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<div align="left"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2022/09/ginni-thomas-attempts-influence-overturn/">https://www.alternet.org/2022/09/ginni-thomas-attempts-influence-overturn/</a></font></div><div align="left"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div align="left"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">david b ncrm</font></div><div align="left"><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://www.thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/?s=Ginni+Thomas" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;"><strong>Ginni Thomas</strong></a>‘ efforts to influence the overturning of the 2020 presidential election are even wider than previously known. Thomas, a far-right activist and lobby who happens to also be the spouse of the most right-wing U.S. Supreme Court justice, not only engaged in a months-long pressure campaign to influence then-Trump White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows to help overturn the results of the election, and pressured <b>29 GOP lawmakers in Arizona to overturn the election, but also pressured lawmakers in another critical battleground state, Wisconsin, to do so as well.</b></font></p><p><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2022/09/01/ginni-thomas-wisconsin-bernier-tauchen/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">The Washington Post</a> Thursday reports “new emails show that Thomas also messaged two Republican lawmakers in Wisconsin: state Sen. Kathy Bernier, then chair of the Senate elections committee, and state Rep. Gary Tauchen. Bernier and Tauchen received the email at 10:47 a.m. on Nov. 9, virtually the same time the Arizona lawmakers received a verbatim copy of the message from Thomas. The Bernier email was obtained by The Post, and the Tauchen email was obtained by the watchdog group Documented and provided to The Post.”</font></span></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Post published the text of the emails sent by Thomas.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">READ MORE: <a href="https://www.thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/2022/06/legal-experts-urge-committee-to-subpoena-ginni-thomas-after-she-backs-away-from-testifying/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">Legal Experts Urge Committee to Subpoena Ginni Thomas After She Backs Away From Testifying</a></font></strong></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Please stand strong in the face of media and political pressure,” the emails read. The Post notes they were sent “just days after major media organizations called the presidency for Biden.”</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Please reflect on the awesome authority granted to you by our Constitution. And then please take action to ensure that a clean slate of Electors is chosen for our state,” they also say.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Thomas has promoted vile conspiracy theories about the 2020 election and other events.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">READ MORE: <a href="https://www.thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/2022/06/emails-raise-obvious-suggestion-ginni-thomas-was-feeding-john-eastman-inside-information-carl-bernstein/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">Emails Raise ‘Obvious Suggestion’ Ginni Thomas Was Feeding John Eastman Inside Information: Carl Bernstein</a></font></strong></p><p><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“In posts on Facebook, she shared a George Soros conspiracy-theory meme and criticized the teenage survivors of the school massacre in Parkland, Fla., for supporting gun control,” <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/22/magazine/clarence-thomas-ginni-thomas.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">The New York Times Magazine</a> reported in February. “She complained when a town near her Virginia home put up a banner in support of Black Lives Matter, saying the group was filled with extremists ‘seeking to foment a cultural revolution,’ and traded barbs on her public Facebook page.”</font></span></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Thomas sits on the board of the highly-influential and highly-secretive religious right wing <a href="https://www.thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/?s=%22Council+for+National+Policy%22" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;"><strong>Council for National Policy</strong></a>, which also includes more prominent members like <a href="https://www.thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/?s=%22Turning+Point+USA%22" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;"><strong>Turning Point USA</strong></a>‘s Charlie Kirk, where Thomas has also served.</font></p></div><div align="left"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div align="left"><div align="left"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">no lnx</font></div><div align="left"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Investigations</font></div><div align="left"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Ginni Thomas pressed Wisconsin lawmakers to overturn Biden’s 2020 victory</font></div><div align="left"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The conservative activist and wife of the Supreme Court justice emailed lawmakers in two states in the weeks after the election</font></div><div align="left"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div align="left"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">By Emma Brown</font></div><div align="left"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>September 1, 2022 </b></font></div><div align="left"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div align="left"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, takes part in the 2017 Conservative Political Action Conference at National Harbor in Maryland. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)</font></div><div align="left"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div align="left"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, the conservative activist and wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, pressed lawmakers to overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 victory not only in Arizona, as previously reported, but also in a second battleground state, Wisconsin, according to emails obtained under state public-records law.</font></div><div align="left"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div align="left"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Washington Post reported this year that Ginni Thomas emailed 29 Arizona state lawmakers, some of them twice, in November and December 2020. She urged them to set aside Biden’s popular-vote victory and “choose” their own presidential electors, despite the fact that the responsibility for choosing electors rests with voters under Arizona state law.</font></div><div align="left"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div align="left"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The new emails show that Thomas also messaged two Republican lawmakers in Wisconsin: state Sen. Kathy Bernier, then chair of the Senate elections committee, and state Rep. Gary Tauchen. Bernier and Tauchen received the email at 10:47 a.m. on Nov. 9, virtually the same time the Arizona lawmakers received a verbatim copy of the message from Thomas. The Bernier email was obtained by The Post, and the Tauchen email was obtained by the watchdog group Documented and provided to The Post.</font></div><div align="left"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div align="left"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Thomas sent all of the emails via FreeRoots</b>, an online platform that allowed people to send pre-written emails to multiple elected officials.</font></div><div align="left"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div align="left"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Please stand strong in the face of media and political pressure,” read the emails sent Nov. 9, just days after major media organizations called the presidency for Biden. “Please reflect on the awesome authority granted to you by our Constitution. And then please take action to ensure that a clean slate of Electors is chosen for our state.”</font></div><div align="left"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div align="left"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Neither Thomas nor her lawyer, Mark Paoletta, responded to requests for comment. </b>A Supreme Court spokeswoman did not respond to a message seeking comment from Clarence Thomas.</font></div><div align="left"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div align="left"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Ginni Thomas’s political activism is highly unusual for the spouse of a Supreme Court justice, and for years it has raised questions about potential conflicts of interest for her husband. She has said that the two of them keep their professional lives separate.</font></div><div align="left"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div align="left"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But scrutiny of the Thomases intensified this year after The Post and CBS News obtained copies of text messages that Ginni Thomas exchanged with Mark Meadows, then President Donald Trump’s White House chief of staff, in the weeks following the 2020 election. Thomas repeatedly urged Meadows to keep fighting to overturn the election results. After Congress certified Biden’s victory Jan. 6, 2021, she expressed anger at Vice President Mike Pence, who had refused to intervene to keep Trump in office. “We are living through what feels like the end of America,” Thomas wrote to Meadows four days later.</font></div><div align="left"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div align="left"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Thomas was also in touch during the post-election period with John Eastman, the pro-Trump lawyer who once clerked for her husband, and whose role in the effort to overturn Biden’s win has drawn scrutiny from both the Justice Department and the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot.<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> In early December 2020, Thomas invited Eastman to speak at a meeting of Frontliners for Liberty, which she described as a group of grass-roots activists, according to an email that Eastman published online.</span></font></div><div align="left"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</font></div><div align="left"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The agenda for the meeting has not been publicly disclosed. But a federal judge ruling on which records had to be turned over in response to a subpoena from the committee wrote that the agenda shows Eastman discussed “State legislative actions that can reverse the media-called election for Joe Biden.” U.S. District Judge David O. Carter ordered Eastman to give congressional investigators emails related to Thomas and meetings of her<b> Frontliners group</b>, finding that the meetings “furthered a critical objective of the January 6 plan: to have contested states certify alternate slates of electors for President Trump.”</font></div><div align="left"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div align="left"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The House committee asked Thomas to sit for a voluntary interview in June. The committee also sought a broad range of documents from her, including any related to plans to overturn the election and all communications with members of Congress and their staff and Justice Department employees, according to a copy of the request published by the conservative Daily Caller.</font></div><div align="left"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div align="left"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">At the time, Thomas indicated she would comply. “I can’t wait to clear up misconceptions. I look forward to talking to them,” Thomas told the Daily Caller, her former employer.