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Two Viral Essays From Longtime Elon Musk Friends Have Just—Yes, Really—Revealed Musk’s Origin Story As a Global Supervillain
The ten most stunning revelations from the Low and Harris Letters—documents unlike any other this Musk biographer has ever seen—lay bare what really happened to make Musk a threat to the world.
Seth Abramson
Jan 29
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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.
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https://sethabramson.substack.com/p/breaking-news-new-revelations-further
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https://twitter.com/SethAbramson/status/1527718357608325120
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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 in 2023.
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
Chapter 3: Kompromat
November 2013
Summary
When Donald Trump arrives in Moscow for the Miss Universe pageant in November 2013, he checks into the presidential suite of the Ritz-Carlton Moscow. That night he is allegedly surreptitiously recorded asking multiple women to urinate on the presidential suite bed President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama had slept in on their trip to Moscow.
Multiple active-duty CIA officers responsible for the case file on this incident, speaking to the BBC’s Russia correspondent through an intermediary, say that the recording does indeed exist. BBC reporter Paul Wood reports that at least one allied European intelligence agency has the same information.
The CIA officers Wood interviews also tell the BBC that there is at least one other recording of Trump “of a sexual nature” from a different location (St. Petersburg) and a different time. Any such recording would be considered national security–endangering kompromat—potential blackmail material—if it is now in the possession of the Kremlin.
Numerous witnesses in contact with British media confirm individual elements of the Ritz-Carlton allegation, which was originally published by BuzzFeed in January 2017 as part of a thirty-five-page dossier of raw intelligence now commonly known as the Steele dossier.
The Facts
The Carlton, Moscow-Moscow Updated 2023 Room Price-Reviews & Deals | Trip.com
ABOVE: The former Ritz-Carlton Moscow, known as the “Carlton Moscow” ever since U.S. hospitality group Marriott International pulled out of Russia following the Kremlin’s illegal—and brutal—2022 invasion of the sovereign nation of Ukraine.
Donald Trump arrives in Moscow on November 8, 2013, for a full day of business meetings. A number of Russian businessmen attend the meetings; among them is Artem Klyushin, a Russian billionaire whose close friend Konstantin Rykov will post on social media the day after the 2016 election that he and Klyushin were part of a clandestine campaign to get Trump elected.
Rykov also runs Dosug, a website that functions as Moscow’s largest brothel and most logistically dexterous supplier of prostitutes to locations around the Russian capital.
At one of Trump’s first meetings, a Russian attendee—possibly Emin Agalarov (see Chapter 2), possibly Klyushin or a third person present—tells Keith Schiller, Trump’s bodyguard, that if Trump wants, a group of prostitutes can be sent to his room at the Ritz-Carlton that night. According to Schiller’s testimony to Congress in November 2017, he declines the offer and tells Trump about it immediately; the two men laugh about it, Schiller testifies.
That night, Schiller stands outside Trump’s door as he normally does. After a few minutes, however, he goes to bed. Trump is aware—by his own subsequent admission at a January 2017 news conference—that his room is likely filled with clandestine recording equipment and that he must be “careful” about what he does there.
Schiller tells Congress that he “could not say for sure what happened during the remainder of the night.”
Longtime Trump Aide Said to Have Plans to Leave the White House - The New York Times
ABOVE: Keith Schiller, Donald Trump’s bodyguard, who, according to his sworn testimony, inexplicably left Donald Trump’s hotel-room door unguarded for hours while his protectee was in a foreign country in a room wired for audio and video. When Schiller left Trump’s employ, the Republican Party—run by Trump—hired him at an exorbitant annual salary, though what he was doing to earn it was unclear.
According to the dossier compiled by former MI6 agent Christopher Steele—using Russian intelligence sources he developed during his time as head of the Russia desk at the British intelligence agency, as well as local Moscow sources and American sources alleged to be close to Trump—prostitutes were indeed sent to Trump’s room on November 8, 2013, and the room was being recorded as Trump says he suspected.
The dossier cites for this intelligence “several of the staff [at the Ritz-Carlton Moscow]”, as well as “Source D” and “Source E.” The dossier sources allege that, to show disrespect to President Obama and his wife, Michelle, Trump asked a group of women to urinate on the bed in the presidential suite that the Obamas had slept in during a prior official visit to Russia.
{Addendum, 6/8/2023: In his book Disloyal, Michael Cohen confirms that Trump viewed a “golden shower” performance at the Las Vegas club Emin Agalarov had taken him to several months earlier. Cohen reports that Trump was visibly enraptured by the urination-themed performance, a reaction that neither Emin nor his father Aras could have missed—and one that might well have informed the activities the Agalarovs imagined women could perform in front of Trump in his wired-for-audio-and-video hotel suite in Moscow in November of 2013.}
Over the course of the next year there will be several reports of witnesses who saw a confrontation in the Ritz-Carlton Moscow lobby between hotel staff and a group of women who wanted to go up to Trump’s room without signing in. Paul Wood of the BBC, in an article for the Spectator, will say he was told by an unnamed source that a hotel employee and an American tourist saw the row happen.
