NEW: Two Men Very Close to Ginni Thomas—One of Them One Step Removed From Trump’s Coup Plot—Come Under New Scrutiny

New evidence strongly suggests that it’s more imperative than ever that the House January 6 Committee get sworn testimony from the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas—and do so quickly.

ABOVE: Ken Klukowski.

Introduction

In early September of 2020, during the same several-week period that Ginni Thomas friend and Donald Trump lawyer Cleta Mitchell was successfully recruiting Ginni Thomas friend and former Clarence Thomas law clerk John Eastman to also become a Trump lawyer, Eastman was the head of the far-right Claremont Institute Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence.

Around this time—September 9—a member of Trump’s National Security Council, Michael Anton, authored a truly stunning article entitled “The Coming Coup?” The document is profoundly unsettling in retrospect, given Anton’s high position within Trumpworld’s intelligence apparatus.

In “The Coming Coup?”, Anton imagined the following scenario:

• Violence around the time of the 2020 election propagated by left-wing groups;

• requiring the invocation of the Insurrection Act by then-President Trump;

• in response to which United States Armed Forces would refuse to impose martial law at Trump’s direction;

• in response to which refusal Trump would (quite reasonably, in Anton’s view) refuse to leave the White House or surrender his office; and

• which sequence of events would comprise a coup of the Trump administration by (somehow) Joe Biden, thus marking Biden an enemy of the state and more or less giving Donald Trump and Trumpist partisans (including armed far-right paramilitaries like the Oath Keepers that had been training for the day Trump invoked the Insurrection Act) the right to do whatever they wanted to restore the Republic—in Anton’s hypothetical, synonymous with a second Trump term—including engage in “street fight[s].”

Note that this very same sequence of events could equally be triggered if Trump and his political team were to stage a televised act of violence and chaos and then blame it on left-wing agitators in a premeditated way—which, in the event, is exactly what Trump used the Rudy Giuliani-Steve Bannon-John Eastman “war room” at the Willard Hotel in Washington to do during Insurrection Week. Despite no evidence whatsoever that either Black Lives Matter activists or participants in the loose antifa movement had been present at the United States Capitol on that dark day, Trumpist partisans insisted that they had been—and immediately after the Capitol was cleared began pushing Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act on these (fraudulent) grounds.

ABOVE: Michael Anton.

But in his September 9, 2020 essay published by Trump lawyer John Eastman’s right-wing Institute, Anton allowed that perhaps the USAF would not get involved in the 2020 presidential election—or even, alternatively, refuse to do so in a way Anton and Trump would, counter-intuitively, deem a military coup—but that Joe Biden might nevertheless stage a “coup” against Trump in another way: through slates of fake presidential electors sent to Washington, D.C. on January 6, 2021.

Anton noted that such a ploy would only work if Biden refused to concede the 2020 election regardless of whether he had won or lost it, which Anton sagely assured his readers Biden would definitely do—despite the fact that Democrat Al Gore conceded in 2000 and Democrat Hillary Clinton conceded in 2016 and by September of 2020 it was Trump’s longtime friend, attorney, confidant, and fixer Michael Cohen who had told Congress and all America under oath that he knew for a fact that Donald Trump was not going to concede the 2020 presidential election no matter what happened in it.

ABOVE: Michael Cohen.

Just days ago, a Mother Jones investigative report confirmed Cohen’s revelation with secretly recorded pre-election audio of Bannon—of Trump’s Insurrection Week Willard Hotel war room, which he shared with the Claremont Institute’s Eastman—confirming that in fact it was Trump who’d all along planned to execute the plot Anton wrote of for Eastman’s Claremont Institute back in September, just after Eastman came aboard Trump’s legal team at Ginni Thomas friend Cleta Mitchell’s invitation.

So Michael Cohen was right. And if you’re of the camp that believes—on significant evidence—that every accusation by Trumpworld is in fact a confession, you can see in the coup plot outlined above by Trump adviser Anton precisely the sequence of events that would quite nearly be carried out by Bannon, Giulian, Eastman, Sidney Powell, Michael Lindell, Patrick Byrne, and Michael Flynn. Within 90 days of Anton’s essay, Eastman would be working on making the seditious vision of Trump’s intel guru (which the Claremont Institute had eagerly published) a reality—though for Donald Trump, of course, rather than Joe Biden. Indeed, once Ginni Thomas friend Eastman joined Trump presidential adviser Ginni Thomas and the aforementioned Ginni Thomas friend and presidential adviser Cleta Mitchell as a Trump adviser, he appears to mostly have focused on executing Anton’s hypothetical.

In fact, Anton’s bizarro-world Biden coup plot perfectly matched even the legal strategy Trump would start employing (with Eastman’s and Mitchell’s help) just weeks later:

1. Anton complained about criminal Democratic schemes to “harvest[ ] ballots” (false claims about the Democratic Party that Eastman would soon parrot);

2. Anton said Biden would “dispute the results in close states and insist, no matter what the tally says, that Biden won them” (which is exactly what happened—as Bannon has now confirmed was always the plan—except replace “Biden” in the above sentence with “Trump”);

3. Anton said Biden would identify certain battleground states that were “so ambiguous [in their election results] and hotly contested that no one [could] rightly say who won”, presumably requiring some sort of closely supervised re-vote (which is exactly what the aforementioned Powell, Byrne, and Flynn would convince Trump to do in a meeting in the Oval Office and the Presidential Residence on December 18, 2020 during which Trump named Powell a White House special counsel for this apparent purpose and others); and

4. Anton said “mail-in ballots” would be used to create the appearance of a Biden win in an election he actually lost—precisely the claim Anton advisee Donald Trump would publicly make every single day, more or less, between Election Day and Insurrection Day.

So well you might ask, here: just because Ginni Thomas and John Eastman are good friends, were in regular email contact in the fall of 2020, are members of the same secretive far-right action groups, attend the same far-right events, participate in the same private listserv, and have known each other for decades, does that necessarily mean that Ginni Thomas was aware of everything published by Eastman’s Claremont Institute? For that matter, just because Anton was one of Trump’s closest advisers during his presidency, does that mean that his words were necessarily closely attended to by Trump and his team after Anton’s departure from the Trump administration?

Those are good questions. So let’s start answering them by looking at Ginni Thomas.

1. Ginni Thomas

ABOVE: Ginni Thomas.

