seth a substack 2

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8 24 ymail proof

the way Elon Musk wants to run Twitter—with no content moderation, a process he deems too expensive, especially as he wants to amplify far-right disinfo via algorithm—is illegal in most countries, which is why he often battles with foreign governments. Yet when far-right governments demand Musk silence their left-wing opponents, he complies immediately; he’s infamous for agreeing to foreign censorship requests far more than his supposedly censorious predecessors at Twitter.

But Brazil is a special case: when Musk was, as a former Donald Trump adviser, seeking to buy Twitter, he was thrilled Brazil was run by far-right neofascist Trump friend Jair Bolsonaro, but then Bolsonaro lost his reelection bid to a left-wing opponent and it greatly angered Musk. Like Trump, Bolsonaro tried to stage a violent coup; unlike Trump, Bolsonaro and his lieutenants faced consequences when their coup plot failed.

When Brazilian authorities demanded that [far-right-government-accommodating] Elon Musk ban far-right insurrectionists in Brazil, he refused; when Brazil brought Twitter’s local legal representative to court, she resigned; when Brazil ordered Twitter to name a new rep—as Brazilian law requires companies have local legal counsel so they can be notified of lawsuits—Musk flatly refused and began issuing serious threats against Brazilian authorities that were tinged with threats, leading to Twitter being shuttered in Brazil.

The Brazilian Supreme Court has acted within its authority and responsibility, and this situation has nothing to do with free speech. It’s about Musk’s contempt for a validly elected left-wing government—and his nostalgia for a violent neofascist coup.

5 23 y mail

{Note: The thousands of endnotes—each pointing to major-media citations—that appear in the print edition of this book are exclusively in that volume. Click here to purchase Proof of Collusion (by Seth Abramson, first published by Simon & Schuster in 2018) in print. If you would like to comment in the comment fields below, feel free to do so whether you are a paid Proof subscriber or not. Comments may be lightly moderated as/if it becomes necessary. Note that Proof of Collusion is only 300 pages of a four-book, 2,500-page series, so this volume is just one piece of a massive trove of evidence relating to the political career of Donald Trump.

This text has been carefully reviewed by a team of lawyers and professional fact-checkers at a cost in the tens of thousands of dollars. See the print edition of this book for all citations and endnotes, which are implicitly incorporated into this republication. This republication also incorporates all five volumes of the 2019 Senate Intelligence Committee Report on Russian Interference in the 2016 United States Presidential Election and the two-volume Mueller Report, which can be found here and here, respectively. Any disparity between this book and those reports—though this author isn’t aware of any—should be resolved in favor of the latter.

Any typographical errors in the text below have been accidentally introduced as a result of the transition of the text from a print to a digital format, and do not appear in the print edition. The text here is otherwise identical to the text of the print edition, excepting a small number of minor edits made to maximize clarity. The substance of the volume remains untouched.}

Table of Contents

The chapter you are now reading is in bold. Any chapters already published are active links to those chapters as published here at Proof.

Introduction: A Theory of the Case

Date: October 2018

Chapter 1: Russia and the Trumps

Dates: 1987 to 2012

Chapter 2: Trump and the Agalarovs

Date: 2013

Chapter 3: Kompromat

Date: November 2013

Chapter 4: The Campaign Begins

Dates: 2013 to 2015

Chapter 5: The National Security Advisory Committee

Dates: January to March 2016

Chapter 6: The Mayflower Hotel

Date: April 2016

Chapter 7: The Back Channels

Dates: May to June 2016

Chapter 8: The Republican National Convention

Date: July 2016

Chapter 9: The Hunt for Her Emails

Dates: July to September 2016

Chapter 10: The October Surprise

Date: October 2016

Chapter 11: The Transition

Dates: November 2016 to January 2017

Chapter 12: The Firings of Flynn and Comey

Dates: February to May 2017

Chapter 13: Testimony and Plea

Dates: June to December 2017

Chapter 14: A Nation in Suspense

Date: 2018

Afterword: The Death and Rebirth of America

Date: 2019

Introduction: A Theory of the Case

October 2018

The Trump-Russia investigation may be the most multifaceted, wide-ranging, high-stakes federal criminal investigation in American history. It crosses continents and decades and has swept into its vortex more than four hundred people, millions of pages of documentary evidence, and scores of unanswered questions about the state of our democracy. It has already resulted in dozens of indictments and a host of guilty pleas and prison sentences. If Donald Trump colluded with Kremlin agents to secure his election or to benefit his real estate empire down the road, or if he knows that any of his associates did so, it gives the Kremlin leverage over him in a way that endangers our national security and even our national sovereignty. Whatever your political views, and whatever your opinion of President Trump, you have a vested interest in finding out the truth about Trump-Russia collusion if you want America to be governed by the consent of its people and not the Kremlin.

In view of all this, you may be surprised to learn that, as a legal term, “collusion” is meaningless outside antitrust law. In lay terms, collusion is simply a clandestine agreement between two or more parties, implicit or explicit, to act in a mutually beneficial way. That collusion is always clandestine underscores that it is almost always a transgression, no matter the venue or the participants. That certain acts of collusion can violate criminal statutes means that collusive behavior is sometimes criminal behavior as well. The notion of an American politician colluding with a foreign power, let alone a hostile one, is antithetical to our values and has been since the nation declared its independence in 1776.

Because foreign nationals are not permitted by U.S. law to interfere in our elections, foreign governments generally refrain from commenting on our electoral processes and certainly do not seek to contribute money or other benefits to our candidates. Doing so is a federal crime. In the few instances in which a U.S. politician has been caught receiving money or in-kind contributions from foreign entities, it’s been regarded as a rare scandal. Should it also be discovered that the politician and his staff reached out to that foreign entity with the aim of securing a hard-money or in-kind contribution, the scandal would become generationally significant. And should that politician be running for president, and should the nation he sought contributions from be a hostile foreign power that was waging cyberwar on America’s critical infrastructure, that generationally significant scandal would become unprecedented.

In short, it is likely that the Trump-Russia story ends with Americans choosing a new archetype for “American traitor” besides Benedict Arnold.

Proof of collusion in the Trump-Russia case is in plain sight. When the president or his allies say “there was no collusion,” what they mean is that the type of collusion the president undoubtedly engaged in does not constitute a criminal offense—whether or not it constitutes an impeachable one. And this latter distinction is important: Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani has been at great pains in the latter half of 2018 to say that the Trump-Russia case is predominantly a political one, and to the extent most legal scholars believe a sitting president can’t be indicted, he is correct. The House of Representatives has to vote to bring charges against a president, and the U.S. Senate has to preside over his trial and find him guilty.

In this current climate, there is a chance that may not happen.

This said, it so happens that much of this president’s collusion may in fact be criminal. The particular forms of collusion in which Trump, members of his family who are also political advisers, and his presidential campaign engaged may include Aiding and Abetting or Conspiracy connected to Election Fraud, Computer Crimes, Bribery, and Money Laundering, as well as acts of Witness Tampering, Making False Statements, Obstruction of Justice, and much more.

Conspiracy occurs when two or more persons have a “meeting of the minds” and set as their ambition the commission of a criminal act. The federal Conspiracy statute is violated when the parties take an “act in furtherance” of the commission of the intended crime. But the crime does not have to be committed for a violation of the Conspiracy statute to be found.

While several chapters of this book contain original reporting, the bulk of Proof of Collusion aggregates and curates information rather than reporting it. My hope is that readers of this book will not only benefit from this presentation but also find, in this text, many opportunities to discover new connections within the curated pieces of evidence.

In America’s adversarial system of justice, those designated to prosecute a case are obligated by the rules of professional ethics to be relentlessly zealous advocates for their position. The system doesn’t work, otherwise; without zealous advocates, we might as well adopt the so-called inquisitorial system of justice employed in most of Europe’s courtrooms rather than the one we have here in America. To an outside observer, zealous advocacy often looks like radicalism—but in fact it’s a civic duty for trial advocates, and one that’s emotionally and intellectually exhausting to fulfill. That’s certainly the case with my ongoing public accounting of the Trump-Russia investigation, though the work is made easier, I’ll confess, by the almost historic absence (and I say this advisedly) of any exculpatory evidence suggesting the president of the United States did not conspire with our enemies to violate federal law.

I make this statement not as a political partisan but as an American citizen and legal professional who for many years pored over thousands of police reports, witness statements, lab results, and documentary and photographic evidence looking for any trace of information that could exculpate my clients. I am trained, by years of experience and habit, to search for an alternative explanation besides the obvious one: that the defendant is indeed a criminal, responsible for either the charges as leveled against him or some lesser offense included in or ancillary to the ones he’s currently facing. That roughly 95 percent of defendants in criminal cases in America accept responsibility for their actions and enter a guilty plea in exchange for a fair punishment is at times a testament to law enforcement and at times an indictment of our ability to give defendants the resources to adequately defend themselves. Most commonly, though, it denotes a body of evidence that is overwhelmingly inculpatory.

It’s within this framework of experience, principle, and philosophy that I say that I have never before encountered a criminal investigation in which the entirety of the evidence is as damning as it is in the Trump-Russia investigation. From a professional rather than partisan perspective, the conclusion of the Trump-Russia scandal is all but certain: an untold number of indictments, prison sentences, and dispiriting revelations about public figures, all of which will momentarily cast doubt on our ability to move forward as a functioning democracy. That the evidence against Trump and his associates is so thoroughly in one direction makes it all the more startling that there has yet to be any published defense of Trump or his allies on the facts whose contentions would be taken seriously in a court of law.

I’m as surprised by this fact as anyone, especially given who the defendant is here and what is so conspicuously at stake in this investigation.

As a longtime criminal defense lawyer, I’ve long sympathized most—philosophically, at least—with the role of defense counsel in our adversarial system of justice. Defense teams are commonly under-resourced, outgunned by a state or federal apparatus with a built-in investigatory arm, a judiciary systematically tilted toward the needs and values of the government, and well-trained prosecutors who are ruthlessly ambitious if not always efficient. But Donald Trump is a different type of defendant; his defense team is a different sort of defense team; and the defense he and his team have mounted so far is not recognizable to an attorney as any sort of legal defense at all.

From his Twitter feed, Trump daily launches baseless ad hominem attacks against prosecutors, investigators, and witnesses alike, and he does so with a seeming impunity from the allegations of Witness Tampering and Obstruction of Justice that any of my clients at public defender offices in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, or D.C. would have faced had they behaved similarly. His attorneys daily play semantic games that don’t so much advance their client’s interests as function as a pervasive campaign to misinform Americans about how our system of justice works and why.

For instance, their contention that collusion isn’t a crime goes beyond mere rhetoric and into a profoundly unethical misrepresentation of the real state of affairs: within the umbrella term collusion there are dozens of federal criminal statutes that federal law enforcement can and does routinely enforce. As for the broader defense strategy Trump and his attorneys have fashioned against his critics, the strategy seems to be a political rather than a legal one. Every time I see Giuliani or Jay Sekulow on television implying, if not outright alleging, a “deep state” conspiracy to frame President Trump, I do not see a fellow “brother at the bar” but a high-priced political operator.

This book is a compilation, at times in summary form and at times in minute detail, of not just the evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign (now administration) and Russian nationals, but also of the criminality born of that collusion. The book’s subchapters are drawn from major-media news stories linked to on my Twitter feed since January 2017 and supplementary news stories and factual updates supporting and expanding upon the materials available on my feed. Taken in sum, these articles, threads, and analyses compose the current state of affairs in the Trump-Russia investigation—at least that part of the investigation that is open to public view.