In October of 2017, an editor at the Guardian will contact this author to say that the Guardian has heard “there are witnesses to a confrontation in the hotel lobby, when security wanted the girls to sign in and DJT [Donald Trump] objected. . . . [O]ne [witness] is [a] former Trump Organization [employee].”
The editor adds that the Guardian source is a trusted one but “two layers away. She talked to a top Republican who talked to the witness. Her understanding is that the witness had talked to the FBI and given an interview to a local paper that never printed it.”
There is speculation, after the Steele dossier is published by BuzzFeed in January 2017, that Belarusian businessman Sergei Millian (born Siarhei Kukuts) is both Source D and Source E in the Steele dossier, a claim made unlikely by the dossier’s contention that Source E “confirmed” raw intelligence provided by Source D as to the incident in Trump’s hotel room.
Trump dossier author Steele gets 16-hour DOJ grilling - POLITICO
ABOVE: Christopher Steele, one of the most respected operatives in the British MI6 spy agency as well as the former Russia desk chief for this branch of British intelligence. Steele was so trusted by the British government that he was tasked with training other MI6 spies, and so trusted by the American government that he frequently worked alongside the FBI to investigate international criminal offenses.
Shortly after the dossier’s publication, Paul Wood reports that a retired spy told him in August of 2016 that an eastern European intelligence agency had confirmed the existence of a tape of the Ritz-Carlton incident. “Later”, Wood writes, “I used an intermediary to pass some questions to active duty CIA officers dealing with the case file” to determine whether the intelligence community credits the allegations. According to Wood, he received a response through that intermediary that there was “more than one tape” of the then president-elect, with “audio and video”, on “more than one date” and in “more than one place”—specifically, Moscow and the Russian city of St. Petersburg, where Vladimir Putin was an official in the Mayor’s office, at a level equivalent to “deputy mayor”, in the mid-1990s—and that the material was, in all instances, “of a sexual nature.”
{Addendum 6/8/2023: When Putin left his government employment in St. Petersburg, it was to work as a “deputy chief” in the Kremlin department focused on “property management”—one of the offices an American real estate developer like Donald Trump might expect to have to negotiate with, or perhaps even bribe, in order to build any substantial structure in Moscow.}
There's a climate of fear in the BBC around stories about race and transgender' | Daily Mail Online
ABOVE: Award-winning BBC journalist Paul Wood, whose reporting on the CIA’s acknowledgment of Kremlin kompromat on Trump U.S. media inexplicably ignored.
The day after BuzzFeed publishes Steele’s dossier of unprocessed intelligence, the Kremlin calls the dossier’s findings “a complete fabrication and utter nonsense.”
Trump thereafter cites the Kremlin’s response nearly word for word, calling the raw intelligence “A COMPLETE AND TOTAL FABRICATION, UTTER NONSENSE”, and adding, “I HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH RUSSIA—NO DEALS, NO LOANS, NO NOTHING!”
He then compares the United States to Nazi Germany and himself to a victim of Nazi oppression, writing on Twitter, “Intelligence agencies should never have allowed this fake news to ‘leak’ into the public. One last shot at me. Are we living in Nazi Germany?”
Defending himself against the allegations, Trump claims that it would be impossible for him to watch a third party urinate on a bed because he is a germaphobe. Yahoo News reports in April 2018 that Trump told FBI director James Comey, at a January 27, 2017, dinner, that he never slept overnight in Moscow—a claim that is later found to be false. The Washington Post reports, in January 2017, on Trump’s contention that he would never have acted inappropriately in his Moscow hotel room, writing, “[T]he president-elect professed an awareness that the hotel rooms he visits overseas may be bugged with tiny cameras.”
At a press conference the day after the dossier (without Steele’s permission) is put out by Buzzfeed, the then-president-elect says, “When I leave our country. . . . I am extremely careful. I’m surrounded by bodyguards. I’m surrounded by people. And I always tell them . . . ‘Be very careful, because in your hotel rooms and no matter where you go, you’re gonna probably have cameras.’” He adds, “I would certainly put [Russia] in that category.” Addressing specifically the possibility of being caught on camera doing something compromising, Trump says, “I always tell [my bodyguards and entourage]. . . . ‘I hope you’re gonna be good anyway. . . . [But you] better be careful, or you’ll be watching yourself on nightly television.’ I tell this to people all the time.”
