Thursday, March 24, 2022

A Scandal Of Immense Proportions
Wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas Exchanged At Least 29 Texts With Trump's Chief Of Staff After 2020 Election & Pushed For Sidney Kraken Powell To Lead Legal Team
Other Reporting Outs Ginni Thomas As A Chief Architect Of Seditious Attack On US Capitol
Also: Where Is Clarence? Court Refuses To Say Why He Has Been In Hiding For Seven Days

"I wouldn't be in [Washington] if I wasn't on a mission." (Ginni Thomas, 1995)
Bob Woodward and Robert Costa of the Washington Post are reporting that Virginia Thomas, a far-right activist and the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, repeatedly urged White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, in a series of text messages in the weeks after the November 2020 election, to do everything possible to overturn the presidential election, which she described as "the greatest Heist of our History".

Thomas and Meadows exchanged a total of 29 messages. In one of them, from November 24, Meadows invoked God to describe the efforts underway. "This is a fight of good versus evil. Evil always looks like the victor until the King of Kings triumphs. Do not grow weary in well doing. The fight continues. I have staked my career on it."

Ginni Thomas actually pressed for lawyer Sidney "Kraken" Powell to be "the lead and the face" of Trump's legal team. Powell's crackpot theories and batshit claims about the 2020 election were one big reason why Trump's so-called "elite strike force" legal team went 0-62 in court. (The biggest reason was no fraud existed, which they readily admitted in court. Outside of court, they whined about widespread fraud.) Powell's loony tunes also prompted Dominion Voting Systems to bring a defamation lawsuit against her (and others) for $1.3 billion.
 
The 29 text messages were among 2,320 that Meadows provided to the House select committee investigating the seditious attack on the US Capitol. The existence of the 29 messages was confirmed by Meadows's attorney, George Terwilliger III. 

While it is not known if Thomas and Meadows exchanged additional messages in the time period between the election and Biden's inauguration two weeks after the Capitol riot, it seems highly likely, considering the topic of that flurry of conversation remained the top priority for Trump et al.. The January 6 Committee must subpoena Thomas's emails and texts immediately.

In the words of Norman Orenstein:
The wife of a Supreme Court justice is a radical insurrectionist. Her husband has refused to recuse himself from any of the cases in which she has been deeply and actively involved. This is a scandal of immense proportions.
We will see if it gets treated that way.

She also suggested certain members of the press should be shipped to Guantanamo Bay to face "military tribunals for sedition" and other capital (i.e., death penalty) crimes.

Justice Thomas, 73, is a serial sexual harasser and the longest-serving current justice (and who went 10 years without asking a single question from the bench). He has also been absent from the court for seven days. The only publicly released information is that he has "an infection".

The revelation of Thomas's messages with Meadows comes three weeks after lawyers for the committee said in a court filing that the panel has "a good-faith basis for concluding that the President and members of his Campaign engaged in a criminal conspiracy to defraud the United States" and obstruct the counting of electoral votes by Congress. . . .

In her text messages to Meadows, Ginni Thomas spread false theories, commented on cable news segments and advocated with urgency and fervor that the president and his team take action to reverse the outcome of the election. She urged that they take a hard line with Trump staffers and congressional Republicans who had resisted arguments that the election was stolen.

In the messages, Thomas and Meadows each assert a belief that the election was stolen and seem to share a solidarity of purpose and faith, though they occasionally express differences on tactics. . . .

The first of the 29 messages between Ginni Thomas and Meadows was sent on Nov. 5, two days after the election. She sent him a link to a YouTube video labeled "TRUMP STING w CIA Director Steve Pieczenik, The Biggest Election Story in History, QFS-BLOCKCHAIN."

Pieczenik, a former State Department official, is a far-right commentator who has falsely claimed that the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., was a "false-flag" operation to push a gun-control agenda.

The video Thomas shared with Meadows is no longer available on YouTube. But Thomas wrote to Meadows, "I hope this is true; never heard anything like this before, or even a hint of it. Possible???"

"Watermarked ballots in over 12 states have been part of a huge Trump & military white hat sting operation in 12 key battleground states," she wrote.

During that period, supporters of the QAnon extremist ideology embraced a false theory that Trump had watermarked mail-in ballots so he could track potential fraud. "Watch the water" was a refrain in QAnon circles at the time.