An accounting of this evidence is made necessary not just by the frenetic pace of Trump-Russia news and the gravity of the investigation behind it, but the fact that Americans are likely to remain in the dark for months. What originally was six investigations in Congress—the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the House Judiciary Committee, the Senate Judiciary Committee, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, and the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism—is now just one: the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. The other investigations have either been shut down or turned their attention toward harassing, impeaching, and in some cases even seeking criminal charges against the law enforcement officials and U.S. intelligence partners who have been, and in many cases still are, investigating the president and his team.

While a separate congressional investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election—better classified as a “hot” cyberwar than “interference”—is ongoing, it has yet to lead to new election safeguards instituted by the Trump administration or to new funding for election security from Congress. Meanwhile, the one professional, nonpartisan investigation of Trump-Russia ties, conducted by Special Counsel Robert Mueller at the Department of Justice, is at once virtually leak-free and under constant assault and threat of termination by Trump, his allies in Congress, and his advocates in the media.

The result of all this chaos is that Americans are either misled by partisan evidentiary summaries released by Trump allies in Congress; disheartened by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and its lack of progress (and its odd unwillingness to subpoena critical witnesses); or bewildered by the lack of information forthcoming from the Office of the Special Counsel under the direction of the Department of Justice. Every few weeks or months a new indictment or plea hits the news, or a leak from the White House by an attention-seeking staffer gives the public some insight into what might be going on behind the scenes. But it’s never enough; nothing ever seems to get resolved. This is the state of America in 2018: we wait for news on the possibility that our president may be beholden to a foreign power and the final verdict never arrives, despite feeling tantalizingly close.

America deserves and demands an accounting of the evidence compiled by media outlets, congressional investigators, and law enforcement in advance of a final, comprehensive special counsel report that might not arrive until mid- to late 2019 or even 2020. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who is currently overseeing the investigation, isn’t obligated to make that report public once he receives it—though as a fellow attorney I certainly hope and expect he will, for the good of the nation. So the public might never get the full details of what went on between the Kremlin and Donald Trump, the Republican Party, and allies of Trump in and out of government.

Proof of Collusion aims to move forward the public discussion of the most significant criminal investigation of our lives. But readers should know that there is one type of evidence that is entirely absent from this book: financial records. Breaking a forty-year tradition, Trump refused to release his tax returns prior to Election Day, and we’ve since come to learn that they will never be released. And, breaking a tradition much longer than forty years, the U.S. Congress has refused to subpoena or otherwise force the disclosure of any financial records through any of its investigations, even though they may well hinge on the flow of money into shell corporations and hidden bank accounts. Even the Treasury Department has recently been accused of failing to turn over documents that might have informed America much sooner of suspicious transactions involving accused Russian spy Maria Butina (also spelled “Mariia”) and her boyfriend, GOP operative and NRA member Paul Erickson.

Unfortunately, these are derelictions of duty and lapses of honor that no public investigation can remedy. We in the public do not have subpoena power, and can only encourage those who do to do their jobs by how we vote every two years and during special elections. So while the Trump-Russia investigation may end up revealing one of the most audacious money-laundering schemes in the last century, perhaps involving one or more European banks or banks in Cyprus under investigation for Russian money laundering, this book cannot go there yet.

That said, the investigatory model my Twitter feed and this book uses to contribute to public discussion of the Trump-Russia case relies on the development of a “theory of the case”—a narrative that connects all other narratives. A good theory of the case must be dynamic as well as encompassing; it must adapt as new facts emerge and quickly supplant old presuppositions with fresh analyses. To develop a theory, a criminal investigator must first know all the facts of a case, which is a task that, with a fact pattern as complex and wide-ranging as that of the Trump-Russia investigation, can feel daunting or even impossible. Nevertheless, a committed criminal investigator builds a timeline of events, a mental gallery of major witnesses and suspects, and a compendium of hard and circumstantial evidence. In doing so, the investigator is able to author a grand narrative that works in concert with, rather than against, the presently available evidence.

In the case of the ongoing Trump-Russia probe, the only plausible theory of the case that coordinates with all the existing evidence is that Donald Trump and a core group of ten to twenty aides, associates, and allies conspired with a hostile foreign power to sell that power control over America’s foreign policy in exchange for financial reward and—eventually—covert election assistance. This theory doesn’t contend that anyone in the president’s sphere participated in any hacking or even knew about Russia’s cyber-intrusions in advance; it doesn’t allege that the conspiracy many members of the Trump team were involved in was finely wrought, as opposed to chaotic, amateurish, and quickly capable of producing a mountain of incriminating evidence; it doesn’t require that all elements of its grand narrative take place in private, as indeed many of them occurred in the plain sight of millions of Americans; and it doesn’t allege that any of the actions involved rose to the level of statutory Treason—a federal criminal statute that applies only if America is in a declared state of war.

What this theory of the case does do is explain decades of suspicious behavior by Donald Trump, his family, and his closest associates, behavior that suggests that these bad actors expected and received a massive financial reward for taking policy positions friendly to the Kremlin and adverse to the interests of the United States.

The theory further maintains that once Trump had sufficient knowledge of Russian crimes to be legally responsible for not aiding and abetting them with promises of policies unilaterally beneficial to the Kremlin—a point Trump reached on August 17, 2016, at the very latest—any additional actions taken to advance Russian interests were criminal. The theory organizes a clear and discrete roster of those Trump aides, associates, and allies who were complicit in Trump’s financially motivated appeasement of a hostile foreign power, and in so doing it explains why nearly every name on that list attaches to a Trump campaign, transition, or administration figure who has lied about his associations with Russian nationals.

In a criminal investigation, even a single significant lie can signal a witness’s or suspect’s guilty conscience. In the Trump-Russia investigation, the combined half-truths and outright falsehoods spread by ten to twenty “Team Trump” coconspirators now number in the dozens. Right now, the inaction of congressional Republicans—a failure to prosecute those who have lied to Congress or to subpoena those who won’t speak to Congress at all—enables these lies to continue.

Proof of Collusion aims to provide a careful, comprehensive, and compelling presentation of the evidence supporting the only theory of the case that answers the question of what’s happening in America right now and how we can stop it.

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Donald Trump’s NFT Scam May Have Been Part of a January 6 Cover-Up

As bizarre as it sounds, the backstory to how Trump made $4.5 million on $99 NFTs in just twelve hours suggests it’s not only the NFTs that are scams, but even the purpose of the whole enterprise.

https://sethabramson.substack.com/p/new-the-coming-collapse-of-donald-50c

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NEW: The Coming Collapse of Donald Trump’s January 6 Conspiracy, Part 5: Ginni Thomas

This shocking new PROOF series details mounting evidence that Trump's seditious January 6 conspiracy is at the point of collapse because of the cowardice, fear, and perfidy of his co-conspirators.

Seth Abramson

Jan 30

Introduction

On Insurrection Eve—January 5, 2021—the epicenter of Trumpist coup plotting in the United States, the White House excepted, wasn’t the now-infamous Willard Hotel in Washington, but rather Trump’s so-called “private residence” in the nation’s capital: the Trump Town House at Trump International Hotel. Presiding over the war room in the Town House was none other than Donald Trump Jr., the president’s eldest son. Just as crucial to the plotting under way that fateful night was Trump Jr.’s then–secret fiancée Kimberly Guilfoyle, a leading presidential adviser who spent part of the hours-long war-room session speaking by phone with domestic terrorist Ali Alexander, co-leader of the Stop the Steal “movement” with Trump friend and adviser Roger Stone.

Within the Trump Town House on Insurrection Eve, the epicenter of the epicenter was a blue-walled conference room with a flag at one end echoing Ali Alexander’s (and other insurrectionists’) favored refrain on Insurrection Eve: “1776!” Alexander’s favored use of the date has long been the phrase, “1776 [violence] is always an option!”

Below you can watch the infamous Arizonan Alexander on Insurrection Eve—wearing one of the blaze-orange hats his Arizona Proud Boy friends wore as they launched the attack on the Capitol (even as Proud Boys from outside Arizona wore the same color on their armbands and combat helmets)—shortly before Donald Trump Jr.’s betrothed called him from Trump’s private residence at Trump International. In the video, he is again using “1776” as code for a violent revolution against the federal government:

Twitter avatar for @RightWingWatch

Right Wing Watch

@RightWingWatch

“Victory or death!” Stop the Steal organizer Ali Alexander tells Trump rally the day before the Capitol insurrection that “1776 is always an option” and “our government should be afraid.”

January 18th 2021

152 Retweets299 Likes

The photo below this paragraph was taken 36 months before the Trump International war room opened its doors. In it, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Ginni Thomas, stands beside the leader of Trump’s preeminent Insurrection Eve war room. The two are posing in the very room that would become, it appears, the seat of a seditious conspiracy to overthrow a democratic election. In the background you can see the “1776” meme which would, years later, be a harrowing call to rebellion against America. Innocuous as it may seem at first blush, in retrospect the photograph below seems like a foreshadowing.

ABOVE: Ginni Thomas (l) and Donald Trump Jr. (r) at Trump International in 2018.

Of course, January 2018 isn’t January 2021. A photo of Ginni Thomas in a room later used as part of a seditious conspiracy, even if she appears in it beside a leader of the said conspiracy—Trump Jr.’s speech on January 6 was just as incendiary and aimed at insurrection as his father’s, as Proof has detailed—doesn’t indicate that Thomas was involved in efforts to overturn the 2020 election. That would require evidence that, in late 2020 and early 2021, Thomas worked to advance the cause the photo above echoes.

Increasingly, it appears such evidence exists. This article will detail a great deal of it.

Before it does, however, Proof must debunk the most widely spread myth about Ginni Thomas’s participation in Trump’s insurrection: that she helped organize the busloads of insurrectionists who arrived in Washington on Insurrection Eve, doing so to aid the aforementioned Alexander and Turning Point USA chief Charlie Kirk. While it’s true that Alexander has now confirmed he and Kirk orchestrated such busing in advance of the storming of the Capitol—and while it’s clear that some of those so aided by Kirk and Alexander later committed federal crimes on January 6—there is no evidence that Ginni Thomas was part of that effort, so this Proof report does not address it at all.

The reason many Americans believed Thomas was involved in the logistics of January 6 at such a granular level is partly owing to her reputation—an unfair extrapolation—and partly owing to her own public statements about January 6, for which, of course, she is directly responsible. As Slate has correctly reported via journalist Mark Joseph Stern, Ginni Thomas’s declarations on Insurrection Day gave many Americans pause:

Twitter avatar for @mjs_DC

Mark Joseph Stern

@mjs_DC

On the morning of Jan. 6, Ginni Thomas—wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas—endorsed the protest demanding that Congress overturn the election, then sent her “LOVE” to the demonstrators, who violently overtook the Capitol several hours later. She has not posted since.

Image

January 8th 2021

43,687 Retweets71,985 Likes

As Proof has exhaustively detailed—for instance, in recounting the violent rhetoric of Ali Alexander in the weeks leading up to January 6, the equally violent rhetoric of the insurrection’s leaders (including Alexander) on January 5, the Trumpist riot at Black Lives Matter Plaza just 15 hours before the Capitol was stormed, the Secret Service report informing the White House that the Capitol would be unsafe by January 6, and the near-universal knowledge of federal legislators that there was danger all around them on January 6 even before the Capitol was breached—by the morning of January 6 anyone with any political savvy, a group that certainly includes Ginni Thomas, knew that events at the Capitol could get bloody. For the wife of a Supreme Court Justice to have publicly declared her “LOVE” for a huge mob gathering in and around the White House Ellipse on January 6; for her to have then added to that already inappropriate adulation, “GOD BLESS EACH OF YOU STANDING UP”; and for her to have done all this despite being an attorney and thus an “officer of the court” is truly appalling.