Trump’s claims of having acted cautiously in Moscow are challenged by an interview on Hungarian television—aired long before Steele’s dossier was made public—in which a former Miss Hungary, Kata Sarka, says that Trump approached her shortly before the 2013 Miss Universe pageant and propositioned her for sex in his hotel room at the Ritz-Carlton Moscow.
Another of Trump’s defenses against the dossier’s allegations is that he would never sleep with a prostitute. Karen McDougal, a former Playboy “Playmate,” says that the first time she slept with Trump he tried to pay her afterward.
Best Hot Girls Pics on Twitter: "Kata Sarka is killing the #babegame! #sexy #hot https://t.co/JZKuPymdV0 https://t.co/GW05no4mm0" / Twitter
ABOVE: Kata Sarka, a Hungarian model, who said long before the Trump-Russia investigation began that Trump propositioned her to have adulterous sex with him in the very Ritz-Carlton Moscow hotel room he later claimed he knew was wired for audio and video—which circumstance he says ensured he was on his best behavior and led him to avoid engaging in conduct the Kremlin might later use against him.
According to a January 2017 Daily Caller report, an unnamed former Trump adviser’s initial defense of Trump contended that it was Emin Agalarov who raised the matter of prostitutes and did not offer them so much as tell Schiller they would be sent. The same former adviser said that there were multiple “people” guarding Trump’s door all night. In his testimony to Congress, however, Schiller will say that it was a “Russian or Ukrainian” person, not the Azerbaijani-Russian Emin Agalarov, who made the offer of women for Trump, and that the only person assigned to Trump’s door that night was Schiller himself—and he left the door unguarded for much of the night.
Agalarov denies the allegation that he arranged for prostitutes and claims that Trump could not have been with prostitutes at 1:00 or 2:00 a.m. on November 9, 2013, because at 7:00 a.m. that day he was filming part of a music video for Emin as a favor. However Trump himself often says he sometimes sleeps as few as three hours a night.
In January 2017, Stanislav Belkovsky, a Muscovite who is the director of the National Strategy Institute in Moscow, a sometime freelancer for publications such as the Guardian and the Moscow Times, and a host at independent Russian network TV Rain, tells the Daily Beast that “[p]rostitutes around [Moscow] say the ‘golden shower’ orgy story is true.”
In July 2017, independent journalist and surveillance expert Andrei Soldatov, while accompanying CBS’s Stephen Colbert on a brief sweep of the Ritz-Carlton Moscow presidential suite bedroom in which the recording of Trump was allegedly made, tells the Daily Beast that “Colbert and I look[ed] for surveillance cameras behind the large mirror [in the presidential suite] and to our astonishment we discovered an electric cable, which could not have any clear purpose, as the mirror had no electronic illumination.”
Belkovsky speaks about strategy of Putin judo wrestler (video) | Belarus news ❘ euroradio.fm
ABOVE: Russian investigative journalist Stanislav Belkovsky.
Russian journalist worries he could be branded a 'foreign agent' under new law | CBC Radio
ABOVE: Russian investigative journalist Andrei Soldatov.
According to the New York Times, “Russia has a long and well-documented record of using kompromat to discredit the Kremlin’s foes and to lean on its potential friends. For decades [at least sixty years following the end of World War II], hotels across the former Soviet Union visited by foreigners were equipped with bugging devices and cameras by the K.G.B.” Experts on Russian hospitality-industry tradecraft say that, historically, “‘interesting’ . . . foreign businessmen” are put in a “handful of rooms” in the hotel in which they are staying that are wired for audio and video.
In March 2018, former CIA director John Brennan tells MSNBC that the Kremlin “may have something on [Trump] personally”: “The Russians, I think, have had long experience with Mr. Trump, and may have things that they could expose.”
In April 2018, former FBI director James Comey, one of the original recipients of the Steele dossier in 2016, tells CNN, “I don’t know whether the current President of the United States was with prostitutes peeing on each other in Moscow in 2013. It’s possible.”
When Vladimir Putin is asked in Helsinki, Finland, whether the Kremlin has a tape of Trump from his November 2013 stay at the Ritz-Carlton Moscow, he does not deny the existence of such evidence. Instead, he says that he was unaware Trump was in Moscow at the time. Noting that there are too many “high-level [and] high-ranking” businessmen coming to Russia to try to collect compromising material on all of them, he adds that “when [Trump] was a private individual, a businessman, nobody informed me that he was in Moscow [in November 2013]. . . . Please disregard these issues and don’t think about this anymore again.”
On August 10, 2018, Robert Baer, a former CIA case officer and an intelligence columnist for Time, tells a crowd at an event in Colorado that prior to the release of the Steele dossier in January 2017 he spoke to a former KGB officer who told him, “We have a tape of Donald Trump.”