</font></div><div align="left"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div align="left"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Less than two weeks later, on June 28, Paoletta told the committee that while Thomas remained willing to sit for an interview, he did not believe there was “sufficient basis” for her to do so.</font></div><div align="left"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div align="left"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">In a letter obtained by The Post, Paoletta — a longtime close associate of the Thomases — described Ginni Thomas’s text messages to Meadows as “entirely unremarkable” and said they do not suggest she had any role in the attack on the Capitol. <b>He cast her invitation to Eastman as simply an invitation to speak, not an endorsement of his views or “any indication of a working relationship.” He also said she played no role in organizing the email campaign to Arizona lawmakers and did not draft or edit the form letters she sent.</b></font></div><div align="left"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div align="left"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>In an interview, Bernier, the Wisconsin lawmaker, said it would have been appropriate for the state legislature to consider decertifying the 2020 results in the weeks following the election if evidence had emerged of significant voter fraud. “But as we went through the process and the legal challenges were made and discounted by the judicial system, there was nothing proven as far as actual voter fraud,” she said.</b></font></div><div align="left"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div align="left"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Bernier said she had not realized that Thomas was among the thousands of people who emailed her after the election, but she said Thomas “has a First Amendment right to speak her mind.”</font></div><div align="left"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div align="left"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“I was married for 20 years. I took on some identity of my husband, but I had my own mind,” Bernier said. “Just because you’re married to someone doesn’t mean that you’re a clone.”</font></div><div align="left"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div align="left"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Tauchen did not respond to messages seeking comment.</b></font></div><div align="left"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Democratic lawmakers renewed calls to create a code of ethical conduct for the U.S. Supreme Court amid mounting scrutiny of Justice Thomas and his wife. (Video: The Washington Post)</font></div><div align="left"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div align="left"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Thomas’s Nov. 9 email was one of thousands sent via the FreeRoots platform that inundated Bernier and Tauchen’s offices in the weeks after the election, records show.</font></div><div align="left"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div align="left"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The Wisconsin State Journal reported in January 2021 that of more than 10,000 pages of emails received during that period by Bernier and state Rep. Ron Tusler (R), then the chair of his chamber’s elections committee, the majority were “mass-generated form letters making nonspecific claims about alleged irregularities, a right-wing fraud-finding effort and a clip from Fox’s Sean Hannity show.”</font></div><div align="left"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div align="left"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The fact that Thomas sent one of the FreeRoots emails to Bernier has not been previously reported. “Please do your Constitutional duty!” read the subject line of the message she sent.</font></div><div align="left"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div align="left"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">According to the records disclosed by Bernier’s office to The Post, Thomas was the fourth of more than 30 people who sent that particular form email Nov. 9 and 10<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">. The first sender of that email, three hours before Thomas, was a person named Stephanie Coleman, according to the records.</span></font></div><div align="left"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</font></div><div align="left"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">A woman named Stephanie Miller Coleman is the widow of one of Clarence Thomas’s former clerks. She was listed as the co-administrator, with Thomas, of a private Facebook group for Frontliners. The page listing the group’s administrators is no longer publicly visible.</font></div><div align="left"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div align="left"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Coleman did not respond to a message seeking comment.</font></div><div align="left"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div align="left"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Ginni Thomas’s communications with key players in the effort to overturn the election have led to calls for her husband to recuse himself from cases related to the 2020 election and attempts to subvert it. Clarence Thomas has given no indication that he intends to do so.</b></font></div><div align="left"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div align="left"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This year, eight Supreme Court justices declined Trump’s request to block congressional investigators from gaining access to White House records that might shed light on the events of Jan. 6, 2021. Thomas was the only justice to dissent, siding with Trump.</font></div><div align="left"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div align="left"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Jacqueline Alemany contributed to this report.