Ginni Thomas, the right-wing activist and wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, lobbied far more Arizona state lawmakers than previously known to try to overturn the state’s 2020 election results—a revelation that reignited calls on Friday for Justice Thomas to recuse himself from cases related to the election.
In addition to emailing two state representatives in November and December 2020, calling on them to “choose” electors who would grant former President Donald Trump a victory in the state, Thomas used a platform called FreeRoots.com to call on 27 other state lawmakers to put aside President Joe Biden’s victory. The Washington Post, which first reported the news, obtained the emails Thomas sent via Arizona’s public records law.
On November 9, as part of a campaign organized by Every Legal Vote—a group that has supported Trump’s “Big Lie” that the election was stolen from him—Thomas sent an email saying the lawmakers must “stand strong in the face of political and media pressure” and claiming they had the “power to fight back against fraud.”
“The wife of a sitting Supreme Court justice was very much a part of the seditious conspiracy” that culminated in the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, said Democratic strategist Sawyer Hackett on Friday in response to the new reporting.
Prior to the January 6 rally—which she briefly attended—Thomas also wrote to 22 state House members and one state senator on December 13, a day before they were scheduled to count their votes, warning them to “consider what will happen to the nation we all love if you don’t stand up and lead.”
“Never before in our nation’s history have our elections been so threatened by fraud and unconstitutional procedures,” Thomas wrote.
When the letters to two lawmakers were reported by the Post last month, U.S. Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) was among the critics who said Thomas’s efforts to keep Trump in office represented a “conflict of interest.”
Thomas’s husband was the lone dissenter earlier this year when the court rejected Trump’s bid to block the release of presidential records regarding the January 6 insurrection.
The Thomases have long claimed that they keep their work separate from one another, but journalist Mark Joseph Stern said Friday, “As obvious as the symmetry between Clarence and Ginni Thomas’ work was three weeks ago, it’s even more glaring now.”
Thomas’s lobbying of 29 state lawmakers to overrule the will of Arizona voters represented “a completely egregious attack on democracy by the wife of a sitting SCOTUS justice,” tweeted Rep. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.).
Friday’s revelations come two-and-a-half months after the Post and CBS News obtained text messages that Thomas sent to former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows in the weeks following the election, calling on him to “save us from the left taking America down.”
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) issued a “friendly reminder that Ginni Thomas has a government position and absolutely should not,” referring to her position on the Library of Congress Trust Fund Board, to which Trump appointed her.
“Her egregious actions to push the White House Chief of Staff and others to overturn a free and fair election make her a threat to democracy and should disqualify her for any role of public trust at the Library of Congress or anywhere else in government,” said CREW in April.
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Julia Conley is a Common Dreams staff writer.