But it is not, in itself, criminal. And it has nothing to do with any buses that arrived in Washington carrying the soon-to-be criminals to whom Thomas sent her ex ante love and blessing. These words require of Thomas an apology, but not a DOJ investigation.

In the event, Ginni Thomas did issue an apology—though not to the nation to which she owed it.

Rather, as the Washington Post reported a month after the attack on the U.S. Capitol, Thomas sent a private apology to a listserv of former federal employees—ex-clerks of her husband—that she had been spamming with insurrectionist rhetoric in the lead-up to Insurrection Day. While Thomas’s self-admittedly unwelcome spread of such rhetoric in a space frequented by former federal employees underscores her state of mind in the weeks before the Capitol was breached, it still does not a crime make.

As for Thomas’s post-riot statements on Facebook the morning of the insurrection, they were less conciliatory: she merely appended a clarifier to them (“[Note: written before violence in US Capitol]”), then made her Facebook feed invisible to the public.

Ginni Thomas: A History

Ginni Thomas’s far-right activism well predated her marriage to Clarence Thomas, so she was certainly under no obligation to brook it simply because she and now-Justice Thomas fell in love with one another. This said, Proof takes the same view many U.S. journalists do in opining that Justice Thomas has committed serious ethical violations by consistently failing to recuse himself from cases directly or indirectly involving his wife’s activism. This is not the same, however, as declaring Ginni Thomas ineligible for such activism. Indeed, Thomas has had an impressive professional career that has seen her be, as a Washington Post feature once observed, “a staffer for a Republican congressman, a[ ] spokeswoman at the U.S. Chamber of [Commerce], and a[ ] deputy assistant secretary at the Department of Labor.” The New Yorker writes that Thomas “has held so many leadership or advisory positions at conservative pressure groups that it’s hard to keep track of them.”

If there is a reason to take Ginni Thomas to task for her decades of activism it is that it has, in many instances, been immoral and dangerous. And, as the Post notes, citing an EEOC official familiar with her marriage to Justice Thomas, not only is she “very smart and a very good lobbyist” but someone who is willing to “discuss[ ]” (and thus, implicitly, lobby for) political positions with her husband—even those that might be relevant to his work. Another friend of the couple who is also from the EEOC, Ricky Silberman, told the Post the following on the question of whether Ginni Thomas has exerted influence on her husband regarding matters that might come (or already are) before the Supreme Court:

I’m married to a federal judge and he influences me and I influence him. That’s part of being close to someone—we certainly have discussions about cases [before Silberman’s husband’s federal court]….[the Thomases are] great intellectual soul mates who talk a lot about ideas and social policy.

With this said, here’s just a brief overview of how Ginni Thomas’s “ideas” have been reflected in her own work.

Ginni Thomas’ Far-Right Activism

(1) Thomas publicly professed a belief in an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory insisting that Jewish philanthropist George Soros led a “coup against [then-president] Trump.” She has also approvingly cited the false and anti-Semitic claim that the foreign-born Soros is “really running the Democratic Party.” (More.)

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(2)She falsely claims “the Obama administration illegally spied on Trump’s 2016 campaign, then tried to rig the election against him.” This particularly insidious piece of disinformation underscores that Ginni Thomas supports Trump’s Big Lie—which predates the 2020 presidential election inasmuch as its central metanarrative is the falsehood (pushed not just by Trumpist insurrectionists but the Kremlin) that the Democratic Party has been working to steal presidential elections for years. (More.)

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(3) During the 2020 general election, Thomas falsely alleged “corrupt [collusion]” between the national media and the Biden campaign. Meanwhile, as the Associated Press reports, she was “using her Facebook page toamplify unsubstantiated claims of corruption by Joe Biden” long known to originate in a Kremlin disinformation campaign (see the thousands of citations in Macmillan’s Proof of Corruption). (More.)

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(4) During the 2020 presidential campaign she also amplified a Kremlin-supported disinformation campaign called Walk Away, which, per Slate, “purport[ed] to spotlight Democrats who became Republicans under Trump. At least two individuals featured in the ‘Walk Away’ series, both Black, were actually models from royalty-free stock photos.”

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(5) Her public writings cite afar-right anti-vaxxer group which claims Bill Gates has secretly conspired with unnamed entities to “use the COVID vaccine to kill people.”(More.)

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(6) She has called Black Lives Matter a consortium of “radical extremists seeking to foment a cultural revolution because they hate America.” (More.)

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(7) Decades years after her husband Clarence sexually harassed his federal-employee subordinate Anita Hill, she decided to call up Hill out of the blue and—if you can believe this—initiate a new course of harassment against the now–professor. (More.)

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(8) As reported recently by Jane Mayer in the New Yorker, Thomas, who “runs a small political-lobbying firm, Liberty Consulting”, has “declared that America is in existential danger because of the ‘deep state’ and the ‘fascist left,’ which includes ‘transsexual fascists.’”

One particularly illuminating anecdote reported by the New Yorker regarding Ginni Thomas’s political activities is worth reciting in full, as it relates to an organization—Groundswell—that will shortly become central to this Proof article. It also references an award Ginni Thomas apparently devised to advance her own political interests (a chit called the Impact Award) which likewise features in the second half of this report.

Frank Gaffney, a defense hawk best known for having made feverish claims suggesting that [former president Barack] Obama is a Muslim and that [former Iraqi president] Saddam Hussein’s regime was involved in the [1995] Oklahoma City bombings….was a colleague of Ginni Thomas’s at Groundswell as far back as 2013. Gaffney was a proponent of Trump’s reactionary immigration policies, including, most vociferously, of the Administration’s Muslim travel ban. As these restrictions were hit by lawsuits, Gaffney’s nonprofit, the Center for Security Policy, signed the first of two big contracts with [Ginni Thomas’s] Liberty Consulting. According to documents that Gaffney’s group filed with the IRS, in 2017 and 2018 it paid Ginni Thomas a total of more than $200,000.

It’s not entirely clear where Gaffney’s nonprofit got the funds to hire Liberty Consulting. But….one of the biggest donors to Gaffney’s group in 2017 was a pro-Trump political organization, Making America Great, whose chairman, the heiress Rebekah Mercer, was among Trump’s biggest backers. While $200,000 was being passed from Trump backers to Gaffney to Ginni Thomas, the Supreme Court agreed to hear legal challenges to Trump’s travel restrictions. In August, 2017, Gaffney and six other advocates submitted an amicus brief to the Court in support of the restrictions, arguing that “the challenge of Islam must be confronted.”

That December, as the case was still playing out, Ginni Thomas bestowed one of her Impact Awards on Gaffney, introducing him “as an encourager to me and a great friend” but giving no hint that his group was paying her firm [over $200,000]. The Impact ceremony was held at Trump International Hotel, and, according to another guest….Justice Thomas was in attendance.

….

Justice Thomas, in his [federal financial] disclosures in 2017 and 2018, failed to mention the payments [to his wife] from Gaffney’s group. Instead, he put down a curiously low book value for his wife’s lobbying firm, claiming in both years that her company was worth only between $15,000 and $50,000.

That Ginni Thomas would later successfully lobby Donald Trump—in major part via a private dinner at the White House with the president and Melania Trump, a dinner Justice Thomas attended with her—to “give in to [her] months-long campaign to bring her, [fellow Groundsweller] Gaffney, and several other associates to the White House to press the President on policy and personnel issues” underscores how her Groundswell operation played into her dealings with Trump in particular (see below for more). It also presages broader themes in Ginni Thomas’s private encounters with Trump.

{Note: The New Yorker has done tremendous work detailing how frequently Ginni Thomas works with entities filing amicus curiae (“friend of the court”) briefs with her husband and his peers. As Jane Mayer writes, “[Ginni] Thomas currently serves on the advisory board of the National Association of Scholars, a group promoting conservative values in academia, which has filed an amicus brief before the [Supreme] Court in a potentially groundbreaking affirmative-action lawsuit against Harvard.”}

Ginni Thomas and Donald Trump

The New Yorker reports that the meeting Ginni Thomas, Frank Gaffney, and others ultimately had with Trump and his political team saw Thomas open by “press[ing] Trump to purge his Administration of disloyal members of the ‘deep state’” and “handing [Trump] an enemies list that she and Groundswell had compiled.”

This event, in itself, underlines several key elements of this report: Ginni Thomas’s paranoia; the concordance of her paranoia with Trump’s; her level of access to the then-president; and the brazenness of her efforts to influence national events on a grand scale.

While the New Yorker also reports (oddly, using third-hand information from a Trump ally) that at the time the former president dined with Justice Thomas and his wife he saw Ginni Thomas as a “wacko” he had to humor to please and placate her husband—a sentiment troubling for a whole different set of reasons—in fact there’s little daylight between the ideas Ginni Thomas has expressed in private and those Donald Trump would express in public both before and indeed on January 6, 2021.

In one particularly unnerving 2018 address to the Council for National Policy, Ginni Thomas opined that “the deep state is serious, and it’s resisting President Trump”, adding that those opposing her (and presumably Trump) aimed to “kill people”—which circumstance required, she said, that “we all have guns and ‘concealed carry’ [laws] to handle what’s coming!”The implication that Clarence Thomas’s wife felt that a Second Civil War was inevitable was unmistakable, even as it was also shocking.

But it is the many indications that Ginni Thomas had exclusive access to Trump that are even more troubling:

(1) During Trump’s presidency, Ginni Thomas had “an extraordinary amount of access to the Oval Office.” As importantly, the reason for this access was in part Thomas’ stewardship of Groundswell, the secretive far-right organization discussed in much more detail in the following section of this article. As head of this organization, Slate reports, Ginni Thomas made multiple trips to the Oval Office to see Trump. (More.)

(2) The Washington Post reports that Thomas’ many meetings “with [President Trump] at the White House [were in part] to advise [him] on political appointees.” (More.)

(3) And yet Thomas’ focus, in her private meetings with Trump, wasn’t simply on who Trump could bring into his administration. It was—as importantly—on who needed to be removed from it. Slate reports that Ginni Thomas was one of the individuals most ardently focused on rooting the supposed “deep state” out of Trump’s administration, “compil[ing] lists of federal employees whom she deemed insufficiently loyal to the president. She sent her lists to Trump, urging him to fire the disloyal employees…”

(4) While Trump may not always have taken Thomas’ direct advice on appointees—many of whom were her friends and associates—she remained close enough to him throughout his presidency that, for instance, the Washington Post reports, “When Trump gathered supporters at the White House to celebrate his acquittal at his first Senate impeachment trial, she was among those invited.” (More.)

(5) Thomas has traded on her husband’s name, status, and influence to advance her far-right activism, even as Clarence Thomas has—major media reports confirm—never recused himself from a Supreme Court case owing to his wife’s involvement in issues that came before the Court. The New York Times reports that, during the period of time Ginni Thomas had “extraordinary” access to Trump, and became one of Trump’s leading advisers on the matter of political appointments, then-President Trump, who was “facing several decisions before the Supreme Court personally and in terms of administration policy…made clear [to aides that] he [was] conscious of whom she is married to.” Slate reports that Ginni Thomas’s “advocacy group Groundswell got an audience with the president in early 2019….a meeting…arranged after Clarence and Ginni Thomas had dinner with the Trumps. Clarence Thomas and Trump appear to be quite friendly: the justice took his clerks to meet with the president in the Oval Office at least once; Ginni attended as well.”

Yet all this is just the barest hint of Ginni Thomas’s influence inside Trumpworld.