</font></div><div align="left"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">More from Investigations</font></div><div align="left"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div align="left"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">----</font></div><div align="left"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">lnx</font></div><div align="left"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div align="left"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">...“Ginni” Thomas, the conservative activist and wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, pressed lawmakers to overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 victory not only in Arizona, as previously reported, but also in a second battleground state, Wisconsin, according to emails obtained under state public-records law.</font></div><div class="teaser-content grid-center"><div class="article-body" data-qa="article-body"><div class="article-body" data-qa="article-body"><p data-qa="drop-cap-letter" data-el="text" class="font-copy font--article-body gray-darkest ma-0 pb-md"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Washington Post <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2022/06/10/ginni-thomas-election-arizona-lawmakers/?itid=lk_inline_manual_4" target="blank">reported </a>this year that Ginni Thomas emailed 29 Arizona state lawmakers, some of them twice, in <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2022/05/20/ginni-thomas-arizona-election-emails/?itid=lk_inline_manual_4" target="blank">November and December 2020</a>. She urged them to set aside Biden’s popular-vote victory and “choose” their own presidential electors, despite the fact that the responsibility for choosing electors rests with voters under Arizona state law.</font></p></div></div><div><div class="article-body" data-qa="article-body"><p data-qa="drop-cap-letter" data-el="text" class="font-copy font--article-body gray-darkest ma-0 pb-md"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The new emails show that Thomas also messaged two Republican lawmakers in Wisconsin: state Sen. Kathy Bernier, then chair of the Senate elections committee, and state Rep. Gary Tauchen. Bernier and Tauchen received the email at 10:47 a.m. on Nov. 9, virtually the same time the Arizona lawmakers received a verbatim copy of the message from Thomas. The Bernier email was obtained by The Post, and the Tauchen email was obtained by the watchdog group Documented and provided to The Post.....</font></p></div><div align="left"><div class="article-body" data-qa="article-body"><p data-qa="drop-cap-letter" data-el="text" class="font-copy font--article-body gray-darkest ma-0 pb-md"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Please stand strong in the face of media and political pressure,” read the emails sent Nov. 9, just days after major media organizations called the presidency for Biden. “Please reflect on the awesome authority granted to you by our Constitution. And then please take action to ensure that a clean slate of Electors is chosen for our state.”</font></p></div><div class="article-body" data-qa="article-body"><p data-qa="drop-cap-letter" data-el="text" class="font-copy font--article-body gray-darkest ma-0 pb-md"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Neither Thomas nor her lawyer, Mark Paoletta, responded to requests for comment. A Supreme Court spokeswoman did not respond to a message seeking comment from Clarence Thomas.</font></p></div><div class="article-body" data-qa="article-body"><p data-qa="drop-cap-letter" data-el="text" class="font-copy font--article-body gray-darkest ma-0 pb-md"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Ginni Thomas’s political activism is highly unusual for the spouse of a Supreme Court justice, and for years it has raised questions about potential conflicts of interest for her husband. She has said that the two of them keep their professional lives separate.</font></p></div><div class="article-body" data-qa="article-body"><div class="article-body" data-qa="article-body"><p data-qa="drop-cap-letter" data-el="text" class="font-copy font--article-body gray-darkest ma-0 pb-md"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But scrutiny of the Thomases intensified this year after The Post and CBS News <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/03/24/virginia-thomas-mark-meadows-texts/?itid=lk_inline_manual_15">obtained </a>copies of text messages that Ginni Thomas exchanged with Mark Meadows, then President Donald Trump’s White House chief of staff, in the weeks following the 2020 election. Thomas repeatedly urged Meadows to keep fighting to overturn the election results. After Congress certified Biden’s victory Jan. 6, 2021, she expressed anger at Vice President Mike Pence, who had refused to intervene to keep Trump in office. “We are living through what feels like the end of America,” Thomas wrote to Meadows four days later.</font></p><p data-qa="drop-cap-letter" data-el="text" class="font-copy font--article-body gray-darkest ma-0 pb-md"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">thomas was also in touch during the post-election period with John Eastman, the pro-Trump lawyer who once clerked for her husband, and whose role in the effort to overturn Biden’s win has drawn scrutiny from both the Justice Department and the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot. In early December 2020, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2022/06/16/john-eastman-ginny-thomas-frontliners-substack/?itid=lk_inline_manual_17" target="blank">Thomas invited Eastman </a>to speak at a meeting of Frontliners for Liberty, which she described as a group of grass-roots activists, according to an email that Eastman published online.