As Proof has reported, by mid-November 2020—immediately after the 2020 election—Ginni Thomas had already devised a several point plan for countering precisely the scenario Anton (published by Eastman’s Institute) had envisioned two months earlier, which plan was to be executed by (mirabile dictu!) an advocacy group, Groundswell, that Ginni Thomas ran and Eastman was a part of. {Note: The full plan, as summarized by Proof based on statements and writings by Ginni Thomas, appears in Section 4 of this article.}

Has Ginni Thomas selected Claremont Institute president Brian Kennedy for one of her famous-in-conservative-circles one-on-one interviews? You bet. Has that interview now been deleted from the internet? Absolutely it has—as have most Ginni Thomas interviews with far-right figures at a time she claims to have nothing to hide.

ABOVE: Brian T. Kennedy.

Does Ginni Thomas’s husband, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, have ties to the Claremont Institute also? You bet. Vice reports that “Thomas has ties with the Claremont Institute, where [former Thomas clerk John] Eastman works: The Justice has spoken there in the past and he regularly quotes the institute’s founder. That network of clerks [Thomas’s] is known to generally have remained close, even by the cozy standards of the Supreme Court.”

Jane Mayer of The New Yorker goes still farther (emphasis supplied):

John Eastman and both Clarence and Ginni Thomas are old friends. And they all have connections to the Claremont Institute, which is sort of a right-wing think tank where John Eastman has been connected to it for years. And Clarence Thomas first spoke at it in 1999. They are in the same social circle and share many sort of very kind of extreme right legal theories.

But what about the second question posed at the end of the Introduction, above? Does the fact that a leading counterintelligence adviser to the Trumps (Michael Anton) was publishing coup fan-fiction in a venue associated with one of Trump’s leading lawyers—a lawyer (Eastman) who joined Trump’s legal team just as he came to be associated with the aforementioned leading Trump counterintelligence aide publishing strange coup fantasies—mean the Trumps kept paying attention to what was being published in the Claremont Institute’s The American Mind not just in September 2020 but even in (could it be? is it possible?) October of 2020? This is the key question that launches this Proof investigation.

2. John Yoo

ABOVE: John Yoo.

Just two weeks prior to the 2020 presidential election, in October 2020, a former law clerk of Justice Clarence Thomas took to the website of the same institute we have been speaking of, and at which then-Trump lawyer and fellow former Thomas clerk John Eastman was a senior fellow at the time—The American Mind and the Claremont Institute, respectively—to make precisely the anti-democratic argument about the powers of an American vice president that Eastman himself would be making a few weeks later as part of what federal judge David Carter recently ruled was more than likely a criminal conspiracy involving Eastman and—at a minimum—Donald Trump.

According to Business Insider, the former Thomas clerk Yoo had spent much of 2020 working with the Trump White House on one of Trump’s top priorities: immigration. Yoo’s work also would have appealed to Trump personally for a more venal reason: as Business Insider notes, “He also wrote a book about Trump that came out in July 2020 titled Defender in Chief: Donald Trump’s Fight for Presidential Power.” So not only had Yoo gotten Trump’s attention by writing a book about him, but had done so on yet another top priority for the then-president: asserting his power over the government.

{Note: At least three of John Yoo’s fellow former Clarence Thomas law clerks—besides John Eastman, also William Consovoy and Patrick Strawbridge—are lawyers for Donald Trump.}

Former Clarence Thomas clerks are known to be a close-knit, far-right bunch. As has been widely reported (including at Proof) they congregate online at Thomas Clerk World, a private listserv which roiled with pro-insurrection language following the 2020 election—some of it authored by Clarence Thomas’ wife, Ginni Thomas. Both John Yoo, the former Thomas clerk referenced in the paragraph above, and Eastman, the Trump co-conspirator, would have had access to Thomas Clerk World not only in November and December 2020 but in late October 2020, too, when Yoo published the shocking words below while part of a listserv obsessed with post-election scenarios that included in its rapt audience the aforementioned Thomas (Ginni) and Eastman:

Under the 12th Amendment, “the President of the Senate [i.e., the Vice President] shall, in the Presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the certificates [of the electoral votes of the states] and the votes shall then be counted.” Left unclear is who is to “count” the electors’ votes and how their validity is to be determined.

While the far-right-fringe rhetoric above—which posits a through-the-looking-glass view of the 12th Amendment that is presently only held by seditionists—was written by Yoo for The Claremont Institute, it certainly would have been music to the ears of future seditionist, Claremont Institute senior fellow, Yoo acquaintance, Ginni Thomas friend, and fellow former Clarence Thomas law clerk John Eastman. Notably, Eastman did not only clerk for Thomas, but an almost equally revered far-right conservative jurist, J. Michael Luttig, who has now testified under oath before the United States Congress that there is no possible way for anyone in the United States, whether Yoo or Ginni Thomas or Clarence Thomas or John Eastman or Donald Trump, to read the 12th Amendment as being “unambiguous” on how electors are counted post-election.

ABOVE (top to bottom): J. Michael Luttig, John Eastman, and Clarence Thomas.

But not only did a longtime Ginni Thomas friend who’d clerked for her husband take precisely this radical view, he took it much further—doing so at a time it is hard to imagine he did not know John Eastman was among his audience members whether through the Claremont Institute or Thomas Clerk World. Specifically, Yoo said the following (emphasis supplied)

We suggest that the Vice President’s role is not the merely ministerial one of opening the ballots and then handing them over (to whom?) to be counted. Though the 12th Amendment describes the counting in the passive voice, the language seems to envisage a single, continuous process in which the Vice President both opens and counts the votes.

The check on error or fraud in the count is that the Vice President’s activities are to be done publicly, “in the presence” of Congress. And if “counting” the electors’ votes is the Vice President’s responsibility, then the inextricably intertwined responsibility for judging the validity of those votes must also be his.

It isn’t possible for Proof to sufficiently emphasize here how radical these words are.

They would, if put in practice, end American democracy immediately and permanently.

So Proof will have to settle, for now, for calling the above words “small-s” (i.e., non-statutorily) “seditious”, and say that anyone who adopted them following the 2020 presidential election and took any action to advance their execution via then-Vice President Mike Pence was doing so as a (small-t) “traitor” to the United States and American democracy. As even the arch-conservative Judge Luttig confirms, there is no good-faith legal reading of the 12th Amendment that could lead to the reading of it Yoo offers above; such a reading—adopted only when it was feared (as Yoo makes clear in his article) Trump would lose the Electoral College, and never made when a Democratic vice president was in office—could only be intended to provide legal cover for the moral abomination of a seditious plot with Pence as its spearhead.