While according to Baer the Russian didn’t say when the tape was recorded or what it depicted, Baer concluded, after the Steele dossier was published, that whether the tape referenced by the ex-KGB agent was from 2013 or not, based on the dossier’s allegations and his own familiarity with Russian intel operations, “the Agalarovs are KGB [FSB] agents.”
Not My Job: Former CIA Officer Robert Baer Gets Quizzed On Bears : NPR
ABOVE: Journalist and former CIA case officer Robert Baer.
Annotated History
(with excerpts from the above chapter in italicized bold, followed by regular-font annotations; this section is key to understanding certain of the facts delineated in the Facts section, above)
1
Donald Trump arrives in Moscow on November 8, 2013, for a full day of business meetings. A number of Russian businessmen attend the meetings; among them is Artem Klyushin, a Russian billionaire whose close friend Konstantin Rykov will post on social media the day after the 2016 election that he and Klyushin were part of a campaign to get Trump elected. Rykov runs Dosug, a website that functions as Moscow’s largest brothel.
Konstantin Rykov is a member of Putin’s political party who previously served in the Duma, is one of the Russian leader’s most trusted confidants, and is widely considered by journalists and Kremlinologists as a member of the “propagandist arm of the Putin government machine”, according to Washington Monthly. PRI (Public Radio International) has noted his expertise in click-bait messaging, viral communication, and digital technology, and referred to him in May 2018 as “the man who taught the Kremlin how to win the internet.” He also, according to a 2016 Daily Dot article entitled “This Dark Net Brothel Makes Finding Sex as Easy as Hailing an Uber”, founded Dosug, now the largest brothel in Moscow.
Kremlin Propagandist Boasted of His Hacking Efforts, Strongly Implied Colluding With Trump Team in Facebook Posts | by Scott Stedman | Medium
ABOVE: Kremlin propagandist and alleged hacker Konstantin Rykov, a good friend of a figure in Trump’s Moscow entourage, Artem Klyushin—but also a pimp whose brothel, Dosug, enabled him to deliver prostitutes to any Moscow hotel in minutes. Rykov has repeatedly boasted of interfering in the 2016 U.S. election to help Trump, even as he coyly alludes to a history of Trump misconduct of which he has evidence.
Rykov created a pro-Trump website, Trump2016.ru, in 2015, and he published a pro-Trump endorsement just a few weeks after Trump’s surprise announcement of his candidacy for president that June. Pictures and text from Klyushin’s Twitter account suggest Klyushin attended a Trump rally in Iowa in late 2015. In a March 2016 Reuters article, Rykov, who is well known in Russia and among American journalists as a “pro-Kremlin blogger” and “Putin supporter”, is quoted as saying, “Trump is the first member of the American elite in twenty years who compliments Russia. Trump will smash America as we know it, we’ve got nothing to lose. Do we want Grandmother Hillary? No. Maybe it’s time to help the old brigand [Trump].”
2
The dossier sources allege that, to show disrespect to President Obama and his wife, Michelle, Trump asked a group of women to urinate on the bed in the presidential suite that the Obamas had slept in during a prior official visit to Russia.
At one hotel in former Soviet republic Estonia, according to the New York Times, during the Soviet era “60 of the hotel’s 423 rooms were bugged and reserved for ‘interesting persons’ like foreign businessmen. Guests who were judged vulnerable to blackmail were put in a handful of rooms with holes in the walls through which special cameras would film dalliances with prostitutes. All the prostitutes . . . worked for the K.G.B.”
In a conversation with FBI director James Comey in early 2017, Trump allegedly said that Putin told him in Moscow in 2013 that “[Russia had] some of the most beautiful hookers in the world.” The comment echoes a letter Trump sent to Putin in the months before he went to Moscow, in which Trump had added a postscript indicating that “he looked forward to seeing ‘beautiful’ women during his trip”, according to the Washington Post.
As noted by CBS’s Stephen Colbert when he traveled to the Ritz-Carlton Moscow to investigate the allegations in the Steele dossier, Trump stayed in the nicest room in the hotel—the presidential suite—while in the Russian capital. In July 2017, Colbert rented out the room Trump had stayed in and videotaped his discovery of “an unexplained power cable . . . dangling from a section of the bedroom wall that was hidden behind a non-illuminated mirror.” Colbert would later recount for Conan O’Brien, on the latter’s show Conan, how “I actually looked behind the mirrors of the presidential suite room where they supposedly had filmed this happening, and there were electrical wires going into a mirror.”
As for the motivation behind the acts Trump allegedly observed at the Ritz-Carlton, reports suggest that Trump has hated Obama ever since Obama made fun of him at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner in 2011 in front of the most powerful and influential figures in American media. According to a September 2015 article by eyewitness Adam Gopnik in the New Yorker, “Trump’s humiliation was as absolute, and as visible, as any I have ever seen: his head set in place, like a man in a pillory, he barely moved or altered his expression as wave after wave of laughter struck him. There was not a trace of feigning good humor about him. . . . No head-bobbing or hand-clapping or chin-shaking or sheepish grinning—he sat perfectly still, chin tight, in locked, unmovable rage.”