Ginni Thomas, the 2020 Presidential Election, and the Coup Plot

We move, now, closer to January 6, 2021. What does any of the above have to do with the days and weeks leading up to Election Day in November 2020, and the period of sixty-four days from Election Day to Insurrection Day? Consider the following facts:

(1) Ginni Thomas was in contact with Trump attorney John Eastman before the coup attempt. Eastman, who wrote the now-infamous “Eastman Memo”—a possibly criminal coup-plot outline intended for use in conjunction with the seditious “Green Bay Sweep” conspiracy devised by top Trump adviser Peter Navarro—is a former Clarence Thomas clerk who regularly posted messages to the very Thomas Clerk World listserv Ginni Thomas was spamming with ardent pro-insurrection rhetoric as Eastman was preparing the document that has now forced him to assert the Fifth Amendment before Congress. And indeed, the Washington Post confirms that Ginni Thomas and John Eastman were sending messages to the listserv on the same topic: Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election. One of Eastman’s messages, which would have been seen by Ginni Thomas just as her messages were seen by him, read, “Rest assured that those of us involved in this [legal battle to overturn the 2020 election through lawsuits aimed at the Supreme Court] are working diligently to ascertain the truth.”

Eastman, an insurrectionist with designs on putting the 2020 election in the hands of Clarence Thomas and his colleagues, could have found no better plausibly deniable channel to the most conservative Supreme Court Justice than through the Ginni Thomas–dominated Thomas Clerk World digital network. One member of the listserv, University of Notre Dame law professor Stephen F. Smith, became so angry at one message by Eastman to the group that he responded with the following: “I hope (and trust) that you—and everyone on this list—agree that the search for truth doesn’t in any way justify insurrection, trying to kidnap and assassinate elected officials, attacking police officers, or making common cause with racists and anti-Semites bent on wanton violence and lawlessness.”

Were Eastman and Thomas aware of one another’s messages on the listserv? Yes, says the New Yorker. It reports that in the debates about overturning the 2020 election that raged on the listserv in the lead-up to the January 6 attack on the Capitol, Trump’s attorney and Clarence Thomas’ wife “[were] on the same side.” Per the New Yorker, law professor Artemus Ward—author of a history of Supreme Court clerks—has said of the approximately 120-person-strong Thomas Clerk World that it is “an élite right-wing commando movement” within which ecosystem Ginni Thomas “is advocating for things [policies and courses of action] directly.” He adds, “It’s unprecedented. I have never seen a Justice’s wife as involved.”

Whether Ginni Thomas communicated with Eastman more directly prior to January 6 remains unknown. However, the mere fact that a Supreme Court Justice’s wife who was also a Trump political adviser was willing to directly and privately email a Trump attorney intending to bring lawsuits before her spouse on the matter of the peaceful transition of power in America itself requires a congressional investigation. (More.)

(2) In 2020, Ginni Thomas also campaigned for Trump in person—and, according to the Intercept, spearheaded a dark-money operation to support the then-president. Cleta Mitchell, the GOP lawyer who infamously participated in Trump’s shakedown of Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger, led Ginni Thomas’s project, thus establishing her as not only one of Trump’s most trusted co-conspirators but one of Trump adviser Ginni Thomas’s closest political associates.

(3) Ginni Thomas and Groundswell (see more below) held weekly meetings during the Trump presidency to both prospectively and retrospectively “vet” Trump appointees for past or potential “disloyalty”, with Thomas herself serving (per the New Yorker) as the “tip of the spear”—the field marshal—for federalizing Trumpism in this respect.

An example of retrospective targeting orchestrated by Ginni Thomas and her peers and subordinates at Groundswell involves Trump-Ukraine scandal hero Alexander Vindman, a soldier and federal official and whistleblower who Thomas’s outfit sought to destroy after he came forward to testify against Donald Trump in the latter’s first impeachment trial. The coordinated Groundswell campaign, which the now-retired Vindman says was “chilling”, “harmed my [military] career”, and was an “un-American….political vendetta [intended] to retaliate against officials who were dutifully serving the public interest”, also underscored that Ginni Thomas would be willing to go to extraordinary lengths to protect Trump’s political career and attack anyone who might hinder it. This sort of mindset would become not just relevant but urgent in Trumpworld the moment Trump lost the 2020 presidential election in an electoral and popular-vote landslide that he and his fans adamantly refused to accept.

But how deep did Groundswell’s operations run during Trump’s presidency—and how far has it been willing to go to aid Trump’s political ambitions in ways that were once unthinkable?

Groundswell

We know that Ginni Thomas is a director at CNP Action (“a dark-money wing of the conservative pressure group the Council for National Policy…[it] connects wealthy donors with some of the most radical right-wing figures in America”, the New Yorker reports) and an advisory board member for Charlie Kirk’s far-right Turning Point USA, which is confirmed to have helped populate (via busing) Trump’s January 6 mob.

We know that Ginni Thomas’s activities with these and other hyperpartisan entities have prompted legal ethicist and NYU law professor Stephen Gillers to call Thomas’s actions—in view of her husband’s position—“horrible” and “reprehensible”, adding that Justice Thomas’ eight peers on the Court without question deem Ginni Thomas’ conduct “appalling.” Another professor and legal ethicist, Bruce Green, calls Ginni Thomas’ actions “awful”, adding that they make she and her husband look like “a mom-and-pop political-hack group.” Ominously, a very close friend of the two once told the Washington Post that “the one person Clarence really listens to is [Ginni].”

We know that around 2019 Ginni Thomas launched, with James O’Keefe (of the Erik Prince–trained Project Veritas), a project called Crowdsourcers. The self-described “journalist” O’Keefe was famously raided by the Federal Bureau of Investigation just 72 hours after the 2020 presidential election on allegations that he and Project Veritas had tried to sway the election by improperly acquiring Joe Biden’s daughter’s diary (Ashley Biden had reported a burglary of her home weeks earlier). Columbia Journalism Review reveals that Project Veritas—to which Thomas has yoked herself by partnering with O’Keefe—is “known to publish surreptitiously recorded and selectively edited videos.” That Project Veritas’ biggest funding source, the Bradley Impact Fund, is particularly focused on “perceived [2020] election fraud” is notable in that the sort of election fraud cases the far right is now most interested in are those that would end up in front of Ginni’s husband Clarence. The New York Times has written of Project Veritas that it rides “the line between journalism and political spying”, noting that internal communications from the group reveal “the extent to which the group has worked with its lawyers to gauge how far its deceptive reporting practices can go before running afoul of federal laws.”

All of this is valuable background information for any attempt to understand Ginni Thomas’s possible willingness to be involved in 2020 election shenanigans or—at a minimum—to consort professionally with those responsible for them. Indeed, here’s what the Department of Justice has had to say about Thomas’s partner’s operation: “[O’Keefe’s] Project Veritas is not engaged in journalism within any traditional or accepted definition of that word. Its ‘reporting’ consists almost entirely of publicizing non-consensual, surreptitious recordings made th[r]ough unlawful, unethical, and or/dishonest means.” Even O’Keefe has called his outfit “a political spying operation.” His group remains under FBI investigation for Conspiracy to Transport Stolen Property Across State Lines, Interstate Transportation of Stolen Property, Aiding and Abetting [a Federal Crime], and Accessory After the Fact [of a Federal Crime].

Lest one think Ginni Thomas’s decision to partner with an election fraud–obsessed political spy was a one-off instance of bad judgment, consider another of her partners in the “Crowdsourcers” project: Cleta Mitchell. Putting aside that Mitchell’s Public Interest Legal Foundation has business before Ginni Thomas’s husband and the rest of the Supreme Court, there’s the more troubling fact that when Trump called Brad Raffensperger to demand that Georgia “find” enough votes to give that state to the Trump campaign—a call which is soon to be the subject of grand jury proceedings—Mitchell was on the phone, too. This means she’s either a key witness in a federal criminal investigation involving historic election fraud or—depending upon how the facts shake out—was an accessory to President Trump as he committed that crime.

But it gets worse.

In 2019, the year before the last presidential election, Ginni Thomas secretly worked with then-congressman and soon-to-be Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows—a man now facing possible federal contempt charges in a seditious conspiracy investigation pursued by the House January 6 Committee—on Donald Trump’s first impeachment.

The Thomas-Meadows partnership was only (semi-)publicly revealed as Meadows was accepting an Impact Award from Thomas; as noted above, Ginni Thomas invented the award, designed to acknowledge “culture warriors” fighting progressives, in 2018. At the time Meadows said, “Ginni was talking [in her introduction of me] about how we ‘team up,’ and we actually have teamed up. And I’m going to give you something you won’t hear anywhere else—we worked through the first 5 days of the impeachment hearings.”The New Yorker notes that it was “soon” after Meadows got an award from Thomas’s hand—remembering, here, that Thomas was at the time one of Trump’s chief advisers on appointments—that the president appointed Meadows his new chief of staff. Meadows would play a critical role in the planning of January 6, and is playing a key role right now in helping obscure Trump’s involvement in the events of that day.

Like Meadows, Thomas associate Cleta Mitchell is now fighting her congressional subpoena with the aim of getting the issue before Thomas’s husband, Clarence; and like Meadows, the New Yorker writes, referring to the former Trump chief of staff’s recent referral to DOJ for the crime of Contempt of Congress, “The same thing [a criminal referral to the Department of Justice] may well happen to Mitchell.”

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Even as Justice Thomas was the sole Supreme Court Justice to dissent from an order requiring that Trump hand over certain documents involving Mark Meadows—the New Yorker notes that Meadows, the recent Ginni-Thomas-devised-Impact-Award winner, himself filed an amicus brief in the case—Ginni Thomas was working (as a self-described “active” member) with Conservative Action Project, a far-right outfit that is demanding Reps. Liz Cheney (R-WY) and Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) be thrown out of the Republican Party for investigating Trump and Meadows’ election fraud and, not for nothing, demanding documents from former President Trump in the case that went before Ginni Thomas’s husband. The Project takes the view that those who planned January 6 “have done nothing wrong”, and that all subpoenas issued by the committee Cheney and Kinzinger sit on—which, presumably, could one day issue a subpoena to Ginni Thomas herself—are illegal.

{Note: Jane Mayer of the New Yorker adds, “A current member of the Conservative Action Project told me that Ginni Thomas is part of the group not because of her qualifications but ‘because she’s married to Clarence.’ The member asked to have his name withheld because, he said, Ginni is ‘volatile’ and becomes ‘edgy’ when challenged. He added, ‘The best word to describe her is ‘tribal.’ You’re either part of her group or you’re the enemy.’”}:

Ginni Thomas’s consulting firm, Liberty Comsulting, also makes use of individuals alleged to have been involved in election fraud. Her website long featured a glowing testimonial from insurrectionist Kimberly Fletcher of Moms for America; Fletcher was one of the primary January 6 organizers, and has been a “political associate” of Ginni Thomas for over a decade, per the New Yorker.

But all of these Ginni Thomas engagements are a mere preface to her most important prospective role in the insurrection: as the self-described “chairman” of Groundswell, the infamous “secretive, invitation-only network that…coordinate[s] with hard-right congressional aides, journalists, and pressure groups.”

One known past participant in Groundswell? Domestic terrorist Ali Alexander, one of the masterminds of the January 6 plot.

Perhaps it is no surprise, then, that in a 2013 report on Groundswell, David Corn of Mother Jones reported that Ginni Thomas’s operation was a “hush-hush coalition” with no less a goal than “fundamentally transforming the nation” (an aim that so happens to be what far-right activists like Thomas routinely accuse progressives of being dangerous and/or un-American for wanting to do).