</font></p></div><div class="article-body" data-qa="article-body"><p data-qa="drop-cap-letter" data-el="text" class="font-copy font--article-body gray-darkest ma-0 pb-md"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The agenda for the meeting has not been publicly disclosed. But a federal judge ruling on which records had to be turned over in response to a subpoena from the committee wrote that the agenda shows Eastman discussed “State legislative actions that can reverse the media-called election for Joe Biden.” U.S. District Judge David O. Carter ordered Eastman to give congressional investigators emails related to Thomas and meetings of her Frontliners group, finding that the meetings “furthered a critical objective of the January 6 plan: to have contested states certify alternate slates of electors for President Trump.”</font></p></div><div class="article-body" data-qa="article-body"><div class="article-body" data-qa="article-body"><p data-qa="drop-cap-letter" data-el="text" class="font-copy font--article-body gray-darkest ma-0 pb-md"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The House committee asked Thomas to sit for a voluntary interview in June. The committee also sought a broad range of documents from her, including any related to plans to overturn the election and all communications with members of Congress and their staff and Justice Department employees, according to a copy of the request published by the conservative <a href="https://dailycaller.com/2022/06/16/january-6-committee-letter-ginni-thomas-testimony-july/">Daily Caller</a>.</font></p></div></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">----</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">ref</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" /><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">no lnx</font></font></font></font></div><div><b>Ginni Thomas pressed 29 Ariz. lawmakers to help overturn Trump’s defeat, emails show</b></div><div>
</div><div>By Emma Brown</div><div><b>June 10, 2022 </b></div><div>Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, speaks at a conference in 2017. (Susan Walsh/AP)</div><div>
</div><div>Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, pressed 29 Republican state lawmakers in Arizona — 27 more than previously known — to set aside Joe Biden’s popular vote victory and “choose” presidential electors, according to emails obtained by The Washington Post.</div><div>
</div><div>The Post reported last month that Thomas sent emails to two Arizona House members, in November and December 2020, urging them to help overturn Biden’s win by selecting presidential electors — a responsibility that belongs to Arizona voters under state law. Thomas sent the messages using FreeRoots, an online platform intended to make it easy to send pre-written emails to multiple elected officials.</div><div>Democratic lawmakers renewed calls to create a code of ethical conduct for the U.S. Supreme Court amid mounting scrutiny of Justice Thomas and his wife. (Video: The Washington Post)</div><div>
</div><div>New documents show that Thomas indeed used the platform to reach many lawmakers simultaneously. On Nov. 9, she sent identical emails to 20 members of the Arizona House and seven Arizona state senators. That represents more than half of the Republican members of the state legislature at the time.</div><div>
</div><div>The message, just days after media organizations called the race for Biden in Arizona and nationwide, urged lawmakers to “stand strong in the face of political and media pressure” and claimed that the responsibility to choose electors was “yours and yours alone.” They had “power to fight back against fraud” and “ensure that a clean slate of Electors is chosen,” the email said.</div><div>
</div><div>Among the lawmakers who received the email was then-Rep. Anthony Kern, a Stop the Steal supporter who lost his reelection bid in November 2020 and then joined U.S. Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Tex.) and others as a plaintiff in a lawsuit against Vice President Mike Pence, a last-ditch effort to overturn Biden’s victory. Kern was photographed outside the Capitol during the riot on Jan. 6 but has said he did not enter the building, according to local media reports.</div><div>
</div><div>Kern did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday. He is seeking his party’s nomination for a seat in the Arizona state Senate and has been endorsed by former president Donald Trump.</div><div>
</div><div>On Dec. 13, the day before members of the electoral college were slated to cast their votes and seal Biden’s victory, Thomas emailed 22 House members and one senator. “Before you choose your state’s Electors … consider what will happen to the nation we all love if you don’t stand up and lead,” the email said. It linked to a video of a man urging swing-state lawmakers to “put things right” and “not give in to cowardice.”</div><div>
</div><div>Speaker of the House Russell “Rusty” Bowers and Rep. Shawnna Bolick, the two recipients previously identified, told The Post in May that the outreach from Thomas had no bearing on their decisions about how to handle claims of election fraud.</div><div>
</div><div>But the revelation that Ginni Thomas was directly involved in pressing them to override the popular vote — an act that would have been without precedent in the modern era — intensified questions about whether her husband should recuse himself from cases related to the 2020 presidential election and attempts to subvert it. Ginni Thomas’s status as a leading conservative political activist has set her apart from other spouses of Supreme Court justices.</div><div>
</div><div>Ginni Thomas did not respond to requests seeking comment for this report. She has long insisted that she and her husband operate in separate professional lanes.</div><div>
</div><div>A spokeswoman for the Supreme Court did not respond to questions for Clarence Thomas.</div><div>
</div><div>The Post obtained the emails under Arizona’s public records law, which — unlike the laws in some other key 2020 swing states — allows the public to access emails, text messages and other written communications to and from state lawmakers.</div><div>
</div><div>In March, The Post and CBS News obtained text messages that Ginni Thomas sent in the weeks after the 2020 election to Mark Meadows, then Trump’s chief of staff. The messages showed Thomas spreading false claims and urging Meadows to keep fighting for Trump to remain in the White House.</div><div>