According to a Washington Post report, “reporters for major news organizations say Trump was so humiliated that it triggered a deep, previously hidden yearning for revenge [against Obama].”
ABOVE: Then-U.S. president Barack Obama roasting Donald Trump at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Despite a fleeting grim smile, witnesses report that Trump became livid during the highly embarrassing several minutes of nationally televised ribbing.
3
Over the course of the next year there will be reports of witnesses who saw a row in the Ritz-Carlton Moscow lobby between hotel staff and a group of women who wanted to go up to Trump’s room without signing in.
Per Paul Wood—a Russia correspondent for the BBC at the time he filed his report—an American Ritz-Carlton Moscow guest alleged that prostitutes went up to Trump’s room.
As Wood wrote in an August 2017 article for the Spectator (emphasis supplied), “Steele is not the only source [on the alleged Ritz-Carlton Moscow tape]. I heard of Russian kompromat—compromising material—on Trump from two sources months before the Steele dossier came to light. . . . There are . . . reports of witnesses in the hotel who corroborate Steele’s reporting. These include an American who’s said to have seen a row with hotel security over whether the (alleged) hookers would be allowed up to Trump’s suite.”
Besides the (minimum) two hotel witnesses he referenced, Wood also directly or indirectly received information from intelligence agency contacts who confirmed Steele’s reporting. As Wood wrote for the BBC on January 12, 2017, in an article entitled “Trump ‘Compromising’ Claims: How and Why Did We Get Here?”:
Steele is not the only source for the claim about Russian kompromat on the president-elect. Back in August, a retired spy told me he had been informed of its existence by “the head of an East European intelligence agency.” Later, I used an intermediary to pass some questions to active duty CIA officers dealing with the case file. . . . I got a message back that there was “more than one tape”, “audio and video”, on “more than one date”, in “more than one place”—in the Ritz in Moscow and also in St. Petersburg—and that the material [in the tapes] was “of a sexual nature.”
Steele’s dossier offers us another person who could corroborate the alleged events of November 8, 2013. According to Steele, a Trump friend described as being in his early forties—either Felix Sater, Russian-born Republican strategist Boris Epshteyn, or (most likely of the three) Sergei Millian—knows that a compromising tape of the sort described above exists. Steele doesn’t allege this witness spoke directly to him about the existence of a tape; rather, he wrote in his dosser that a man in Trump’s 2013 Miss Universe pageant entourage spoke out of turn to a Russian source Steele had reason to trust.
Another possible corroborator is Aras Agalarov, father of Emin. A Western diplomat in Moscow, speaking to the Daily Mail, observed that “if there are skeletons in Trump’s dealings with Russia, Aras is the man who will know where they are.”
Just three days after Steele’s dossier was published, NBC News called Steele a “real-life James Bond”, quoting British tradecraft expert Rupert Allason.
John Stoddart/Popperfoto/Getty Images
ABOVE: Rupert William Simon Allason, whose pen name as an author is Nigel West, was a Conservative Party MP (Member of Parliament) for Torbay in Devon.
4
Multiple active-duty CIA officers responsible for the case file on this incident, speaking to the BBC’s Russia correspondent through an intermediary, say that the recording does indeed exist. BBC reporter Paul Wood reports that at least one allied European intelligence agency has the same information. These officers also tell the BBC that there is at least one other recording of Trump “of a sexual nature” from a different location (St. Petersburg) and a different time. Any such recording would be considered national security–endangering kompromat—potential blackmail material—if it is now in the possession of the Kremlin.
Keith Darden, an international-relations professor at American University who “has studied the Russian use of kompromat”, described to the New Yorker in July 2018 the political environment in Russia as being one where “kompromat is routinely used . . . to curry favor, improve negotiated outcomes, and sway opinion. Intelligence services, businesspeople, and political figures everywhere exploit gossip and damaging information.”
Darden even coined the term “blackmail state” to describe the “uniquely powerful role” kompromat has in what was once the Soviet Union, and how “pervasive” it is. In September 2017, a Russian hotel industry source told the Guardian, “If you are in their field of interest then the FSB will absolutely attempt to carry out surveillance. . . . In the bigger hotels you also definitely have a number of people on the staff who work on the side for the FSB, so they would have had absolutely no problem getting into the room if necessary.” Added the source, “I’m pretty sure Trump would have been of a sufficient level to warrant [surveillance]. I’ve seen people of lower levels than him watched [in their hotel rooms] for sure.”