{Note: This calls to mind the way John Yoo infamously provided legal cover for the moral abomination of torture when he worked for George W. Bush’s Department of Justice. That Yoo is a man without character is generally accepted by mainstream news-watchers, with the exception of cable news channel CNN—which regularly uses him as an on-air legal analyst.}

As Proof has already reported (see here, here, and here), Ginni Thomas—who is a far-right activist rather than a practicing lawyer—was publicly expressing identical, off-the-grid fringe-right views to those of her friend John Yoo at the same time Yoo was publishing them. With this in mind, Proof went looking for more information about past contacts between Ginni Thomas and John Yoo; as Thomas is a prolific public interviewer of far-right figures she admires and is friends with—not only did she do a lengthy televised interview with Trump co-conspirator Mark Meadows, but even gave him an award thereafter, and spent much of the run-up to the coup texting him—and sure enough I quickly found one of the longest interviews John Yoo has ever given, which saw him speaking with Ginni Thomas on television for over half an hour.

You’d be able to watch that interview if it had not mysteriously been made private.

3. Donald Trump Jr.

ABOVE: Donald Trump Jr.

Seventeen days after Yoo published his Claremont Institute article—which spread like wildfire among the far-right fringes of the internet—Donald Trump Jr., the son of the sitting president, wrote Ginni Thomas friend Mark Meadows (at a time Ginni Thomas was texting him also) in the shadow of his dad’s quickly-becoming-apparent landslide defeat at the hands of Democrat Joe Biden.

Remarkably, Trump Jr. seemed entirely unconcerned that his father was about to lose the presidency and his immunity from criminal prosecution. Indeed, Trump Jr. had apparently read something online that made him downright giddy about his infamous pater’s chances of remaining in office. Specifically, he said the following to Meadows:

It’s very simple….We have multiple paths [to staying in power]. [And] we control them all.

What was Trump Jr. referring to? Other messages of his to Meadows during the same conversation clarify. Immediately preceding the text above he had sent the following:

This [NB: an unknown embedded link was inserted here] is what we need to do [to stay in power]. Please read it and please get it to everyone that needs to see it because I’m not sure we’re doing it. We have operational control[.] Total leverage. Moral High Ground[.] POTUS [Donald Trump] must start [his] second term now.

Had Trump Jr. himself been the author of the “operational control” and the “total leverage” plan he sent to the White House chief of staff? No—of course not. Trump Jr.’s lawyer Alan Futerfas says this of the Trump Jr. texts to Meadows:

After the election, Don received numerous messages from supporters and others. Given the date [November 5, 2020], this message [NB: the embedded link referenced above] likely originated from someone else and was forwarded.

So what did the link in question entail? CNN reports as follows (emphasis supplied):

The November 5 text message [from Donald Trump Jr. to Meadows] outlines a strategy that is nearly identical to what allies of the former President [Trump] attempted to carry out in the months that followed. Trump Jr. makes specific reference to filing lawsuits and advocating recounts to prevent certain swing states from certifying their results, as well as having a handful of Republican state houses put forward slates of fake “Trump electors.”

While we do not yet know if the specific link Donald Trump Jr. referred to was Yoo’s article, whatever the link was, it echoed perfectly Yoo’s argument from 17 days earlier:

State legislators and governors might come under mounting pressure to designate electors on their own if the popular vote remains incomplete [after Election Day in 2020], especially if there are allegations of fraud or abuse. Article II of the Constitution provides that “each state shall appoint, in such manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a number of electors, equal to the whole number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress.” The time when state legislatures directly appointed electors themselves are long gone: since the 19th century, states have delegated that power to their voters. But as the Supreme Court noted in Bush v. Gore, a state “can take back the power to appoint electors.”

The constitutional question is not whether but how a state legislature could reclaim the appointment of electors. States have provided by statute for the selection of their electors by their voters; therefore one might argue they may only resume that power with a second, superseding statute. On the other hand, the Constitution specifically designates state legislatures, rather than the executives or a combination of the two, to choose the electors.  A state legislature might argue that a past legislature-and-governor cannot constrain its discretion to choose electors today.

Yoo’s vision, above, could only have been effectuated via the sort of “lawsuits” and “fake elector” schemes the link in the Trump Jr.-Meadows text message apparently detailed.

Were Yoo’s argument a mainstream argument being widely made by conservatives in the days before Trump’s text, we might think that there would be little chance that Yoo (again, friends with Trump adviser Ginni Thomas and publishing in the media outlet run by Trump lawyer John Eastman’s institute) was one of the originators of Trump Jr.’s third-party plan for “operational control” of, and “total leverage” over, American democracy—which plan evolved into, per the ruling of Judge Carter, the more-likely-than not federal criminal “conspiracy” of which Trump is now accused.

And yet.

4. Ginni Thomas

On February 23, 2022, Proof published a comparison between Ginni Thomas’s public statements and writings on the 2020 election and what would become known as the “Green Bay Sweep” coup plot attributed to Ginni Thomas friend John Eastman and a top adviser to Ginni Thomas advisee Donald Trump, the now-indicted Peter Navarro.

The summary reads as follows:

If you compare former Clarence Thomas clerk Yoo’s essay; former Clarence Thomas clerk Eastman’s legal strategy; Clarence Thomas’ wife Ginni Thomas’s Groundswell action plan; and the “Green Bay Sweep” coup plot authored by Steve Bannon (who co-founded Groundswell with Ginni Thomas) and Ginni Thomas’ fellow Trump adviser Peter Navarro, all four are the same. There is no daylight to be found between them.

ABOVE: Peter Navarro.

But it would be wrong to say that this monolithic coup strategy, which first appeared—under the cover of it being a Democratic plan—from Trump’s counterintelligence adviser Michael Anton, was only focused on battleground-state, GOP-led legislatures and the fake electors that such Republican legislatures might try to appoint under the benighted Independent State Legislature (ISL) doctrine. Those legislative bodies were going to need help from both Clarence Thomas’ judicial branch and Trump’s executive branch. Specifically, battleground-state, GOP-led state legislatures needed and wanted cover from Trump’s Department of Justice in their effort to advance Ginni Thomas’ (and his compatriots’) coup plot. They needed the DOJ to issue some sort of formal notice declaring that the 2020 presidential election had been rife with fraud.