In the Nov. 5 message to Meadows, Thomas went on to quote a passage that had circulated on right-wing websites: "Biden crime family & ballot fraud co-conspirators (elected officials, bureaucrats, social media censorship mongers, fake stream media reporters, etc) are being arrested & detained for ballot fraud right now & over coming days, & will be living in barges off GITMO to face military tribunals for sedition." . . .

The next day, Nov. 6, Thomas sent a follow-up to Meadows: "Do not concede. It takes time for the army who is gathering for his back." . . .

On Nov. 10, Thomas drew a reply from Meadows. She wrote, "Mark, I wanted to text you and tell you for days you are in my prayers!!" She continued by urging him to "Help This Great President stand firm" and invoking "the greatest Heist of our History."

Thomas added in the message that Meadows should "Listen to Rush. Mark Steyn, Bongino, Cleta" – appearing to refer to conservative commentators Rush Limbaugh, Mark Steyn and Dan Bongino, as well as lawyer Cleta Mitchell, who was involved in Trump's push to claim victory in Georgia despite Biden's certified win there.

One minute later, Meadows responded: "I will stand firm. We will fight until there is no fight left. Our country is too precious to give up on. Thanks for all you do."

Nine minutes after that, Thomas replied, "Tearing up and praying for you guys!!!!! So proud to know you!!" . . .

Thomas then turned to her frustrations with congressional Republicans and said she wished more of them were rallying behind Trump and being more active with his base voters, who were furious about the election.

She wrote, "House and Senate guys are pathetic too... only 4 GOP House members seen out in street rallies with grassroots... Gohmert, Jordan, Gosar, and Roy." She appeared to be referring to Republican House members Louie Gohmert of Texas, Jim Jordan of Ohio, Paul A. Gosar of Arizona and Chip Roy of Texas. . . .

"Where the heck are all those who benefited by Presidents coattails?!!!" she wrote in her text message to him late on Nov. 10. She then told him to watch a YouTube video about the power of never conceding. . . .

On Nov. 13, she texted Meadows about her outreach to "Jared," potentially a reference to Jared Kushner, the president's son-in-law and senior White House adviser. She wrote, "Just forwarded to yr gmail an email I sent Jared this am. Sidney Powell & improved coordination now will help the cavalry come and Fraud exposed and America saved." . . .

Powell was becoming ubiquitous on television – and winning the president's favor, according to several Trump advisers – as she claimed without evidence that electronic voting systems had stolen the election from Trump by switching millions of ballots in Biden's favor. She claimed, again without evidence, that hundreds of thousands of ballots were appearing out of nowhere and that a global communist conspiracy was afoot involving Venezuela, Cuba, and probably China. . . .

Her views were considered so extreme and unsupported by evidence that David Bossie, a longtime Trump supporter, told others that she was peddling "concocted B.S." After Fox News host Tucker Carlson contacted Powell about her claim that electronic voting machines had switched ballots to Biden, he told his viewers that he found her answers evasive and that she had shown no evidence to support her assertion. He stopped having her on his program.

Ginni Thomas stood by her. "Don't let her and your assets be marginalized instead...help her be the lead and the face," she wrote to Meadows on Nov. 13. . . .

"This war is psychological. PSYOP," the [Nov. 14] text from Thomas states. . . .

On Nov. 19, which would be a crucial day for Powell as she spoke at a news conference at the Republican National Committee, Thomas continued to bolster Powell's standing in a text to Meadows.

"Mark (don't want to wake you)… " Thomas wrote. "Sounds like Sidney and her team are getting inundated with evidence of fraud. Make a plan. Release the Kraken and save us from the left taking America down." . . .

In that same exchange, Thomas also at one point offered Meadows advice on managing the West Wing staff.

"Suggestion: You need to buck up your team on the inside, Mark," Thomas wrote. "The lower level insiders are scared, fearful or sending out signals of hopelessness vs an awareness of the existential threat to America right now. You can buck them up, strengthen their spirits." . . .

Thomas then wrote, "You guys fold, the evil just moves fast down underneath you all. Lots of intensifying threats coming to ACB and others." Justice Amy Coney Barrett, sometimes called "ACB" by her supporters, had joined the Supreme Court in October, shortly before the election. It is unclear to what threats Thomas was referring. . . .

But Thomas's high aspirations for Powell quickly collapsed that afternoon. Instead of capturing the nation's attention at the RNC news conference, where she spoke alongside Giuliani and other Trump advisers, Powell was criticized for spreading a false theory about electronic voting machines as a tool for communists. Some Trump aides were horrified by her and Giuliani's performances and felt they had embarrassed the president by becoming a parody of his post-election fight.