{Addendum, 6/8/2023: In 2019, the year after Proof of Collusion was published, the United States Senate launched a bipartisan effort to interrogate David Geovanis, a Trump friend who was also an employee of Russian oligarch and self-described Kremlin agent/Vladimir Putin ally Oleg Deripaska. Readers may know Deripaska as the longtime employer of Paul Manafort, Trump’s ex-con former campaign manager and the man who shared proprietary 2016 Trump campaign data with Russian intelligence officer Konstantin Kilimnik in New York City in the summer of 2016 and spent all of the 2016 general election under a standing contract with Deripaska to advance Putin’s geopolitical goals inside the United States (see generally Proof of Corruption, Macmillan, 2020). In 1996, when future Deripaska employee and business partner Manafort was advising Trump through the consulting company he then ran with Roger Stone, future Deripaska employee Geovanis was Trump’s host as he made his second visit to Russia, specifically to Moscow and St. Petersburg, to seek Kremlin-sanctioned real estate deals with Russian oligarchs. At the time, Vladimir Putin was the deputy mayor of St. Petersburg, having a few years earlier ended his long career surveilling powerful Americans as a KGB agent. Geovanis, playing the role in 1996 that Aras and Emin Agalarov would play in 2013, allegedly sought to enmesh Donald Trump in videotaped sexual escapades in Russia.
As CNN has reported of Senate Democratic and Republican investigators’ strong interest in Geovanis, “Geovanis may be valuable in the mystery of whether Russia has material on Trump that could be personally embarrassing to him….After starting his career in finance, Geovanis went to Moscow to work for a Russian venture of a company called Brooke Group, which owned land earmarked for the site of a proposed Trump Tower. When Trump came to town to promote the project, sources say, it was Geovanis’ job to show him around. Also on the trip were Brooke Group’s owners, the real estate moguls Bennett LeBow and Howard Lorber, who went on to become substantial donors to Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.” Lorber is said to be one of Trump’s two closest friends, and is one of the two men Donald Trump Jr. immediately called from Trump Tower when he learned that he would be meeting with several Kremlin agents in his father’s home in New York City in June 2016. The Trump Tower Moscow project Geovanis was trying to shepherd in 1996 was the very same project that Aras Agalarov, Putin’s lead architect, would seek to shepherd in November 2013.
Geovanis is married to a Russian woman; has a Russian passport; lives in Moscow; and, per CNN, has stayed away from the United States entirely—making it impossible for investigators to access him—ever since Trump became president. The company Geovanis worked for when he hosted Trump in Moscow and St. Petersburg, the latter the location of the alleged second tape of Trump “of a sexual nature,” eventually changed its name from Brooke Group to Vector Group. One of the major shareholders of Vector Group is Robert Mercer, a man described by CNN as “the conservative donor who was once a patron of business and political ventures of Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist.” After the indirectly Geovanis-linked Paul Manafort left Trump’s campaign in August 2016, he was effectively replaced by the indirectly Geovanis-linked Bannon, who became the Trump campaign CEO in the late summer of 2016.
When the U.S. Senate released its bipartisan report on ties between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russian security services, it revealed an unsettling but in retrospect perhaps unsurprising fact: David Geovanis “[has] links to the Russian security services.” Readers may recall that among the controversial pardons Trump issued before leaving the White House in January 2021 were pardons for Paul Manafort, Manafort’s 1990s business partner Roger Stone, Steve Bannon, and both of Trump’s other alleged top Kremlin-backchannel coordinators, Michael Flynn and George Papadopoulos. Trump also surprised many by pardoning Charles Kushner, the father of the presidential adviser who’d interfaced the most on Trump’s behalf with Kremlin agents at Trump Tower before and after the 2016 election, son-in-law Jared Kushner.}
If Trump has indeed been caught up in Russia’s “blackmail state,” the implications for America’s national security are significant.
Whether any material in the Kremlin’s possession is of a personal or financial nature or both, it throws into doubt the authenticity of Trump’s Russia policy—which has included characterizing Putin in glowing terms, refusing to denounce the Russian strongman’s role in the murder of journalists, opposing critical sanctions on Russia, challenging the authority and viability of NATO in a manner that echoes Kremlin propaganda, advocating Russia’s immediate return to the G7, and remaining open to acknowledging Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea.
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.
- 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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https://sethabramson.substack.com/p/breaking-news-new-revelations-indicate
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no italics, refs long crusade of GT https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/22/magazine/clarence-thomas-ginni-thomas.html
introduction
The most comprehensive reporting on Ginni Thomas’s involvement in the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol continues to be this exclusive Proof report from January.