They needed, it turned out, a Trump legal team plant named Ken Klukowski—a long-time associate of Ginni Thomas friend/former Clarence Thomas clerk John Eastman.

We’ll return to Mr. Klukowski in a moment.

5. Mark Paoletta

ABOVE: Ginni Thomas’ lawyer Mark Paoletta (l) with her husband (r).

Not long after Proof and other media outlets began writing major investigative reports about Ginni Thomas, Proof was contacted by the House January 6 Committee.

While Proof cannot and will not detail the nature of its correspondence with the Committee—which, to be clear, was concurrent to the Committee reaching out to many American journalists researching and writing on the January 6 Capitol attack—it is public knowledge that in May of 2022 the Committee announced that it wished to interview Ginni Thomas.

Thomas replied, in the digital pages of Tucker Carlson’s fake-news blog The Daily Caller—which Thomas had been working for at the time she interviewed (in a now-deleted article) Brian Kennedy, the president of the Claremont Institute—that she “couldn’t wait” to testify under oath before Congress about her months and months of backchannel communications with Trump co-conspirator John Eastman, who by then had pleaded the Fifth Amendment over 100 times under congressional questioning.

Proof immediately observed that there was no chance Ginni Thomas had any actual interest in testifying before Congress as she had claimed on Carlson’s blog.

Proof was right.

Within days of Ginni Thomas’ somewhat preposterous giddiness at the prospect of detailing for Congress how she secretly lobbied 29 Arizona lawmakers to ignore the will of Arizona voters and how she secretly and directly lobbied the White House to overthrow the democratically elected Biden administration, Thomas was no longer the public voice of her legal interests: that is—in short—the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas lawyered up.

Which, in itself, is of course fine and warranted. Anyone involved in a potential legal proceeding should have legal counsel.

And yet.

The problem suddenly present was the matter of who Ginni Thomas had hired as her lawyer—and the ties that man had to another crucial January 6 Trump co-conspirator.

6. Ken Klukowski

It goes without saying that no public conduct from Ginni Thomas would have been required for her to prepare the Supreme Court to rule on the ISL-informed coup plot she and other Trump advisers had devised. Even were she not keeping her husband apprised of her activities—in a marriage of which those who know it best say, across scores of puff pieces and investigative reports regarding the long-time married couple, everything is shared—Clarence Thomas had as part of his social circle and his regular reading habits all the same “news” sources as his wife, including (for instance) the Claremont Institute of which he had been a particular friend for many, many years.

But if Ginni Thomas knew the judicial branch was covered, the same couldn’t be said of the executive branch. Certainly, her advisee President Trump had his “bully pulpit,” but the entities most needed to stage an “auto-coup” without the (presumptively unavailable) aid of the United States Armed Forces—the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security (the latter of which, as Proof has reported, was the particular lobbying focus of ex-DHS employee and Trump lawyer Christina Bobb and Colorado militant Joe Oltmann as they frequented Trump’s Insurrection Week war room at the Willard Hotel)—were not being accommodating. Bobb and Oltmann had unsuccessfully been lobbying DHS to seize supposedly fraudulent ballots, while Team Kraken (including Flynn, Powell, Byrne, Navarro, Lindell, top Navarro aide Garrett Ziegler, Russell Ramsland Jr., and others) had had only mixed success in getting DHS to seize voting machines, inasmuch as Trump had appointed Powell a White House special counsel for this purpose on December 18, 2020, but her work was being blocked by White House Counsel Pat Cipollone and Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows.

ABOVE (top to bottom): Christina Bobb, Joe Oltmann, and Patrick Byrne.

{Note: Proof has detailed Team Kraken member Patrick Byrne’s visit to the Willard Hotel war room during Insurrection Week, during which visit Byrne confessed to his involvement in the coup plot in front of Joe Oltmann. The House January 6 Committee just interviewed Byrne for around eight hours.}

Meanwhile, the component of Ginni Thomas’ strategy that involved DOJ was going much better, hitting a high-water mark with the appointment of insurrectionist Jeffrey Clark as acting Attorney General of the United States on January 3, 2021.

Jeffrey Clark has since pleaded the Fifth Amendment over 100 times before Congress.

At the time the House January 6 Committee was ramping up its public call for Ginni Thomas to appear before it voluntarily, it was readying itself for a televised hearing in which it would announce that a man closely linked to Ginni Thomas’ far-right circle, former Jeffrey Clark deputy legal counsel Ken Klukowski, was at the center of one of the most important and illicit components of Donald Trump’s criminal conspiracy: the plot to stage an internal coup at the Department of Justice just days before what Trump and his team (we now know) anticipated would be an armed, violent attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Specifically, as a bipartisan House select committee issued its first call for Ginni Thomas to testify under oath before it, Klukowski was then about to—and now does—stand accused by the said committee of trying to engineer, in December 2020 and early January 2021, fake slates of Trump electors by giving Vice President Mike Pence legal cover to put the matter of elector selection in the key 2020 battleground states into the hands of very state GOP legislators Donald Trump had outlined this exact plan to on January 2, 2021 via conference call (reported on by Proof here and here).

If Klukowski’s plot—which would have involved not only fake electors but lawsuits brought by state legislators in an effort to get them before Clarence Thomas and the Supreme Court—sounds familiar, it’s because it dovetails precisely with what former Clarence Thomas law clerk John Yoo had written in late October of 2020 and what former Clarence Thomas law clerk John Eastman would thereafter adopt as his legal advice to Donald Trump and what Clarence Thomas spouse Ginni Thomas would in late 2020 begin secretly advocating in emails to battleground-state GOP lawmakers.

7. Mark Paoletta

So when Ginni Thomas, a famous talker, suddenly stopped talking after insisting that she “couldn’t wait” to talk to Congress, many were curious to hear what her new legal counsel, Mark Paoletta, would say about it.

And it was worth the wait, as what Paoletta had to say was so consistently and even shockingly counter to the record of Ginni Thomas’ activities that it immediately raised the question (in the mind of this longtime trial attorney) of whether Ginni had secured for herself competent legal counsel. Here is some of what Paoletta had to say:

Based on my understanding of the facts the committee has in its possession, I do not believe there is currently a sufficient basis to speak with Mrs. Thomas.

