, is Michael Flynn’s confession to federal investigators that Ledeen acted as a “conduit” between Trump and the late Peter W. Smith in the plot to buy stolen documents from Russian hackers during the 2016 presidential campaign. This mirrors Ledeen’s claim of being a “messenger” in the scheme to blackmail Flynn’s successor, H.R. McMaster. So it is that when, two days after hiring Ledeen, Grassley seemed to quote from the Eastman Memo (see below) only to later be cagey about who had acted as a conduit or messenger to him from Eastman’s ring of coup plotters, it would be understandable if the suspicion of federal criminal investigators were to fall on a repeat interlocutor in several criminal schemes: Barbara Ledeen. This is especially so given that Ledeen’s closest political associate, Ginni Thomas, was in contact with Eastman during the period he was drafting his now-infamous memo.
There is, too, the broader context of Ledeen’s career—and her husband’s—to consider.
Much as this publication has often said of Trump lawyer Joe diGenova and his wife Victoria Toensing, Esquire reports that “there scarcely has been a Republican presidential scandal in the past 40 years that Michael Ledeen hasn’t had a hand in.” The same might be said, in the Trump era, of the Ledeens’ good friend Michael Flynn, or the originator of the Stop the Steal “movement,” longtime Trump friend and adviser Roger Stone. It is Stone who, of all the political operators in Washington, is most associated with the word ratfucking (popularly defined as “political sabotage or dirty tricks, particularly pertaining to elections”). In writing of the Ledeens, Esquire notes that “Michael Ledeen’s family has made ratf[u]cking a generational enterprise.”
Statements from Grassley spokesman Taylor Foy have only further confused the issue.
As reported by a popular Iowa politics website, which was itself working off research done by celebrated independent investigative journalist Marcy Wheeler, the origin of Grassley’s knowledge of the coup plot (below referred to as “the PowerPoint”) seems to have remained deliberately murky even through December of 2021:
Foy’s hair-splitting is telling in too many ways to count. But here are a few indications that this topic is one Chuck Grassley’s office feels a need to dissemble in addressing:
While Grassley may not have chaired the Senate Judiciary Committee from early January 2019 to early January 2021, he was on it, and Ledeen was working for its chairman (Senator Graham) as a means of serving the entire committee—so yes, Ledeen was doing work for Grassley “in the [two] years leading up to January 6.”
Prior to working for Grassley indirectly from 2019 to 2021, Ledeen worked for Grassley directly from 2012 to 2019, making Foy’s attempt to suggest that Sen. Grassley was at a distance from Ledeen disingenuous at best.
Grassley did, in fact, rehire Ledeen 72 hours before the insurrection, so Foy clarifying that Ledeen wasn’t rehired to be part of Grassley’s Judiciary Committee staff—but rather was serving him in some other capacity—goes beyond mere disingenuity, as Foy seeks here to leave the impression that Ledeen wasn’t working for Grassley at all during Insurrection Week. In fact, she was.
That Ledeen’s retirement from the Senate came under circumstances worthy of additional investigation is underscored by Foy’s use of that retirement as a sort of rhetorical “get-out-of-jail-free” card in dealing with reporters. Despite the fact that Ledeen leaving the Senate in precipitous fashion makes the incident more rather than less worthy of investigation, Foy attempts to fashion it as a means for Grassley and his team to avoid significant questions about her.
Given that Foy worked alongside Ledeen for a very long time, his efforts to put distance between himself and her border on the comical: “you’d have to ask her”; “I don’t have her contact information”; “I can’t speak to her [knowledge].” In fact, not only would Foy almost certainly have her contact information (given that she only just recently left Grassley’s office), but he should be able to tell media whether Ledeen exhibited any awareness of “the PowerPoint” during the three quarters of a year—at a minimum—that he worked alongside her in Senator Grassley’s employ.