However, the New York Times just published a very lengthy feature on the Thomases—Ginni Thomas and her husband, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas—that gave its readers a series of buried ledes about Ginni Thomas and January 6. It’s unclear why the Times did little to highlight these revelations; all are ensconced deep within an article it takes more than an hour and a half to listen to via an audio reading supplied by the newspaper. Whatever the explanation for the odd framing of Ginni Thomas’s role in January 6 by the Times, Proof has decided to update its prior report with a clear summary of the Times feature that focuses only on the elements of the feature that will matter to federal investigators. {Note: The author of this Proof article is a former criminal investigator in the federal criminal justice system in Washington, D.C., and was a longtime criminal defense attorney in Massachusetts and New Hampshire. You can read his bio here.}:
These elements, combined with the January Proof report, confirm that Ginni Thomas was one of the chief architects of the events of January 6, 2021.
While it remains unclear whether the House January 6 Committee will now subpoena Ginni Thomas, it is increasingly evident that the Committee is gathering all available data on potential witnesses—including data published in venues like Proof, which the Committee has previously cited in its formal filings. For this reason, the article below may be of assistance to decision-makers wondering if Ginni Thomas has valuable evidence about the January 6 attack on the Capitol to offer both Congress and the FBI.
The short answer: she does. And indeed the evidence curated in the article that follows warrants the immediate issuance of a subpoena to Ginni Thomas for both testimony and documents. It warrants, further, the interrogation of Thomas by agents of the FBI.
Addressing the Elephant in the Room: Clarence Thomas
The New York Times focuses a majority of its article on Ginni Thomas on her husband, Clarence Thomas—a common mistake that Proof warned about at the very beginning of its own feature on Ginni Thomas. While the Times does admirably substantiate long-standing claims that the Thomases don’t segregate their professional careers in anything like the manner they might like observers to think they do, it remains the case that, whatever the framing employed by the Times, Ginni Thomas’s activities are considerably more newsworthy and influential than her husband’s, deserving coverage exclusive from any consideration of Justice Thomas’s arch-conservative jurisprudence.
How could the public and private actions of a political activist be “more influential” than those of a Supreme Court Justice? It seems unlikely, and yet Clarence and Ginni Thomas offer us a unique—even unprecedented—case study in this seeming paradox.
When I studied at Harvard Law School in the 2000s, it was commonly understood—even among conservative students self-identifying as constitutional “originalists”—that Clarence Thomas was perhaps U.S. history’s least interesting Supreme Court Justice, as despite his lofty position he simply had no evident governing judicial philosophy for a law student to analyze, let alone internalize. Indeed, Justice Thomas had made clear by the early 2000s that his tenure on the bench was in substantial part an act of revenge: as punishment for his historically bruising confirmation process, he would thwart the advance of anything he deemed a byproduct of American liberalism at every turn and by any means—not merely because doing so was in keeping with his politics, though it was, but because it’d be a stick in the eye of the very politicians and political party that had only narrowly failed to keep him off the Supreme Court (he was confirmed in the United States Senate with only 52 votes; much more on this later on).
Known for years and years for never asking questions of the parties before him during oral argument—one of the few justices in American history to be so melodramatically passive—many court-watchers assumed that one reason for Thomas’s odd practice was that he simply had no difficulty making up his mind about cases. That is, he didn’t need input from practitioners to know which arch-conservative, doctrinaire position he’d take at the conclusion of a case. Unlike his friend and mentor Antonin Scalia, whose occasional bouts with draconian intellectual integrity made him a favorite of the well-heeled, self-styled intellectuals of The Federalist Society, Thomas was seen by many in the American legal community as little more than a far-right foot-soldier with an ax to grind. The notion that this rather uncharitable view wasn’t far from the mark is bolstered by current facts on the ground: while Justice Scalia was a favorite of the Republican Party while it still existed, Thomas is now the favorite of the principle-free MAGA “movement”, which as a matter of temperament and inclination puts ends above means—and indeed values means not at all.
All of this is to say that from the time he was seated on the Supreme Court in the early 1990s, Clarence Thomas’s influence on the court and position on individual issues has been predictable in advance. Thomas is not so much a jurist who is studied as a reliable vote whose presence is appreciated by those with whom he agrees (and vice versa). So he is “influential” when it comes time to tally votes in the Supreme Court’s private chambers almost exclusively because he offers—as many, even countless others might have done in the very same way—one vote for the conservative position on any legal question, and without fail. Just as a Major League Baseball team could find hundreds of players in its own or other teams’ minor leagues to elevate to its starting lineup and reliably hit .240, Justice Thomas, for all his quite evident intelligence and wisdom, in the final accounting merely admirably fulfills the expectations of his political “team.”
By comparison, Ginni Thomas’s role in U.S. politics is not merely unprecedented but has been influential in a way that never could’ve been predicted—and remains wholly unpredictable. And this fact is still, decades on, woefully under-reported in U.S. media.
It’s a decades-long trend that continued with the recent feature by the New York Times.