Yet given Ginni Thomas’s baseless and highly public claims of collusion between the Democratic Party and U.S. media, perhaps just as surprising here is the breathtaking hypocrisy of Thomas’s Groundswell being—in point of fact—an actual clandestine conspiracy between leading Republicans and organizations allegedly journalistic in character. As Corn reported in 2013, Thomas’s Groundswell saw her secretly colluding with “journalists from Breitbart News and the Washington Examiner” to “concoct talking points, coordinate messaging, and hatch plans” for (as internal Groundswell documents confessed, Corn reported) “a 30-front [culture] war.”

If you are unnerved by the idea of a Supreme Court Justice’s wife secretly conspiring with far-right activists–cum–domestic terrorists like Ali Alexander, as well as men and women claiming to be journalists but intending to instead be political operatives, and doing so with the aim of launching a “war” to “transform” our democracy—if, indeed, that notion sounds perilously close to what the insurrectionists (led by past Groundswell participant Ali Alexander, and aided by individuals falsely claiming to be journalists like Christina Bobb) were trying to do on January 6, unfortunately it gets worse.

Inside Groundswell

During the last decade, Thomas’s secretive outfit met in the offices of an entity that is regularly engaged with issues before the Supreme Court: Judicial Watch, one of the most litigious entities in America. These hush-hush meetings also included—another echo of the January 6 conspiracy—“aides to congressional Republicans.” As Corn details Groundswell’s backroom activities, all were focused, as was the January 6 conspiracy, on changing the outcome of major developments in American politics, from immigration reform bills to sensitive congressional investigations like Benghazi.

The group Ginni Thomas “guid[ed]” included future Trump National Security Advisor John Bolton; Max Pappas, a top aide to the man who in 2021 led the fight to overturn the 2020 election results in Congress, Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX); current extreme-right Texas gubernatorial candidate and former GOP congressman Allen West, one of the masterminds behind Texas’s present push to suppress non-white votes; and the man many deem to have single-handedly rigged the 2004 presidential election for George W. Bush, former Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell—whose partisan and logistically groundless redistribution of voting machines in majority-minority Ohio districts led to ten-hour voting lines in some Cuyahoga County precincts, and gave Bush Ohio (and the White House) by the attendance of an Ohio State football game. At other points Groundswell “collaborated” with Trump’s first Attorney General, Jeff Sessions—a key member of Trump’s 2016 campaign—and the aforementioned Cruz.

Corn also reports that “Among the conveners listed in an invitation to a May 8 [2013] meeting of Groundswell [was] Stephen Bannon”—the very man who was advising Donald Trump in the lead-up to January 6, and who seemed to know in advance that “all hell” (his prescient words) was going to “break loose” in Washington on that day.

Internally, Groundswell at times seemed like an intelligence operation. One document reviewed by Mother Jones informed members of the group that certain members’ names should be removed from all communications for “OPSEC reasons.” (“OPSEC” is short for “operational security.”) Other documents spoke of “strategic growth”, winning the “propaganda battle”, and ensuring all visitors to Groundswell meetings—who could, presumably, later identify members of the secretive group—got “cleared” in advance. Another internal memo informed Groundswell members that the group had tasked itself with “develop[ing] action from reports and information.” One 2010s initiative recorded that Groundswell had been activated to “collect[ ]…[information] to provide to Cruz”—exactly what Groundswell participant Ali Alexander was doing, and with respect to the same acknowledged Groundswell “collaborator,” on Insurrection Eve.

The notes from one February 2013 Groundswell meeting sound like they could have been ripped from any meeting of Trump’s antifa-obsessed Willard Hotel “war room” years later: “[The] radical left is dedicated to destroy[ing] those who oppose them….[via] vicious and unprecedented tactics. We are in a real war; most conservatives are not prepared to fight.” Notes from a meeting held the next month said Groundswell needed to be activated to ensure that Republican “leaders” would “be shamed into doing the right thing”—the very theme Trump harped upon in his now-infamous “incitement to insurrection” speech at the Ellipse on January 6, and the very endeavor Ali Alexander had dedicated himself to following the 2020 presidential election. One can imagine how much Trump would have admired this group run by a top adviser of his, given that, as Corn reports, “Venting about weak and squishy GOP leaders was a regular feature of Groundswell gatherings.”

Corn reports, ominously, that another “high-priority cause” for Ginni Thomas and her “Groundswellers” is “voter identification efforts—what progressives would call voter suppression.” This focus, too, presumably drew Trump’s notice, as would have the general tenor of the group’s operations, which the New Yorker termed “warlike.”

{Note: Corn adds that “In one post [to a Google communication channel used by her Groundswell group], Ginni Thomas encouraged Groundswell members to watch ‘Agenda: Grinding America Down,’ a documentary that claims that progressives (including Obama) seek ‘a brave new world’ based on the ‘failed policies and ideologies of communism’ and that an evil left is purposefully ‘destroying the greatest country in all of world history.’” Thomas later greenlit a political ad pitched to the group that implied Obama’s ideologies and policies were going to lead the U.S. into nuclear war. Trump and—in particular—Alexander coconspirator Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL) sounded identical notes in his Insurrection Day speech.}

At yet another Groundswell meeting in 2013, it was decided to, as described by Mother Jones after a review of the meeting’s minutes, “ask…Stephen Bannon to arrange for his media organization ‘to get senators on the record regarding their support [or non-support]’ of [a] filibuster that GOP Sens. Mike Lee [R-UT], Rand Paul [R-KY], and Ted Cruz were threatening to mount…” That as of January 2021 Ginni Thomas’s group had a history of working with Bannon to lobby GOP senators on controversial actions—notably, a filibuster isn’t so far from what Ted Cruz aimed to do at the joint session of Congress on January 6, via protracted objections to certain Biden electors—is unnerving. Indeed, Mother Jones reports that Thomas’s group had a “particularly” close and abiding relationship with Bannon’s media operation. Groundswell had even more contact with Bannon employee Matt Boyle,who by 2017 was being described by the Washingtonian as “Breitbart’s (other) man [besides Bannon himself] in the White House.” The DC-focused media outlet reported at the time that Boyle “has the ear of the [Trump] White House….[including] flying on [President] Trump’s private jet and interviewing him in the Oval Office.” Indeed, Trump became so close with top Ginni Thomas collaborator Boyle that the then-president habitually called him “my Matty.”

As for his relationship with insurrectionist guru Steve Bannon, Boyle would describe Bannon as the Bill Belichek to his Tom Brady—a “coach” and his “quarterback.” A former boss of Boyle’s told the Washingtonian that as a political operator “Boyle has two modes: murder and blowjob.” Presumably while in the former of these modes, Mother Jones reports, Boyle shared with Ginni Thomas’s Groundswell “his suspicion that many government agencies—State, the CIA, the Pentagon, the EPA, and more—[are] conspiring with ‘far left wing groups.’” If this pap sounds like a precursor to the Deep State conspiracy theories that animated the insurrection, that’s because it is.

As she was fighting to destroy Obama initiatives like Obamacare, Ginni Thomas was said to be particularly focused, during the Obama presidency, on the notion that the nation’s soft-spoken first black president was a “tyrant”—the same overheated term with which Groundswell participant Ali Alexander would be obsessed as he recorded Periscope video after Periscope video urging his followers to launch a “loud war” on the Capitol grounds on January 6. That Ginni Thomas helped launch Groundswell as a reaction to “the November [2012] elections” (per Mother Jones) and that it was founded on the idea that “our country is in peril” (per an internal Groundswell document) only further echoes the November 2020–relaunched Stop the Steal campaign that evolved into a dangerous march on the Capitol Ginni Thomas applauded until suddenly her Facebook feed went private.

When not seeking to change GOP minds on Capitol Hill in much the same way Ali Alexander claimed he intended to do on January 6, Groundswell focused on Ginni Thomas’s husband’s place of work, David Corn reports, as her operation “zeroe[d] in on contentious issues that come before the Court, including voting rights, abortion, and gay marriage.”

So these are the types of causes—and types of people—Ginni Thomas has invested in, along with those of a similar bent, like the Erik Prince–associated James O’Keefe.

Whether Ginni Thomas used the Thomas Clerk World listserv that included Trump attorney John Eastman the same way she used Groundswell’s private Google group is unclear, though her post–January 6 apology to her husband’s former clerks strongly suggests that she did—and that her conduct with Groundswell may well have been a prelude to communications with Eastman in the weeks leading up to January 6.

But do we have evidence that Groundswell members, participants, or collaborators—besides Alexander, Cruz, Bannon, and Cleta Mitchell, that is (and accepting that these four individuals were among the most important behind the insurrection and the events leading to it)—were involved in clandestine planning before that terrible day?

Yes, we do.

The McMaster Plot and Barbara Ledeen

Ginni Thomas’s story takes a turn toward possible sedition in 2018, just as Trump and his team were gearing up for the 2020 election by seeking to ally themselves with pro-Kremlin Ukrainians promising manufactured dirt on the man Trump believed would be his November opponent: Joe Biden.

{Note: All of this is covered in exhaustive detail in the nearly 600-page nonfiction book Proof of Corruption, published by Macmillan in 2020, so I won’t unpack it further here.}

It was in 2018 that, according to the New York Times, Ginni Thomas conspired with one of the most prominent members of Groundswell, Barbara Ledeen, to formulate a conclusive “enemies list” for Trump to use in targeting opponents outside (but even more so, inside) the federal government. Ledeen is married to Michael Ledeen, the co-author of Michael Flynn’s first book, The Field of Fight: How We Can Win the Global War Against Radical Islam and Its Allies(St. Martin’s / Griffin, 2017).

ABOVE: Barbara Ledeen (second from left) in the U.S. Capitol in 2003.]

Flynn—the former highly controversial intel official (at the DIA) and Trump National Security Advisor, a federal indictee, and now an open insurrectionist—is very close to the Ledeens, and has been for years. Indeed, in May of 2021 Proof published the “lost chapter” of Proof of Corruption, entitled “Flynn and the Ledeens”, which detailed how Flynn turned to the Ledeens in 2016 after Trump ordered him to get Hillary Clinton’s “missing” emails, even if doing so meant conspiring with or paying Russian criminals. Barbara Ledeen’s work with Flynn on this clandestine project—which continued after it was universally known that the Kremlin was waging cyberwar on the United States and using “cut-outs” to dump data it had stolen from federal officials—underscored her willingness to skirt the line of legality in trying to help Trump win a presidential election (and Flynn’s equal willingness in this regard). Indeed, Ledeen ultimately made contact with individuals she believed to be Russian hackers on the “dark web”, and—despite America being in a cyberwar with Russia—sent materials transmitted to her by these “Russians” to Erik Prince. Ledeen has since posted on Facebook, “We owe a lot to Erik Prince.”

That the wife of a Supreme Court Justice would have any professional contact with someone like Barbara Ledeen, let alone secretly conspire with her to draft a “list” of the sort held by the the corrupt, nearly-impeached U.S. president Richard Nixon—who avoided impeachment only by resigning from office—is stunning. But in fact Ginni Thomas’s work with Ledeen appears to have gone much deeper than even this.

At a time when she was a “close friend” of Ginni Thomas, per the Times—and had worked with Thomas on at least one secretive plot (the “enemies list”) intended to aid Trump—Barbara Ledeen acted as a “messenger” in a national security–implicating plot to blackmail the nation’s sitting National Security Advisor, H.R. McMaster. The plot mirrored Kremlin intelligence operations, inasmuch as it intended to use a “honey trap” (an attractive woman tasked with seducing the plot’s intended victim) to gain info from McMaster that could be used to extort him into resigning from one of the top national security positions in the U.S. government. Though the criminal plot, as reported by the Times, was run by “a network of conservative activists…[who had] mounted a campaign during the Trump administration to discredit perceived enemies of President Trump inside the government”—precisely the project Ginni Thomas was then working on with the implicated Barbara Ledeen—Ginni Thomas’s name was never brought into reporting on the scheme. This may be for the simple reason that the scheme was never executed; McMaster resigned his job before the unnamed “network of conservative activists” could run their counterintelligence op on him, so that illegal scheme was never the subject of the sprawling federal criminal investigation that would undoubtedly have turned up everyone who was involved in it.