Soon enough, Paoletta became even clearer: Ginni Thomas wasn’t going to speak to anyone, and felt that she had absolutely no reason whatsoever to do so at any time.

This, despite the fact that her personal friend—also a friend and former employee of her husband—John Eastman had just been held by a federal court to be “more likely than not” involved in a criminal conspiracy with the sitting President of the United States, and despite the fact that Ginni Thomas had been in touch with Eastman on the very subject of Eastman’s criminal conspiracy over and over again, even to the point of her personally editing documents related to the conspiracy.

This, despite the fact that during the period of this alleged conspiracy Ginni Thomas had been in touch with Eastman via email, via Thomas Clerk World, and even via her FrontLiners activism group—which Eastman addressed twice on “election” issues at her invitation during the period Eastman was criminally conspiring with her advisee Donald Trump.

Most startlingly, Ginni Thomas’ lobbying efforts during this period sought to aid and assist Eastman’s conspiracy and—worst of all—she was, as we’ve already seen, on record outlining and endorsing Eastman’s plot even before Eastman was, putting in question whether in fact she was the progenitor of the plot rather than him. Certainly, Ginni Thomas is more powerful, better connected, and more established in America’s corridors of power than Eastman ever has been or could be, as indeed her husband is among the nine most powerful people in Eastman’s profession. Beyond this, Thomas was an eyewitness to events and conversations at the White House Ellipse on January 6 because she was there, was an eyewitness to certain conversations inside the Trump White House about the law because she was for years a presidential adviser to Trump, and was of course an eyewitness to the possibly hundreds or even thousands of times she privately spoke to her husband Clarence about litigation then pending before the Supreme Court that she was involved with—including John Eastman’s planned post-election direct appeal to the Supreme Court upon which Clarence Thomas serves.

It was in this context that Paoletta told the nation that he could not find a single reason Congress would want to talk to Ginni Thomas as it investigated Eastman and Trump’s coup plot.

But Paoletta, who according to a report in the New York Times “is close with the Thomases and has written a book about Justice Thomas”, wasn’t done by a long shot.

He now claims, per the Times, that a single derogatory statement one of the members of the House January 6 Committee made about Clarence Thomas eight years ago means that the Committee—formed following a coordinated, military-style assault on the seat of our government—is actually asking to speak to Thomas just to harass her.

Despite contact between Ginni Thomas and John Eastman at two FrontLiners events that Ginni Thomas coordinated, and possibly more contacts (only Thomas or Eastman could say, and the latter pleaded the Fifth Amendment over a hundred times, instead) via Thomas Clerk World, Paoletta falsely contends that between the 2020 presidential election and January 6 the only contact of note between Thomas and Eastman cannot be deemed consequential because it came on “November 6 [2020]”, a “month before Mr. Eastman filed anything on President Trump’s behalf.” Of course, as Proof and many other media outlets have reported, by November 6, 2020, Eastman had been on Trump’s legal team for three months, having been brought aboard the team by Ginni Thomas’ best friend Cleta Mitchell—perhaps even (and this is something Congress would surely want to talk to her about) partially at Thomas’ orchestration, as surely it gave Thomas even better insight into Trump’s legal maneuvers once she had two good friends on that particular congregation of far-right lawyers rather than just one. And indeed, we know Thomas wanted such access because not only did she ask Eastman to speak to her FrontLiners group twice, but almost immediately after the 2020 election she secured a lecture to another of her activist groups, CNP Action, but Cleta Mitchell.

But Paoletta still wasn’t done mischaracterizing the record in the January 6 probe.

He next opined to Congress that when Ginni Thomas emailed Thomas family friend Eastman on November 6, she “merely forwarded a document with a few comments to Mr. Eastman….Someone else drafted the document, which discussed ways to address the election fraud concerns held by millions of Americans” (emphasis supplied).

This is so willfully obtuse as to strain the Rules of Professional Conduct. So, in order:

1. By forwarding the document to Eastman, Ginni Thomas became part of his litigation effort (or at least intended to do so). She was curating and pre-editing the documents she wanted to see used by the then-president’s legal team, and providing analysis of why it should use those documents. And she did this while involved in one of the most famously tight-knit marriages in American politics with one of the nine leading lawyers in America. So it is impossible to say what work the word “merely” is doing in Paoletta’s letter to Congress.

2. If Proof had to guess at why Paoletta appended an adverb to the euphemistic verb “forward”, it would be to grammatically place additional weight on that verb and remove it from, say, the considerably more substantively critical words that follow that verb: “with a few comments.” With those words, Paoletta admitted that the typical purpose of “forwarding” an email was, in this instance, frustrated; generally, when one “merely forwards” content digitally it means one does so without editing or commentary. In this case, Ginni Thomas offered both.

3. By prophylactically insisting that “someone else drafted the document”, Paoletta appears to concede that the document is problematic—so problematic that Ginni Thomas needs to have her legal counsel disavow her authorship of it in a public letter to Congress. The problem with this is that Ginni Thomas was an author of the document, just not the sole author. By definition, and I say this as someone who has not only practiced law but taught Composition at the university level, when multiple people participate in the drafting of a document they become its co-authors. Certainly, one co-author may have done more work than another, and one co-author will generally be (unless Google Docs is being used in real time) the co-author who created the first draft of a document that other co-authors then assisted in editing and shaping and augmenting into new drafts, if Paoletta is here trying to say that the document in question had only one author—even though Ginni Thomas offered “comments” on the document she intended to imminently change its form and content—he’s etymologically wrong. Ginni Thomas could have chosen to “merely forward” a document she had nothing to do with, but she could not help herself; so great was her desire to end American democracy that she inserted herself, by choice, in the chain of co-authorship. One of the consequences of such arrogance is that when the document at issue ends up as evidence in a seditious conspiracy investigation, everyone who chose to help co-author it will be questioned by investigators.