</div><div>“That conflict of interest just screams at you,” said Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.), who serves on the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, on MSNBC in response to The Post’s May report revealing the emails to Bolick and Bowers.</div><div>
</div><div>Schiff pointed to Clarence Thomas’s decision not to recuse when Trump went to the Supreme Court to try to block the House committee from getting access to his White House records. The high court declined to block the release of those documents. Thomas, siding with Trump, was the only justice to dissent.</div><div>
</div><div>“Here you have the wife of a Supreme Court justice,” Schiff said, trying to “get Arizona to improperly cast aside the votes of millions. And also, to add to it, her husband on the Supreme Court, writing a dissent in a case arguing against providing records to Congress that might have revealed some of these same e-mails.”</div><div>
</div><div>After the May article, Mark Paoletta — a longtime ally of the Thomases who, as a member of the George H.W. Bush administration, played a role in the confirmation of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court — confirmed that Ginni Thomas signed the emails, but he sought to minimize her role.</div><div>
</div><div>“Ginni signed her name to a pre-written form letter that was signed by thousands of citizens and sent to state legislators across the country,” Paoletta wrote on Twitter on May 20. He described Thomas’s activities as “a private citizen joining a letter writing campaign” and added, sarcastically, “How disturbing, what a threat!”</div><div>
</div><div>The letter-writing campaigns were organized on FreeRoots.com, which advertised itself as a platform to amplify grass-roots advocacy across the political spectrum. A Post review of its archived webpages shows that it was heavily used in late 2020 by groups seeking to overturn the presidential election results.</div><div>
</div><div>One of those groups was Every Legal Vote, which organized the campaign to send the message that Ginni Thomas sent on Nov. 9. In those first days after the Nov. 3 election, Every Legal Vote described itself online as a “labor of love by American citizens, in partnership” with the nonprofit United in Purpose, according to webpages preserved by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. United in Purpose, which harnesses data to galvanize conservative Christian voters, in recent years hosted luncheons where Thomas presented her Impact Awards to right-wing leaders.</div><div>
</div><div>On Dec. 14, 2020, Biden electors in Arizona cast their votes, after the election results were certified by Secretary of State Katie Hobbs (D) and Gov. Doug Ducey (R).</div><div>
</div><div>Trump electors met in Arizona that day and signed a document declaring themselves the state’s “duly elected and qualified Electors.” One of them was Kern, the outgoing state representative.</div><div>
</div><div>Kern was among more than a dozen lawmakers who signed on to a letter to Congress that same day calling for the state’s electoral votes to go to Trump or “be nullified completely until a full forensic audit can be conducted.”</div><div>
</div><div>The lawmakers’ letter was an exhibit in Kern and Gohmert’s lawsuit asking a federal court to rule that Pence had the “exclusive authority and sole discretion” in deciding which electoral votes to count for a given state. The plaintiffs asked the Supreme Court to intervene after the case was dismissed in lower courts. The day after the Jan. 6 insurrection, the court declined in an unsigned order.</div><div>More from Investigations</div><div>
</div><div><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2022/05/20/ginni-thomas-arizona-election-emails">https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2022/05/20/ginni-thomas-arizona-election-emails</a>/?itid=lk_inline_manual_4</div><div>
</div><div><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/what-is-ginni-thomas-saying-now-the-evolution-of-an-unusually-outspoken-supreme-court-spouse/2018/12/26/883da960-f753-11e8-8c9a-860ce2a8148f_story.html">https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/what-is-ginni-thomas-saying-now-the-evolution-of-an-unusually-outspoken-supreme-court-spouse/2018/12/26/883da960-f753-11e8-8c9a-860ce2a8148f_story.html</a>?itid=lk_inline_manual_28&itid=lk_inline_manual_16</div></div></div><div align="left"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div align="left"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" /><div align="left"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">wapo no lnx</font></div><div align="left">INVESTIGATIONS</div><div align="left"><b>John Eastman says Ginni Thomas invited him to speak on ‘election litigation’</b></div><div align="left"><b>
</b></div><div align="left">By Emma Brown, Jacqueline Alemany and Josh Dawsey </div><div align="left">June 16, 2022 </div><div align="left">
</div><div align="left">Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, speaks at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Oxon Hill, Md., on Feb. 23, 2017. (Susan Walsh/AP)</div><div align="left">John Eastman, the lawyer who played a key role in efforts to pressure Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the 2020 election, confirmed Thursday that the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas invited him a month after the election to speak at a meeting she was helping to organize.</div><div align="left">
</div><div align="left">Eastman’s disclosure came a day after The Washington Post reported that the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol had obtained email correspondence between him and Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, a conservative activist and staunch supporter of former president Donald Trump. Individuals involved in the investigation said the emails — which have not been made public — showed that Thomas’s efforts to help overturn the election were more extensive than previously known, The Post reported.</div><div align="left">=</div><div>
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