Anyone inclined to think Ginni Thomas was unaware of what “close friend” Barbara Ledeen was doing—as part of a broader gambit (regarding Trump’s enemies) Thomas is now confirmed to have been involved in with Ledeen—would be hard-pressed to maintain that view in light of a second “undercover operation” the Times uncovered, this one also of dubious legality and spearheaded by a Ginni Thomas associate: James O’Keefe. Per the New Yorker, this plot “targeted government employees, including F.B.I. agents, suspected of trying to thwart Trump’s agenda.” The magazine notes that Thomas had given O’Keefe an “Impact Award,” just as she had Mark Meadows.

The Times report notes that the O’Keefe operation was styled as an intelligence plot—a “sting operation” involving “secret surveillance” and “undercover operatives”—which means it mirrors the “warlike” intelligence ops run by the Groundswell group (to which O’Keefe was tied via his association with Ginni Thomas, its chairwoman). Indeed, in a seeming echo of Thomas’s own political obsessions, this second scheme targeted, the Times reports, individuals who likely were on the Thomas-Ledeen-built “enemies list,” as it betrayed the “obsession some of Mr. Trump’s allies had about a shadowy ‘deep state’ trying to blunt his agenda.” There could be no more precise recitation of O’Keefe associate Ginni Thomas’s own post-2016 political obsession.

Anyone who doubts whether it is appropriate to call these operations run by people so close to Ginni Thomas “intelligence” operations must read the New York Times article in full, as it explains (emphasis supplied) that

[c]entral to the effort, according to interviews, was Richard Seddon, a former undercover British spy who was recruited in 2016 by the security contractor Erik Prince to train Project Veritas operatives to infiltrate trade unions, Democratic congressional campaigns and other targets. He ran field operations for Project Veritas until mid-2018.

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Last year, The New York Times reported that Mr. Seddon ran an expansive effort to gain access to the unions and campaigns and led a hiring effort that nearly tripled the number of the group’s operatives, according to interviews and deposition testimony. He trained operatives at the Prince family ranch in Wyoming.

So how high up did these Ledeen- and O’Keefe-involved intelligence operations go? The Times reports that “Ledeen…said she was brought on by someone ‘with access to McMaster’s calendar’”—a telling detail, given the grave national security implications of the minute-by-minute whereabouts of one of the nation’s foremost intelligence officials. The fact that Ledeen has been unwilling to name any of the others who were involved in the plot she participated in raises the real possibility that a top adviser to Trump who ran one of the foremost civilian intelligence-gathering ops in D.C., Ginni Thomas, would have been revealed as at least one of the individuals with knowledge of the operation.

Lest this seem mere inflammatory speculation, consider what the New York Times has to say on who recruited Ledeen to the McMaster operation, as well as Ledeen’s clear unwillingness to reveal that person’s name: “Who initially ordered the operation is unclear. In an interview, Ledeen said ‘someone she trusted’ contacted her to help with the plan. She said she could not remember who.” Ledeen added that her role in the events reported on by the Times was to “pass[ ] [a] message to a man she believed to be a Project Veritas operative during a meeting at the University Club in Washington” (a place it appears Ginni Thomas has frequented).

What sort of meeting in D.C. was it that Ledeen both (a) refused to identify, and (b) saw then–congressional staffers meeting with far-right activists to share intelligence? It’s certainly possible that other groups besides Groundswell answered to this description in 2018, but Ledeen’s involvement in that group, her “close” friendship with its chairwoman, her unwillingness to speak about the provenance of the meeting, and the known activities of Groundswell all suggest that Ginni Thomas’s operation may well have been the original epicenter of the McMaster sting. Much more investigation would be required to confirm this, of course, but it is noteworthy that—consistent with the caution that Ledeen’s Groundswell group displayed in revealing the names of anyone who attended its meetings—Ledeen claimed to the Times (rather improbably) that not only could she not remember who had passed her intelligence about McMaster’s schedule, but that the person she gave that intelligence to had used a “fake name”, so there was no point in repeating it. Would a Project Veritas employee really have used a fake name at a private gathering with friendly congressional staffers like Ledeen? One would be hard-pressed to see why—or, for that matter, why Project Veritas’s founder would’ve been working closely with Groundswell’s longtime chairwoman in 2018 and 2019 but for some reason eschewed her intelligence-gathering operations in 2018—but these too remains unsolved mysteries that no one appears to be looking into at the moment.

We do, however, have some indications about the role Ginni Thomas may have played in the McMaster operation.

In early 2020, the perpetually arch Wonkette attributed McMaster’s ouster to Ginni Thomas and Groundswell, writing that “After Groundswell’s early success [in] getting rid of National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster….[Ginni] Thomas scored a meeting with the president in January 2019, where he ‘listen[ed] quietly as members of the group denounced transgender people and women serving in the military.’” Salon issued a similar verdict, reporting that Groundswell “led a successful effort to oust former national security adviser H.R. McMaster, who [had] replaced [Michael] Flynn.” The unstated implication to be taken from these and other similar reports, in view of reporting on the Project Veritas sting operation against McMaster, is that the operation allegedly intended by Ginni Thomas associate James O’Keefe was “Plan B” to a more conventional lobbying/disinformation action by Thomas and Groundswell.

Additional evidence in this regard comes from reporting by Axios, which dates the beginning of the formalized Ginni Thomas-Barbara Ledeen “hit list” to approximately the middle of 2018, only a matter of weeks after McMaster’s April 9, 2018 resignation (and a matter of days after the last known email regarding the McMaster plot, which the Times reports was inexplicably still a going concern in May, well after its target had left the Trump administration). Times reporting indicates that at that time Ginni Thomas associate James O’Keefe was just beginning what he publicly claimed would be a “series” of undercover operations against “deep state” figures; the list Thomas and Ledeen were then compiling certainly included prime candidates for a project of that sort, and therefore represents a temporal nexus between the two efforts. Just so, Ginni Thomas’s “Crowdsourcers” partnership with O’Keefe reportedly unfolded at some point between mid-2018 and the end of 2019, meaning that it likewise coincided with the “series” of undercover operations against Trump enemies O’Keefe promised.

So was Groundswell’s success in pushing out McMaster one of the inspirations for Ginni Thomas and Barbara Ledeen formalizing their partnership—or even expanding it into new partnerships with associated parties like Project Veritas? Describing the enemies list Groundswell’s leader began producing in 2018, Axios reports (emphasis supplied) that

[b]y the time President Trump instructed [John McEntee], his 29-year-old former body man and new head of presidential personnel to rid his government of anti-Trump officials [in February of 2020], he’d [already] gathered reams of material to support his suspicions.

While Trump’s distrust has only intensified since his [early 2020] impeachment and acquittal, he has long been on the hunt for “bad people” inside the White House and U.S. government, and fresh “pro-Trump” options. Outside advisers have been happy to oblige.

In reporting this story, I have been briefed on, or reviewed, memos and lists the president received since 2018 suggesting whom he should hire and fire. Most of these details have never been published.

A well-connected network of conservative activists with close ties to Trump and top administration officials is quietly helping develop these “Never Trump”/pro-Trump lists, and some sent memos to Trump to shape his views, per sources with direct knowledge. Members of this network include Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and Republican Senate staffer Barbara Ledeen.

The big picture: since Trump’s [February 2020] Senate acquittal, aides say the president has crossed a psychological line regarding what he calls the “Deep State.” He feels his government—from Justice to [the] State [Department] to [the] Defense [Department] to [the Department of] Homeland Security—is filled with “snakes.” He wants them fired and replaced ASAP.

This reporting strongly contradicts any notion—pushed exclusively, to this point, by anonymous White House insiders seeking to (for unknown reasons) distance Trump from Ginni Thomas—that Trump saw Thomas as a “wacko” he listened to only out of concern for her husband’s opinion of him. Rather, it suggests that, as the 2020 Trump presidential campaign churned into high gear in February 2020, both Ledeen and Ginni Thomas were deemed critical Trump advisers who could regularly liaison with the White House—in the person of McEntee or with Trump directly—to advance the then-president’s ongoing “war” on the “Deep State.”

It was this war that Trump would frame as being continued in the “protest” he helped orchestrate on January 6, 2021. As he said in his White House Ellipse speech that day, speaking of government employees around the country, “In every single swing state, local officials, state officials…made illegal and unconstitutional changes to election procedures without the mandated approvals by the state legislatures. These changes paved a way for fraud on a scale never seen before. I think we [have to] go a long way outside of our country [to find fraud on this scale].” He called what “they” were doing a matter of “national security”, adding that he’d committed himself—in an imagined second term in office—to “drain[ing] the Washington swamp…[and] clean[ing] up the corruption in our nation’s capital. We’ve done a big job on it, but you think it’s easy? It’s a dirty business. It’s a dirty business. You have a lot of bad people out there [in Washington].” Not long after Ginni Thomas posted on Facebook her support for the armed mob gathered before Trump at the Ellipse, Trump told that mob that it was an unnamed “group of people” who were then trying to “illegally take over our country.”

All of this may explain why, when major media outlets write about Groundswell even in passing, it is referred to as a “network of conservative activists…[with] close ties to Trump and his senior officials.”

The Fallout From Ginni Thomas’s “Groundswell Purge”

Ginni Thomas and Barbara Ledeen’s influence over Trump’s administration, via John McEntee and direct contact with Trump, had more far-reaching an impact than many realize. By pushing Trump to launch a comprehensive sweep of his administration—which effort the president initiated by first rehiring McEntee (who had previously been let go because he couldn’t pass a national security background check)—Thomas and Ledeen helped usher in a new era of the Trump administration, one that would have profound implications for the post-election period that began in November 2020.

As the New York Times reports, the Groundswell-backed purge led to a “freeze on all political appointments across the government” and a new Trump policy under which “cabinet secretaries [were to be told] that the White House would be choosing their deputies from now on.” This latter policy was be in evidence just nine months later, when Trump installed two young and ill-prepared—but unwaveringly loyal—political operatives, Kash Pateland Ezra Cohen-Watnick, as top deputies inside the Pentagon.

Patel thus became the chief of staff for new Secretary of Defense Chris Miller—who wasn’t permitted to choose his own top aide—with Cohen-Watnick becoming Miller’s acting undersecretary for intelligence and security. Both men were in their roles by January 6, when the Pentagon inexplicably failed to relieve the Capitol for nearly four hours, doing so only after the building had already been cleared of the insurrectionists who had intended to occupy it. It is reasonable to ask, now, whether Patel and Cohen-Watnick would have been in a position to influence the conduct of the United States military on January 6 if Ginni Thomas had not led a clandestine effort to ensure that only unflinchingly loyal Trump acolytes were serving under Trump cabinet members.

As CNN reported at the outset of McEntee’s purge, which extended through Election Day and encompassed the installation of Patel and Cohen-Watnick at the Pentagon,

Trump has told aides he wants fewer people working for him in the White House and only loyalists installed in key administration positions, several people familiar with the matter say. Trump’s allies have provided him lists—not always solicited—of people they’ve identified as disloyal and of names they say would work better toward advancing his agenda. The lists have been generated over the past three years, but some are being dusted off in the post-impeachment purge.

….

[A]fter hearing for three years from acquaintances and confidants about various people deemed disloyal, [Trump’s] efforts seem to have newfound urgency. Trump told people recently he wants to take action on removing some people who he’s been “warned about,” according to one person who’s spoken to him. Some of the conservative activists who have been working on the effort to compose the lists include Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and Senate staffer Barbara Ledeen.