As Giuliani spoke, a dark brown liquid mixed with beads of sweat rolled down his cheek. "Did you watch 'My Cousin Vinny?' " he asked reporters, tying a legal reference to the 1992 comedy.

Thomas wrote to Meadows, "Tears are flowing at what Rudy is doing right now!!!!" . . .

By Nov. 22, Trump gave his blessing for Giuliani and another Trump lawyer, Jenna Ellis, to issue a statement claiming that Powell "is not a member of the Trump Legal Team."

Thomas reached out to Meadows that day with concern. "Trying to understand the Sidney Powell distancing," she wrote.

"She doesn't have anything or at least she won't share it if she does," Meadows texted back.

"Wow!" Thomas replied. . . .

On Nov. 24, Thomas engaged Meadows again by sharing a video from Parler, a conservative social media website, that appeared to refer to conservative commentator Glenn Beck.

"If you all cave to the elites, you have to know that many of your 73 million feel like what Glenn is expressing," Thomas wrote. . . .

Meadows replied three minutes later: "I don't know what you mean by caving to the elites."

Thomas responded: "I can't see Americans swallowing the obvious fraud. Just going with one more thing with no frickin consequences... the whole coup and now this... we just cave to people wanting Biden to be anointed? Many of us can't continue the GOP charade." . . .

The text exchanges with Thomas that Meadows provided to the House select committee pause after Nov. 24, 2020, with an unexplained gap in correspondence. The committee received one additional message sent by Thomas to Meadows, on Jan. 10, four days after the "Stop the Steal" rally Thomas said she attended and the deadly attack on the Capitol. . . .

"We are living through what feels like the end of America," Thomas wrote to Meadows. "Most of us are disgusted with the VP and are in listening mode to see where to fight with our teams. Those who attacked the Capitol are not representative of our great teams of patriots for DJT!!"

"Amazing times," she added. "The end of Liberty."
Seth Abramson (Proof) has been reporting about Ginni Thomas's deep involvement in far-right circles and specifically regarding January 6 for several months. 

On January 30, 2022, near the end of a lengthy and mind-blowing presentation (nearly 14,000 words) of Ginni Thomas's far-right extremism and connections, Abramson wrote:
As a former federal criminal investigator [in the federal criminal justice system in Washington, D.C. and a longtime criminal defense attorney in Massachusetts and New Hampshire], 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. . . .

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 [Thomas chose not to write a dissent, thus providing no reason for his decision]. 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.

Jane Mayer of The New Yorker has also done great in-depth reporting on Ginni Thomas.

On February 22, 2022, the New York Times published a long feature on both Ginni and Clarence Thomas, which Abramson, in an article posted the following day, described as "oddly fram[ed]" and "a series of buried ledes".

In "New Revelations Indicate Ginni Thomas Was a Key Author of Trump's January 6 Coup Plot", Abramson wrote:

It's unclear why the Times did little to highlight these revelations; all are ensconced deep within an article it takes more than an hour and a half to listen to via an audio reading supplied by the newspaper.  . . .

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

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

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

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

Over more than 10,000 words, Abramson laid out how "the public and private actions of a political activist" could be "more influential" than those of a Supreme Court Justice. He focused on five revelations about Ginni Thomas and January 6:

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

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

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

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

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

Abramson wrote:

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

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

So the question remains: what is the House January 6 Committee waiting for? Why is Ginni Thomas sacrosanct in a way no other witness is? . . .

The evidence that Ginni Thomas was at the heart of the planning of the events of January 6 is now overwhelming; the evidence that she kept clear of the pinnacle moment of her life's "mission" is non-existent. Her apparent lifetime of arrogant, "out of bounds" political advocacy has left her open to the ambit of responsible congressional and federal criminal investigations—if only Congress and the FBI will lift the "cone of silence" the Thomases have so carefully constructed.

On Twitter today, Abramson stated:

It appears, from the Post article, that the wife of a SCOTUS Justice—herself a Trump adviser—wrote approvingly to the White House chief of staff of "reporters...being arrested & detained for ballot fraud...& living in barges off GITMO to face military tribunals for sedition.” WTF

Indie journalists keep telling everyone how *profoundly dangerous* these avowed insurrectionists are, but maybe what it takes is one of the insurrectionist leaders getting caught privately speculating about members of the press being sent to Gitmo and tried for capital offenses.

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