4. In no way was the effort Ginni Thomas and John Eastman both participated in—only the latter (so far) apparently criminally, according to a federal court—focused on “discuss[ing] ways to address the election fraud concerns held by millions of Americans.” First, the effort in question, as Ginni Thomas well knew, began before the election (inasmuch as the Trump campaign made it part of its election-year strategy to stoke fears of election fraud); second, none of the conduct then known to Ginni Thomas constituted “election fraud”, but rather changes in state election procedures that Thomas thought would politically disadvantage her favored candidate; this is not a crime, but merely how politics works in America, for better or worse. Third, at no time was Eastman working on “addressing” the concerns he and his co-conspirators had stoked among Trump voters, as the only way to address such concerns would be to investigate them—which Eastman and his team never did to the point that even a single U.S. court recognized them to have any (repeat: any) evidence of fraud. So in fact Paoletta is being euphemistic again, using words to describe a coup plot that in no way can be used to describe it. So why do so, if his client had nothing to do with any such plot and therefore no motive to whitewash it?

5. At the time Paoletta sent this letter denying a request from Congress to speak to his client, the nature of Eastman’s pre-insurrection work—which Ginni Thomas actively sought to aid—had just been revealed to America, and it not only had nothing to do with “addressing” concerns of “election fraud” but was, itself, inarguably, election fraud. As former Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen and former Deputy Acting Attorney General Richard Donoghue testified before Congress, the purpose of the Eastman-Kenneth Klukowski “Georgia letter” was to contradict weeks of intensive Department of Justice investigation into election fraud in Georgia by publishing falsely claims that contradicted the investigation’s findings. For Paoletta to take Eastman and Klukowski’s part in this matter by misrepresenting their clandestine efforts (which Proof has done much to connect Ginni Thomas to) makes no sense, unless there’s a connection between Ginni Thomas and Kenneth Klukowski or Mark Paoletta and Ken Klukowski that we don’t know of beyond both Thomas and Klukowski having been advisers to Donald Trump on the matter of legal appointments to his administration (Klukowski worked on the 2016 Trump transition team on this issue).

All of which unexplained strangeness raises a question: who the hell is Mark Paoletta?

8. Ken Klukowski

In September 2019, 2020 Trump coup co-conspirator and 2016 Trump transition adviser Ken Klukowski began working at the federal Office of Management and Budget (OMB).

Klukowski was in some senses an odd pick to work at the Office of Management and Budget, as he had cut his political teeth as a powerful public homophobe identified as such by the Southern Poverty Law Center, and therefore seemed better suited to filing amicus curiae briefs in cases trying to make LGBTQIA+ Americans reviled second-class citizens than having anything to do with controlling America’s purse-strings.

If we try to figure out why Klukowski was pushed—presumably, by someone with real leverage—to get a job his CV didn’t suggest he was suited, we note a few coincidences.

(1) Klukowski’s ultimate boss would be Mick Mulvaney. Mick Mulvaney is a man Ginni Thomas had stuck out her neck to be an ally for, and who had co-founded the House Freedom Caucus in 2015 as an outgrowth of the Tea Party “movement” that Thomas figured prominently in.

ABOVE: Mick Mulvaney.

(2) At the time Klukowski was hired to work for Mulvaney, the House Freedom Caucus he’d founded was run by Ginni Thomas’s good friend Mark Meadows. Meadows would later—following Mulvaney himsef—become Trump’s chief of staff, gaining this position in large part as a consequence of directly lobbying of Trump by none other than Ginni Thomas. Indeed, Ginni Thomas remained so close to Meadows following his appointment as Trump’s top political aide that, as we now know, she repeatedly texted him in the run-up to the insurrection.

{Note: The two men who followed Meadows as House Freedom Caucus chairs were both leading insurrectionists. The first, Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ), was identified as a coup co-conspirator by domestic terrorist Ali Alexander, and the second, Rep. Scott Perry, is the man who introduced Ken Klukowski’s then-boss, DOJ attorney Jeffrey Clark, to Donald Trump in the Oval Office on December 22, 2020. As noted above and elsewhere at Proof, Trump and Clark would thereafter plot a DOJ coup in furtherance of Trump’s larger national coup plot.}

But this third association between Klukowski and Thomas seems the most relevant:

(3) Klukowski’s immediate boss at OMB was Mark Paoletta—the man who is now Ginni Thomas’ lawyer. What? Yes. Ginni Thomas lawyer Mark Paoletta is the man Klukowski went to work for when someone mysteriously got him a job he wasn’t qualified for in September 2019 in the very same way that someone mysteriously got him a job he wasn’t qualified for at DOJ 27 months later.

And while Klukowski was working for Ginni Thomas’ lawyer, Scott Perry was running the House Freedom Caucus in part thanks to Ginni Thomas, who’d gotten her friend Mark Meadows the chief of staff gig her friend Mick Mulvaney had just vacated. Perry would soon enough be the man who introduced Klukowski’s next boss—after Ginni Thomas’ lawyer—Jeffrey Clark to Donald Trump, the latter of whom Ginni Thomas was advising at the time. It is in this context that Mark Paoletta can see no reason whatsoever why the House January 6 Committee would want to speak to Ginni Thomas about Ken Klukowski, John Eastman, Donald Trump, or indeed anyone at all.

ABOVE (top to bottom): Scott Perry and Mark Meadows.

Presumably, another person Paoletta can’t imagine letting his new client talk about to Congress is her fellow CNP Action board member Kenneth Blackwell, who sure does seem to be one of the people the House January 6 Committee thinks placed Klukowski at DOJ.

9. Kenneth Blackwell

ABOVE: Kenneth Blackwell.

Ken Klukowski’s proximity to Ginni Thomas is getting closer and closer with each passing day. At least some of that has to do with Kenneth Blackwell’s simultaneous proximity to both Ginni Thomas and Ken Klukowski.

Proof recently referenced congressional evidence establishing that Ginni Thomas’s peer on the powerful, eight-person CNP Action board—Kenneth Blackwell, who is also her subordinate in the even more secretive Groundswell group that Thomas runs solo—is on a first-name basis with Ken Klukowski, and moreover that Klukowski was senior legal counsel to another of Ginni Thomas’s fellow CNP Action board members Kelly Shackelford. What Proof did not realize at the time—as Klukowski’s name had only just entered the public discussion of January 6—was that Klukowski had actually co-authored two books with Kenneth Blackwell. Here is the cover of one of them:

Putting aside the irony of the book’s title—Blackwell is almost exclusively famous for having helped then GOP presidential candidate George W. Bush win the 2004 election for president by deliberately using his voting-machine placement authority as Ohio Secretary of State to generate ten-hour voting lines in many majority-minority Black precincts in Cuyahoga County, the county that decided the 2004 election; meanwhile Klukowski is now at the center of a coup plot that involved stealing the 2020 election and erecting an imperial post-democratic Trump regime in its place—we must also note that the book’s publisher, Lyons Press, now lists only Blackwell as its author, effectively making Klukowski invisible on the press website and hiding Blackwell’s association with Klukowski.