(Emphasis supplied.)

Most tellingly, however—with respect to the connection between the Groundswell-pushed purge and the Patel and Cohen-Watnick appointments—is this reporting from CNN: “McEntee indicated he plans to first focus his efforts on personnel at the State Department and Defense Department.” As Proof has reported, at the very moment Patel and Cohen-Watnick were dithering at the Pentagon on January 6, a militant associated with Donald Trump’s legal team, Joe Oltmann, was in the State Department lobbying loyalist Trump political appointees to seize voting machines.

It may not be too much to say, therefore, that the insurrectionist government Trump headed on January 6—“insurrectionist” as to its leadership cadre—was one that had been orchestrated by Ginni Thomas over a years-long lobbying effort that involved multiple meetings with President Trump himself. Indeed, in a February 2020 NPR interview, Axios reporter Jonathan Swan indicated that Trump had been an active partner of Thomas’s, rather than merely a passive recipient of her work product. According to Swan, who had by then reviewed never-before-seen administration documents to compile his report, “Over the last 18 months [a period of time ranging from the first Thomas-Ledeen ‘enemies list’ to the hiring of McEntee], the president has been asking for names of people within his government who are disloyal, who are, quote-unquote, ‘Never Trump’ or anti-Trump, or, quote-unquote, ‘the bad people.’ He’s told aides that he feels that there are ‘snakes everywhere,’ quote-unquote” (emphasis supplied). Swan added that Trump was specifically targeting DOJ, the Pentagon, and the Department of Homeland Security, but “also…the White House. He has a network outside the White House, which is comprised of very well-connected conservative activists. One of them in particular is Ginni Thomas, who is the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.” Axios even explained that it was a Groundswell memorandum that had first aimed its sights at the then-head of the Presidential Personnel Office, Sean Doocey, whose eventual ouster led to his replacement with none other than John McEntee.

In other words, it now appears that Ginni Thomas didn’t just want to direct Trump’s government-wide purge from outside the government, she wanted to influence who would execute the purge from inside the government. And she was successful in these clandestine efforts.

Swan summarizes his early 2020 findings—issued well under a year before the attack on the Capitol—by observing that “Ginni Thomas has put an extraordinary amount of energy and time into a project of shaping the president’s thinking on the staffing of his government.” Dahlia Lithwick of Slate, one of the most highly respected Court-watchers in U.S. media, would go even farther the following day, writing that Ginni Thomas “is paid to staff up the Trump administration with [her] friends and cronies, even as her husband [Justice Clarence Thomas] sits on cases that involve [Trump] and the agencies she seeks to reshape.”

{Note: As Proof has reported, in addition to the now-infamous Trump plot to install Jeffrey Clark as Attorney General, Oltmann’s lobbying of Trump loyalists in the State Department, and Trump’s installation of Patel and Cohen-Watnick at the Pentagon, the Department of Homeland Security was critical to the insurrectionbecause Trump’s legal team had tasked Christina Bobb—a former DHS employee—with lobbying her former boss to overturn the 2020 presidential election. And so it was that every Trump administration unit targeted by Ginni Thomas for purging, from DOJ to DHS, became part of the administration’s coup plot.}:

Barbara Ledeen and January 6

At the time Barbara Ledeen was involved in the plot against the nation’s National Security Adviser, she was—incredibly—also a federal employee herself. Specifically, she was a staff member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which was then led by Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA). Reports indicate that though Ledeem served the Committee generally, she was deemed to be a staffer for Senator Grassley in particular.

Given that Ginni Thomas’s lobbying of President Trump focused on appointments, and that Ledeen was a regular collaborator with Thomas on secretive Groundswell projects, it is deeply concerning to learn that Ledeen was in the “judicial nominations unit” of Grassley’s office up until 2019, whereafter she continued this work (for the same Senate committee) under Trump golfing partner Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC).

{Note: Just prior to January 6, Ledeen returned to service with Grassley. More on this below.}

One reason Proof calls this coincidence concerning is because when Donald Trump rushed Amy Coney Barrett’s Supreme Court nomination to a vote virtually on the eve of the November 2020 presidential election, he did so, and openly, with an eye toward cases that might come before that Court in the near term—including post-election cases addressing an issue Trump had had with the conduct of the election since before Election Day: mail-in ballots.

None of these interrelationships and power dynamics would matter much to a probe of the January 6 insurrection were it not the case that the recent article on Chuck Grassley at Proof was continually forced to refer to anonymous persons in the Senate office of Chuck Grassleymaking critical decisions about how to respond to reports Grassley may have been involved in the January 6 coup plot in some way. Proof was forced into this position because only the official spokesman to Grassley, Taylor Foy, would speak to the press for attribution on this issue. Other Grassley staffers refused to speak for attribution, even as they repeatedly made claims to the media that turned out to be untrue.

So who was one of the leading staffers in Chuck Grassley’s office in September 2021, when he faced his toughest questioning yet over his actions on Insurrection Eve?

Barbara Ledeen.

Chuck Grassley and Barbara Ledeen: Two Experienced Republican Operatives with a Very Long History

The questions Grassley faced last September focused on one issue in particular: what did his staffers or others tell him about Trump’s coup scheme prior to January 6? What did he know about the plot, and from whom did he hear it, and when? But a second question—one raised by Grassley staffers’ unproven, self-aggrandizing claims that in September 2021 they had sifted through Grassley’s January 2021 correspondence and found no evidence of wrongdoing—was this one: why would reporters take Grassley’s staffers’ word on this point, when some of the people doing the searching may well have been the same operatives who initially briefed Grassley on Trump’s coup plans?

There is, of course, a necessary (and a far more specific) third question, as well: what role did Barbara Ledeen play in either briefing of Grassley prior to Insurrection Day—during which time she was a staffer for Lindsey Graham but still working for the Senate Judiciary Committee (on which Grassley was the senior Republican)—or in aiding Grassley’s ultimately self-exculpating September 2021 search of his files for potentially incriminating documents?

In answering these three questions, it’s important to first understand that the “purge” project Ginni Thomas and Barbara Ledeen were leading from outside the White House was being led inside the White House, per reporting from CNN, by top Trump adviser Peter Navarro. Navarro was also one of the authors, with Trump attorney John Eastman, of the “Green Bay Sweep” coup plot that in September 2021 Grassley’s staff—including Ledeen—assured the press Grassley knew nothing about.

With this denial, the suggestion must be, therefore, that either Peter Navarro kept from Ledeen his ambitions for January 6 despite them being the central players (with Ginni Thomas) in a massive, government-wide pro-Trump project to eliminate non-loyalists from Trump’s inner circle, or that Ledeen was briefed by Navarro or Eastman about the “Green Bay Sweep” but decided to hide that information from her boss in the United States Senate. Worth noting here, too, is that only two people (out of more than two dozen) who appear to have attended theTrump International Hotel war room on Insurrection Eve felt the need to lie about that attendance and maintain that lie over time: (1) Peter Navarro, and (2) Barbara Ledeen’s close friend, Michael Flynn. While this could be mere coincidence, it could also indicate that two insurrectionists in Ledeen’s orbit fear with great particularity any inquiry into what they were doing on the day Chuck Grassley attempted to remove Vice President Mike Pence from the January 6 equation.

{Note: In identifying these connections, Ginni Thomas’s orbit cannot be forgotten, either. Thomas appears to have been essential in pushing Mark Meadows into Trump’s inner circle, and it is Mark Meadows who, the New York Times reports, led a “band of loyalists…[who] fought to keep Trump in power….[by] taking on an outsize role in pressuring the Justice Department [over the election results], amplifying conspiracy theories and flooding the courts in an attempt to overturn the 2020 election.” Trump’s man at DOJ, Jeffrey Clark, has already asserted the Fifth Amendment to protect himself from self-incrimination, as has Eastman, who sent his coup outline to Meadows. So in considering how ignorant Ledeen would have to have been of a plot advanced by those in her orbit, we must also consider how ignorant Thomas would have to have been of a plot likewise advanced by those in her orbit.}

For his part, Grassley has vacillated on his own degree of knowledge of the coup plot.

As Proof has reported, when Grassley was pressured, in September 2021, on whether Trumpist partisans “approached” him with the Eastman-Navarro coup plot prior to his declaration that he would be in charge of the January 6 joint session—a claim made in the 2021 book Peril by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa—Grassley’s hedging could only be described as epic. “I [was not] ‘approached’ in the situation as you described it”, he replied cagily (emphasis supplied). By leaving the door open, indeed wide open, to the implication that he had been approached about the coup plot in some way other than the precise one Woodward and Costa had detailed, Grassley allowed the implication that he might have been briefed on the plot by either his own staffers (many of whom were connected to Barbara Ledeen via the Senate Judiciary Committee), Judiciary Committee staffers like Ledeen herself, or outside agitators like Thomas. Grassley’s denial of the reporting in Peril appeared to cover only an approach from Trump’s legal team (e.g., Eastman) or administration advisers (e.g., Navarro). All of which only heightens the scrutiny on those Eastman or Navarro might’ve thought to use as interlocutors with Grassley—a list of people that undoubtedly has Thomas and Ledeen at its top.

Recall, now, that in the days leading up to Grassley’s astonishing declaration that Pence would not be at the Capitol on January 6, Ginni Thomas was in contact with John Eastman—her husband’s former law clerk—via the Thomas Clerk World listserv.

In short, if, as Grassley implies, he caught wind of Trump’s coup plot before he took a public action that clearly aimed to advance it, there are no more obvious suspects in the matter of who briefed him on that plot than Barbara Ledeen and Ginni Thomas—which makes it astonishing that thus far it seems neither have been interviewed by the House January 6 Committee. That public records appear to indicate that Grassley rehired Ledeen on January 3, 2021—the day the post-election Congress was sworn in—underscores that he would have been in contact with her in the days leading up to his Insurrection Eve gambit, and also that it was during this period of time that Ledeen would have been in the position of wanting and needing to underscore to Grassley her utility to his staff. Her ready access to Trump’s inner circle, and intelligence regarding its January 6 designs, would surely have been one of her primary chits in this regard.

As indicated above, Ledeen has a very long history of being interested—much like Ginni Thomas is—in clandestine intelligence-gathering, and in the dissemination of such intelligence. That she would have wanted to pass on Eastman and Navarro’s plans to her new (or, rather, both former and “new”) boss Grassley cannot be doubted, if in fact she had access to those plans. Consider the sort of schemes we have seen from Barbara Ledeen in the past:

ABOVE: Just one example of Barbara Ledeen seeking to position herself as an intelligence intermediary between individuals in positions of power and influence.]

On the other end of Ledeen’s second stint as a Grassley staffer, it must be noted that, as the New York Times has reported, Ledeen “retired” from her position with Grassley almost immediately after Grassley’s staff was forced to answer questions about which of them, if any, had briefed the senator about Trump’s coup plot. Given that Ledeen’s first employment with Grassley lasted for seven years, the fact that her second was cut short after only a matter of months is certainly worthy of some additional investigation.

Telling, as well, is Michael Flynn’s confession to federal investigators that Ledeen acted as a “conduit” between Trump and the late Peter W. Smith in the plot to buy stolen documents from Russian hackers during the 2016 presidential campaign. This mirrors Ledeen’s claim of being a “messenger” in the scheme to blackmail Flynn’s successor, H.R. McMaster. So it is that when, two days after hiring Ledeen, Grassley seemed to quote from the Eastman Memo (see below) only to later be cagey about who had acted as a conduit or messenger to him from Eastman’s ring of coup plotters, it would be understandable if the suspicion of federal criminal investigators were to fall on a repeat interlocutor in several criminal schemes: Barbara Ledeen. This is especially so given that Ledeen’s closest political associate, Ginni Thomas, was in contact with Eastman during the period he was drafting his now-infamous memo.