But Foy’s most telling evasion, bordering on pure deceit, is his last one: “She didn’t work for Senator Grassley at the time.” Foy here takes advantage of the fact that Woodward and Costa’s reporting about the Eastman plot covered a several-week period of time, from mid-December 2020 through Insurrection Day. Ledeen did work for Grassley during part of that time, but not for all of it, which Foy here exploits to imply that she didn’t work for Grassley for any of it.
Conclusion
As a former federal criminal investigator, I was trained to consider the relationships between all parties to a given event, the histories of all parties to an event, and the motives that these histories and relationships may disclose. I’m trained to deem past conduct a possible precedent for future conduct; lies as illuminating as truths; and the opportunity for a malfeasor to misbehave as the obvious and necessary precursor to a finding that they did. With all this in mind, and on all of these grounds, there is simply no doubt that Ginni Thomas and Barbara Ledeen are presently the foremost (if not the only) suspects in the matter of who transmitted to key members of Congress the coup plot John Eastman and Peter Navarro had devised with Donald Trump’s knowledge.
Incredibly, the other chief suspects in this are all connected to Ginni Thomas and Barbara Ledeen by various means: Ali Alexander, a participant in Ginni Thomas’s Groundswell group; Erik Prince, the man who helped train Project Veritas (run by Thomas’s partner James O’Keefe) in intelligence-gathering; Michael Ledeen, Barbara Ledeen’s politically well-connected husband, who has been involved in scandals in every Republican administration since Nixon’s; Michael Flynn, a close friend of the Ledeens, and Michael Ledeen’s co-author; Mark Meadows, whose Trumpist career was advanced in aggressive terms by Ginni Thomas, in part (but only part) by the awarding of an laurel Thomas devised to celebrate and advertise her favored political instruments; Cleta Mitchell, another participant in Groundswell, and one who also participated directly in Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election; John Eastman and Peter Navarro themselves, the former of whom was in contact with Ginni Thomas in the weeks and months before the attack on the Capitol and the latter of whom spearheaded a “purge” effort inside the White House that was masterminded by Ginni Thomas and Barbara Ledeen outside of it; Presidential Personnel Office director and former Trump “body man” John McEntee, who assumed a position for which he was entirely unqualified because of a clandestine disinformation campaign against his predecessor Sean Doocey by—you guessed it—Ginni Thomas and Barbara Ledeen; Steve Bannon, whose media operation was hopelessly entwined with Thomas and Groundswell and who was himself a privileged guest of Thomas’s secretive group on at least one occasion; and Donald Trump, who met with Thomas on a number of occasions to discuss the very topic at issue here: locating and positioning loyalists in government who would do anything Trump demanded of them. A small number of other tangential figures, like Jeffrey Clark at DOJ, would not have been key liaisons themselves, but were nevertheless somehow located and selected via a murky process run by Trump partisans; Thomas and Ledeen had spent years plucking men like Clark from obscurity for the sake of getting them to do Trump’s bidding, and in the search for those who recruited Clark to participate in a coup plot in December 2020, Thomas and Ledeen would likewise be the prime suspects for any federal criminal investigator.
In short, as the House January 6 Committee seeks to connect three spheres of coup plotting—grassroots activists and political insiders, Congress, and the White House—there is no map of the key players within these spheres in January 2021 that does not have both Ginni Thomas and Barbara Ledeen at or near the center of it. The House January 6 Committee would be wise to subpoena these two women immediately in order to find out what they know as soon as possible. Proof is confident that if such a subpoena is issued, one or both women will take the same tack that their associates already have, either by asserting the Fifth Amendment (like Eastman and Clark), defying their subpoenas (like Meadows and Bannon), fighting document production vociferously (like Flynn and Trump), issuing statements filled with half-truths (like Foy and Navarro), or testifying under circumstances that suggest perjury (Alexander).