{Note: If you want to know how conservative Lyons Press is, know that it chose to publish the abandoned book that was, according to a report by New York Magazine, responsible for American editor Judith Regan’s highly public firing from HarperCollins. During a dispute with her publisher, a company owned by arch-conservative Rupert Murdoch, about the book Lyons Press ultimately chose to publish—a fictionalized, salacious autobiography of Mickey Mantle—Regan allegedly complained that a “Jewish cabal” was blocking the book, and that “Of all people, Jews should know about ganging up, finding common enemies and telling the big lie.” Lyons, whether to combat Regan’s imagined “Jewish cabal” or otherwise, scooped the book right up.}

Proof has now learned, too, that when Ginni Thomas’s pre-insurrection emails with Mark Meadows were first reported on by major media, Blackwell was one of the first people to defend her, doing so in March—a decision that underscores the relationship between the two CNP Action board members but also the fact that, back in March of 2022, Blackwell may not have realized that Congress would soon be in possession of his emails regarding his co-author’s work at DOJ. Had Blackwell known this then, he might have been advised by his lawyers to say nothing about Ginni Thomas’ activities.

The New Yorker further notes that Blackwell was on the board of the National Rifle Association (NRA) when its Friends of the NRA “youth competition” offered as a prize a meeting with none other than Ginni Thomas.

In 2019, Blackwell and Thomas were two of seventy signatories of a letter supporting Trump making Mulvaney his permanent chief of staff.

And just as Ginni Thomas sought to advise the White House on election matters, so to did Kenneth Blackwell. In 2017, Trump named Ginni Thomas’s fellow CNP Action board member to his failed Presidential Advisory Committee on Election Integrity, which folded after failing to find any evidence of systemic election fraud in America—despite the fact that Blackwell’s co-author Klukowski would just 36 months later help pen a letter falsely claiming that DOJ had found just the opposite (which it did not).

The New York Times reports that, in early 2022, Blackwell wrote a lengthy defense of Clarence and Ginni Thomas at Breitbart. In the article, Blackwell claimed a startling level of familiarity with Ginni Thomas’ thinking, professional practices, values, and personal history. He even took the time to lie about her attitude toward pro-Trump election litigation: “No matter how strongly she feels about a matter, she steps back if it moves toward litigation, even before it reaches the Supreme Court.” As we all now know, exactly the opposite was true following the 2020 presidential election.

So why did one of Ginni Thomas’ closest friends feel the need to lie about her conduct in the digital pages of a far-right publication forever associated with one of the silent co-founders of Thomas’s Groundswell group, Steve Bannon? Perhaps Blackwell knew what evidence would be coming to light with respect to Ginni Thomas in the same way he knew it was critical not to “overexpose” the suspicious fact that his co-author Klukowski had suddenly found himself working outside his area of expertise at DOJ.

{Note: At 2015, at the dawn of Trump’s political career, a small percentage of the members of Ginni Thomas’s Groundswell group was revealed. As The Week detailed, three of the names disclosed were from Breitbart, including Bannon. The Week also quotes David Corn, who had authored the initial expose on Groundswell at Mother Jones, as saying that “The Groundswell documents show conservative journalists, including several with Breitbart News, colluding on high-level messaging with leading partisans of the conservative movement.” Writing for Slate, Dave Weigel noted that one difference—in fact the key difference—between Ginni Thomas’s Groundswell and similar left-wing groups was that the latter “have a strict ban on members who join[ ] the government.” Meanwhile, Thomas’s Groundswell boasted Texas senator Ted Cruz aide Max Pappas among its members, underscoring that Ginni Thomas, and for that matter Kenneth Blackwell, wanted Groundswell to be a group able to directly influence government entities. Indeed, Ginni Thomas initially supported Cruz for POTUS in 2016 until he was soundly defeated by Trump in that year’s GOP primaries. Weigel notes that one member of Groundswell, a journalist at The Washington Examiner, ultimately left the group because “The implication of attending [Thomas’s group] is that you're participating in their [political] planning”, which the journalist deemed inappropriate for a member of the media. This too underscores the elements of Groundswell that make it more likely to have been engaged in covert planning to directly influence the DOJ through Blackwell’s co-author.}

In short, one of the men in the world closest to Ken Klukowski certainly seems to be one of the men in the world closest to Ginni Thomas as well. And Ginni Thomas—of all the lawyers in the world—chose to defend her, as she faces reasonable suspicion of participating in a seditious conspiracy, Ken Klukowski’s former boss. Not one federal investigator or prosecutor in America could possibly miss the stench of a cover-up here.

Conclusion

As the House January 6 Committee reaches the critical days and perhaps even hours of its decision-making process with respect to sending a subpoena to Ginni Thomas, and as the U.S. House of Representatives quickly reaches the last drop-dead date for initiating an impeachment investigation of Justice Clarence Thomas—who continues to refuse to recuse himself from January 6 cases, but is closer to the progenitors of a Trumpist coup plot than any Supreme Court Justice in history has ever been to any federal crime of such magnitude—the evidence above, and the further information and investigation it implicitly and explicitly points toward, becomes as important as any revelation that’ll come from the Committee in a month of harrowing revelations.

ABOVE: Steve Bannon.

The simple fact is that all of the coup plot progenitors mentioned above were echoing one another in unmistakable ways in Fall 2020 and early 2021. Of the federal divisions over which Congress has the constitutional duty of oversight, the Trump conspirators’ plot encompassed—at a minimum—the Supreme Court, the White House, DOJ, and the Department of Homeland Security.

Nor does it appear that the plot has run its course. The same individuals referenced above as being involved in a coup plot in 2020 and 2021 appear to still be involved in similar efforts in 2022.

Consider that former Department of Homeland Security employee Christina Bobb, whose role in Trump’s coup plot appears to have been in part to lobby her former employer to illegally interfere in national vote-counting processes, is now a member of Trump’s legal team. In the video below, she tells us what she’s working on now:

Ron Filipkowski 🇺🇦 @RonFilipkowski

Trump’s attorney Christina Bobb tonight says things are in the works to overturn the 2020 election and possibly reinstate Trump. She says the plan is for 3 states to decertify their results and send resolutions to the next Congress after the midterms to overturn the results.