ABOVE: Step 1 in the Eastman coup plot noted the advantage of having Grassley replace Pence as overseer of the January 6 joint session. Grassley thereafter unilaterally announced that he would indeed take on this role.]

There is, too, the broader context of Ledeen’s career—and her husband’s—to consider.

Much as this publication has often said of Trump lawyer Joe diGenova and his wife Victoria Toensing, Esquire reports that “there scarcely has been a Republican presidential scandal in the past 40 years that Michael Ledeen hasn’t had a hand in.” The same might be said, in the Trump era, of the Ledeens’ good friend Michael Flynn, or the originator of the Stop the Steal “movement,” longtime Trump friend and adviser Roger Stone. It is Stone who, of all the political operators in Washington, is most associated with the word ratfucking (popularly defined as “political sabotage or dirty tricks, particularly pertaining to elections”). In writing of the Ledeens, Esquire notes that “Michael Ledeen’s family has made ratf[u]cking a generational enterprise.”

Statements from Grassley spokesman Taylor Foy have only further confused the issue.

As reported by a popular Iowa politics website, which was itself working off research done by celebrated independent investigative journalist Marcy Wheeler, the origin of Grassley’s knowledge of the coup plot (below referred to as “the PowerPoint”) seems to have remained deliberately murky even through December of 2021:

Foy’s hair-splitting is telling in too many ways to count. But here are a few indications that this topic is one Chuck Grassley’s office feels a need to dissemble in addressing:

While Grassley may not have chaired the Senate Judiciary Committee from early January 2019 to early January 2021, he was on it, and Ledeen was working for its chairman (Senator Graham) as a means of serving the entire committee—so yes, Ledeen was doing work for Grassley “in the [two] years leading up to January 6.”

Prior to working for Grassley indirectly from 2019 to 2021, Ledeen worked for Grassley directly from 2012 to 2019, making Foy’s attempt to suggest that Sen. Grassley was at a distance from Ledeen disingenuous at best.

Grassley did, in fact, rehire Ledeen 72 hours before the insurrection, so Foy clarifying that Ledeen wasn’t rehired to be part of Grassley’s Judiciary Committee staff—but rather was serving him in some other capacity—goes beyond mere disingenuity, as Foy seeks here to leave the impression that Ledeen wasn’t working for Grassley at all during Insurrection Week. In fact, she was.

That Ledeen’s retirement from the Senate came under circumstances worthy of additional investigation is underscored by Foy’s use of that retirement as a sort of rhetorical “get-out-of-jail-free” card in dealing with reporters. Despite the fact that Ledeen leaving the Senate in precipitous fashion makes the incident more rather than less worthy of investigation, Foy attempts to fashion it as a means for Grassley and his team to avoid significant questions about her.

Given that Foy worked alongside Ledeen for a very long time, his efforts to put distance between himself and her border on the comical: “you’d have to ask her”; “I don’t have her contact information”; “I can’t speak to her [knowledge].” In fact, not only would Foy almost certainly have her contact information (given that she only just recently left Grassley’s office), but he should be able to tell media whether Ledeen exhibited any awareness of “the PowerPoint” during the three quarters of a year—at a minimum—that he worked alongside her in Senator Grassley’s employ.

But Foy’s most telling evasion, bordering on pure deceit, is his last one: “She didn’t work for Senator Grassley at the time.” Foy here takes advantage of the fact that Woodward and Costa’s reporting about the Eastman plot covered a several-week period of time, from mid-December 2020 through Insurrection Day. Ledeen did work for Grassley during part of that time, but not for all of it, which Foy here exploits to imply that she didn’t work for Grassley for any of it.

Conclusion

As a former federal criminal investigator, I was trained to consider the relationships between all parties to a given event, the histories of all parties to an event, and the motives that these histories and relationships may disclose. I’m trained to deem past conduct a possible precedent for future conduct; lies as illuminating as truths; and the opportunity for a malfeasor to misbehave as the obvious and necessary precursor to a finding that they did. With all this in mind, and on all of these grounds, there is simply no doubt that Ginni Thomas and Barbara Ledeen are presently the foremost (if not the only) suspects in the matter of who transmitted to key members of Congress the coup plot John Eastman and Peter Navarro had devised with Donald Trump’s knowledge.

Incredibly, the other chief suspects in this are all connected to Ginni Thomas and Barbara Ledeen by various means: Ali Alexander, a participant in Ginni Thomas’s Groundswell group; Erik Prince, the man who helped train Project Veritas (run by Thomas’s partner James O’Keefe) in intelligence-gathering; Michael Ledeen, Barbara Ledeen’s politically well-connected husband, who has been involved in scandals in every Republican administration since Nixon’s; Michael Flynn, a close friend of the Ledeens, and Michael Ledeen’s co-author;

Mark Meadows, whose Trumpist career was advanced in aggressive terms by Ginni Thomas, in part (but only part) by the awarding of an laurel Thomas devised to celebrate and advertise her favored political instruments; Cleta Mitchell, another participant in Groundswell, and one who also participated directly in Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election; John Eastman and Peter Navarro themselves, the former of whom was in contact with Ginni Thomas in the weeks and months before the attack on the Capitol and the latter of whom spearheaded a “purge” effort inside the White House that was masterminded by Ginni Thomas and Barbara Ledeen outside of it; Presidential Personnel Office director and former Trump “body man” John McEntee, who assumed a position for which he was entirely unqualified because of a clandestine disinformation campaign against his predecessor Sean Doocey by—you guessed it—Ginni Thomas and Barbara Ledeen;

Steve Bannon, whose media operation was hopelessly entwined with Thomas and Groundswell and who was himself a privileged guest of Thomas’s secretive group on at least one occasion; and Donald Trump, who met with Thomas on a number of occasions to discuss the very topic at issue here: locating and positioning loyalists in government who would do anything Trump demanded of them. A small number of other tangential figures, like Jeffrey Clark at DOJ, would not have been key liaisons themselves, but were nevertheless somehow located and selected via a murky process run by Trump partisans; Thomas and Ledeen had spent years plucking men like Clark from obscurity for the sake of getting them to do Trump’s bidding, and in the search for those who recruited Clark to participate in a coup plot in December 2020, Thomas and Ledeen would likewise be the prime suspects for any federal criminal investigator.

In short, as the House January 6 Committee seeks to connect three spheres of coup plotting—grassroots activists and political insiders, Congress, and the White House—there is no map of the key players within these spheres in January 2021 that does not have both Ginni Thomas and Barbara Ledeen at or near the center of it. The House January 6 Committee would be wise to subpoena these two women immediately in order to find out what they know as soon as possible. Proof is confident that if such a subpoena is issued, one or both women will take the same tack that their associates already have, either by asserting the Fifth Amendment (like Eastman and Clark), defying their subpoenas (like Meadows and Bannon), fighting document production vociferously (like Flynn and Trump), issuing statements filled with half-truths (like Foy and Navarro), or testifying under circumstances that suggest perjury (Alexander).

It is deeply regrettable that Ginni Thomas’s association with Turning Point USA as an advisory board member led to a false rumor that she directly aided that organization’s leader, Charlie Kirk, in organizing buses to transport Trump voters to Washington on January 6. While Thomas’s indirect involvement at both ends of Kirk’s operation—on the front end she advised it, and on the back end the Turning Point buses were aimed at aiding the efforts of Alexander, a previous participant in her Groundswell group—the fact that Ginni Thomas was not working the phones ordering up buses (a task well below her pay-grade) obscured the fact that she appears to have been involved in January 6 in more complex and troubling ways. It is little wonder that after cheering on the events of January 6 on the morning of Insurrection Day, she thereafter did the bare minimum to justify her conduct, adding a non-apologetic note to her Facebook page before making it invisible to the public, and then sending a private apology to a private listserv regarding private missives none of us have ever seen. There remains no sense that Thomas regrets her role in January 6 or is even willing to speak about it.

All of the foregoing puts in an entirely new light Ginni Thomas’s husband—who, we are assured from those who know them both, she directly lobbies on matters before the Supreme Court—being the only member of the Supreme Court to rule that Donald Trump should be able to keep secret documents related to his contacts with advisers in the run-up to January 6. That Ginni Thomas appears to have been one of Trump’s key advisers in 2019 and 2020, and that during this period she was working hand-in-glove with one of the most notorious election-year “ratfuckers” in the Republican Party, raises the question of whether Clarence Thomas had reason to apprehend (either under his own steam or at his wife’s urging) that Ginni Thomas or her closest associates might well be implicated in January 6 plotting if all of Trump’s presidential records are disclosed to Congress. Unless we assume that Ginni Thomas hid from her husband the nature of her contacts with Trump and her work on Trump’s behalf—which would be impossible, given that Clarence Thomas was present at intimate gatherings with his wife and the former president; it is also not, according to friends of the Thomases, how their marriage has been structured for many decades now—Justice Thomas was aware of his wife’s proximity to coup plotters like John Eastman when the issue of Trump’s records being released to Congress came before the Court.

While the Supreme Court ruling releasing Trump’s records to Congress was an 8-1 decision—meaning that Thomas’s dissent was ultimately immaterial as a practical matter—in the months and years to come other issues touching upon Donald Trump’s ongoing insurrection will come before the Court. One or indeed many more than one may end up as 5-4 decisions favoring the protection of Trump’s borderline seditious conduct. These majority rulings will depend upon the vote of a man who is surely well aware of what his wife did or did not know about the January 6 coup plot in advance.

If House members do not determine what Ginni Thomas knew between now and the presumed Republican takeover of Congress in January 2023, it will be impossible for the case to be made that Clarence Thomas cannot sit on any Supreme Court case that involves Trump or the January 6 insurrection now or in the future. That is how urgent the immediate issuance of federal subpoenas to Barbara Ledeen and Ginni Thomas is.

july 16

https://sethabramson.substack.com/p/new-two-men-very-close-to-ginni-thomasone

no lnx pix

Proof

JANUARY 6

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.

Seth Abramson

Jul 16

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:

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

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”);

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

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

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

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.

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 theISL-informed coup plotshe 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 orEastman 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 friendCleta 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:

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.

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.

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.

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 ratherchanges 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?

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.

(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.

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

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.

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:

Twitter avatar for @RonFilipkowski

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.

July 9th 2022

1,897 Retweets5,392 Likes

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:

Twitter avatar for @RonFilipkowski

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.

Image

July 9th 2022

1,607 Retweets4,888 Likes

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.

Twitter avatar for @RonFilipkowski

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.”

July 15th 2022

1,704 Retweets4,123 Likes

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:

Twitter avatar for @ifindkarma

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

July 12th 2022

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.

By Seth Abramson  ·  Tens of thousands of paid subscribers

David

Jul 16

More & more of these enablers & plotters will be revealed as the investigations continue. As one thing leads to another Americans are going to have a difficult time grasping the enormity of this conspiracy & the implications to our nation. We need to see some of these miscreants arrested or held in detention pending trial. Otherwise, they are going to remain emboldened & continue their plotting, further disrupting society & causing political chaos. At what point is the evidence readily available sufficient to start pressing charges?

Cheryl Wolf

Jul 16

Holy Crap Cakes, Seth! Brilliant investigative work. But it makes me think, what if any one (or more) of those co-conspirators has subscribed to PROOF and knows that you’re hot on their trail? Stay safe, please. The world needs you.

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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 Trumpwho’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 titledDefender 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 (seehere, 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 documentwith a few commentsto 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.