It is deeply regrettable that Ginni Thomas’s association with Turning Point USA as an advisory board member led to a false rumor that she directly aided that organization’s leader, Charlie Kirk, in organizing buses to transport Trump voters to Washington on January 6. While Thomas’s indirect involvement at both ends of Kirk’s operation—on the front end she advised it, and on the back end the Turning Point buses were aimed at aiding the efforts of Alexander, a previous participant in her Groundswell group—the fact that Ginni Thomas was not working the phones ordering up buses (a task well below her pay-grade) obscured the fact that she appears to have been involved in January 6 in more complex and troubling ways. It is little wonder that after cheering on the events of January 6 on the morning of Insurrection Day, she thereafter did the bare minimum to justify her conduct, adding a non-apologetic note to her Facebook page before making it invisible to the public, and then sending a private apology to a private listserv regarding private missives none of us have ever seen. There remains no sense that Thomas regrets her role in January 6 or is even willing to speak about it.
All of the foregoing puts in an entirely new light Ginni Thomas’s husband—who, we are assured from those who know them both, she directly lobbies on matters before the Supreme Court—being the only member of the Supreme Court to rule that Donald Trump should be able to keep secret documents related to his contacts with advisers in the run-up to January 6. That Ginni Thomas appears to have been one of Trump’s key advisers in 2019 and 2020, and that during this period she was working hand-in-glove with one of the most notorious election-year “ratfuckers” in the Republican Party, raises the question of whether Clarence Thomas had reason to apprehend (either under his own steam or at his wife’s urging) that Ginni Thomas or her closest associates might well be implicated in January 6 plotting if all of Trump’s presidential records are disclosed to Congress. Unless we assume that Ginni Thomas hid from her husband the nature of her contacts with Trump and her work on Trump’s behalf—which would be impossible, given that Clarence Thomas was present at intimate gatherings with his wife and the former president; it is also not, according to friends of the Thomases, how their marriage has been structured for many decades now—Justice Thomas was aware of his wife’s proximity to coup plotters like John Eastman when the issue of Trump’s records being released to Congress came before the Court.
While the Supreme Court ruling releasing Trump’s records to Congress was an 8-1 decision—meaning that Thomas’s dissent was ultimately immaterial as a practical matter—in the months and years to come other issues touching upon Donald Trump’s ongoing insurrection will come before the Court. One or indeed many more than one may end up as 5-4 decisions favoring the protection of Trump’s borderline seditious conduct. These majority rulings will depend upon the vote of a man who is surely well aware of what his wife did or did not know about the January 6 coup plot in advance.
If House members do not determine what Ginni Thomas knew between now and the presumed Republican takeover of Congress in January 2023, it will be impossible for the case to be made that Clarence Thomas cannot sit on any Supreme Court case that involves Trump or the January 6 insurrection now or in the future. That is how urgent the immediate issuance of federal subpoenas to Barbara Ledeen and Ginni Thomas is.
Holy shit. That was a very impressive pooling of information. I'm blown away every time you put out a piece like this. If the Jan 6th committee isn't using your reporting as a basis for their investigative course, they are failing America. Indictments can not come fast enough. As I always note, history will credit people like yourself for literally helping to save our democracy if it is indeed saved. So yeah, no pressure.... You deserve far more then the hate you get from the right as you expose them and the few bucks a month we all chip in.
I just upgraded my subscription, it's the least I can do.
I’m amazed at how blatantly and obviously connected every one of these “ratf***ers” are. I try to explain the orchestration (to anyone that will listen) and they look at me like I’m crazy…like I’m a loon conspiracy theorist from the other side…and that’s exactly why the MSM doesn’t report on it…it’s so complicated and unbelievable, and the analytical skills of your average American is zero. Worse yet is the apathy I’ve encountered.
I do believe that the J6 committee is reading every word of your work. They would be remiss if they didn’t. Not since Watergate have we seen “freedom of the press” more important in American politics than we do today. And your work, Seth, has been instrumental in what is being uncovered. Thank you.