This shocking video isn’t from 2020 or 2021. It’s from this month—July—in 2022.

The plan Bobb details is identical to the one Ginni Thomas and others were working on before Trump left office, suggesting that Thomas requires House questioning not just about 2020 and 2021 but whether she has continued her covert lobbying of state GOP legislators and GOP members of Congress in 2022. After all, Bobb makes clear that, as a member of Trump’s legal team, her efforts to aid Trump’s candidly deranged plot to be “reinstated” as President of the United States following the 2022 elections requires action from the same individuals who Thomas was lobbying in 2020 and 2021—starting with the very same state legislators Thomas targeted. While Bobb admits that the current Congress wouldn’t attempt to further any such coup, she ends her summary of Trump’s current illegal scheme by saying, “After 2022, if we replace them [the current Democratic majority in the House of Representatives], who knows?”

Given that any such 2023 coup would eventually come before Clarence Thomas, the urgency of questioning Ginni Thomas now—before a possible Republican takeover of Congress in January 2023 ends the Committee’s brief lifespan—is urgent at a level that can’t be overstated. Any who doubt this should listen to what Trump himself has been saying lately, all of which dovetails with the statements coming from his lawyers and (again) were last heard from all his foremost 2020 and 2021 coup co-conspirators:

Ron Filipkowski 🇺🇦 @RonFilipkowski

Trump’s attorney said yesterday that if they could get 3 states legislatures to pass these resolutions, then a 2023 GOP Congress could take this up, overturn the 2020 election, and reinstate Trump. Now this from her client.

Meanwhile, following the recent Proof coverage of a little-noticed July 2021 Rumble interview between insurrectionists David K. Clements and Garrett Ziegler, there is now new attention being paid to the links between Team Kraken—which Ziegler let into the White House on December 18, 2020, without the proper authority to do so—and Trump’s administration, particularly top Trump adviser Peter Navarro’s office.

Ron Filipkowski 🇺🇦 @RonFilipkowski

Peter Navarro’s aide Garrett Ziegler says he let Powell & Flynn into the WH without permission: “That was not scheduled. So when Meadows & Cipollone got called into that meeting and realized that Sidney Powell and Mike Flynn were there .. they had no idea how they got in.”

As evidence mounts that the December 18, 2020 meeting in question constituted an actionable Conspiracy to Commit Treason, the accusation that Trump and his many co-conspirators didn’t “merely” commit Conspiracy to Obstruct a Congressional Proceeding but a crime punishable by life imprisonment or even death are starting to appear in mainstream media—underscoring that what is at stake in the House January 6 Committee executing a thorough investigation of Trump’s plot before its time is up.

ABOVE: Garrett Ziegler.

Here’s MSNBC legal analyst (and former federal prosecutor) Glenn Kirschner on the appropriateness of treating the January 6 investigation as an investigation of Treason:

Adam Rifkin 🐼🌻 @ifindkarma

“Donald Trump launched the attack on the Capitol and refused to call it off… He told those around him Mike Pence should be hanged. Donald Trump waged war — levied war — against the United States on and around #January6th.” @glennkirschner2 #JusticeMatters

Adam Rifkin 🐼🌻 @ifindkarma

@glennkirschner2 “Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them… is guilty of treason… and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.” 18 U.S. Code § 2381 — https://t.co/X1T73pDXc5 https://t.co/uvjuBCFDj2 https://t.co/uI7Qujveda https://t.co/wu4SYrqD2j

Indeed, evidence of the size, scope, depth, and duration of Trump’s coup plot—this last too little a topic of public discussion thus far—is only increasing as the summer of 2022 wears on, emphasizing that the House January 6 Committee will likely need to hold more hearings in August or even September of this year. For instance, and as Proof will now report for the first time, there is new evidence in the Clements-Ziegler interview above that, contrary to his claims of having no awareness of or support for Trump authorizing the illegal interference of the U.S. armed forces in a U.S. election, Peter Navarro may have been present at the December 18, 2020 Trump-Team Kraken meeting conference—and therefore been well aware that precisely such a plot was being pushed by Team Kraken and advanced by Trump.

In the July 2021 Clements-Ziegler interview, Ziegler says that during his time in the White House as Navarro’s top aide (notably, he says that he and not Navarro primarily authored, with one or two other aides, the Navarro “reports” that helped animate the January 6 insurrectionists) he was only in Trump’s presence at a private meeting five or six times. He makes clear that his most substantive involvement with Trump came on December 18, 2020, when he led Team Kraken, by fits and starts, to the Oval Office.

Now consider this section of his interview with Clements (which begins at 41:50 in the linked video), after Ziegler has just referenced “December 18” several times and the topic of the conversation is, unambiguously, December 18, 2020 (emphasis added):

ZIEGLER: The memory that sticks out to me the most [of being in a private meeting with then-President Trump and others] is the 18th. That’s the most that I had spoken to him one-on-one and he had directly listened to me. And Peter [Navarro] was actually ill at the time, so he was on the phone—they conferenced him in. You know, Cipollone was there, [Jared] Kushner was there, Meadows was there, and I was basically saying—

CLEMENTS (looking concerned): The 18th of what?

ZIEGLER: January.

CLEMENTS (looking relieved): January, okay.

ZIEGLER: So this was after the Federal Bureau of Insurrection [sic] did their thing [on January 6]. {NB: Ziegler here adopts the conspiracy theory that the FBI planned and executed the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021].

Is it possible that, of the five or six times Ziegler had meaningful encounters with the President of the United States, two of them occurred on the 18th of a month and both involved Pat Cipollone, the White House Counsel? It’s possible. Or, this may’ve been a slip of the tongue that helps explain why—after the Trump-Team Kraken meeting ended in the wee hours of December 19—Trump tweeted about just two things: (1) the “wild protest” that was coming on January 6, and (2) the “Navarro reports” Ziegler had written and Navarro had put his name on.

In short, what has come into focus in the last two months is a ring of co-conspirators whose names are known and who nearly all have connections to either John Eastman, Ginni Thomas, or both. Eastman has now pleaded the Fifth Amendment a hundred times. It’s time for Ginni Thomas to answer questions to help protect our democracy or confirm herself—finally—as one of those who has secretly been trying to destroy it.

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