The New York Times Feature
Beyond the components of the feature that rehash what Proof readers already found in these digital pages many weeks ago—that Ginni Thomas used her husband’s access to President Donald Trump to gain significant access to the sitting president herself; that she has been a significant influence on her husband, even as he has never recused himself from a case or dispute due to her extensive prior involvement with it; and that she has had leadership roles in at least two profoundly influential far-right operations, Groundswell and the Council for National Policy, both which have unscrupulously sought to influence U.S. politics behind the scenes for many years—the Times mostly focuses on Clarence Thomas’s judicial career and the nature of his marriage, despite the feature’s provocative and somewhat misleading headline and sub-headline, “The Long Crusade of Clarence and Ginni Thomas: The Supreme Court Justice and His Wife Battled for Years for a More Conservative America, [and Now] New Reporting Shows How Far She Was Willing to Go After Donald Trump’s 2020 Election Loss.”
In fact, unless you really know what you’re looking for, you’re likely to miss any utility the Times article offers in revealing “how far [Ginni Thomas] was willing to go after Donald Trump’s 2020 election loss.” Proof is concerned that congressional and federal criminal investigators may take the Times report at face value, therefore, and wrongly deem it the best case possible for Ginni Thomas becoming a federal witness over her role in the events leading up to January 6. Unfortunately, the Times report can’t be readily approached in this way. Instead, it must be deconstructed and networked with other reporting to determine its value—which is surprisingly high when approached in this fashion.
Here, then, are the five key revelations we’ve just gotten from the New York Times.
5 New Revelations About Ginni Thomas and January 6
(1) Ginni Thomas’s 2012 formation of Groundswell, and her role in the controversial Council for National Policy, includes shocking details not previously reported upon—all of which haveimmediaterepercussions for the ongoing January 6 investigation.
It was previously thought that Steve Bannon—then–President Trump’s top adviser on the subject of January 6; a man now being criminally prosecuted by DOJ for refusing to reveal what he knows about that day and the planning for it; and the highest-profile Trump adviser who appeared to have advance knowledge of the violence planned for January 6—was involved in Thomas’s secretive far-right Groundswell cabal only as a sometime speaker. We now know this woefully understates his role in Groundswell.
The Times implies Bannon was quite nearly a co-founder of Groundswell with Thomas, writing that not only did she “found[ ]…Groundswell with the support of Stephen K. Bannon, the hard-line nationalist and former Trump adviser”, but that Bannon was so central to the founding of Groundswell that Ginni Thomas sought an audience with him before she created the group—and apparently did so to get his blessing, support, and endorsement. It is therefore difficult to see the far-right group as anything less than a Bannon co-creation. Here’s what the Times reports on Groundswell’s founding:
A few weeks after Mitt Romney lost the 2012 presidential election, Ginni Thomas called Steve Bannon, then the chairman of Breitbart, and they had lunch at the Washington townhouse that was both Bannon’s residence and Breitbart’s headquarters. Romney’s loss presaged a battle for the Republican Party’s direction, and Thomas wanted to start a hard-right round table to serve as an alternative to an establishment meeting run on Wednesdays by Grover Norquist, the anti-tax crusader. “She had the idea, ‘I think we need something to counter Grover’s Wednesday meeting,’” recalled Bannon, who didn’t know her well at the time. “And I said, ‘That’s a brilliant idea.’”
The implications of this tête-à-tête in Bannon’s home-cum-office are extraordinary.
We know that in the weeks before January 6, Steve Bannon was using every means at his disposal to play a “central role” in ensuring January 6 would be the “hell” he publicly predicted it would be—24 hours before the attack on the Capitol. The House January 6 Committee has found that Bannon occupied “multiple roles” relevant to the planning of the events of January 6. So with the news that he was a seminal partner with Thomas in creating Groundswell, and that Groundswell members Cleta Mitchell and Barbara Ledeen were on-the-ground operators in the insurrection effort (see the prior Proof report on this), it can hardly be doubted that Trump was able to reach out to Groundswell, either directly or through Bannon, to weaponize it in service of his political objectives during November and December of 2020.
But we needn’t speculate on this.
The Times has now confirmed this presumption by noting that, as Groundswell’s head, Ginni Thomas served a specific function in the post-election, pre-January 6 Trumpist camp: as the very glue that held it together. Per the Times reporting, “[Thomas’s] role [in the post-election effort to overturn the 2020 election] went deeper, and beyond [the] Council for National Policy[’s] Action [group]. Dustin Stockton, an organizer who worked with Women for America First, which held the permit for the [January 6] Ellipse rally, said he was told that Ginni Thomas played a peacemaking role between feuding factions of rally organizers ‘so that there wouldn’t be any division around January 6.’”
It is easy to skim through the notion of a “peacemaking role” as constituting little more than some form of handshake-and-smile diplomacy, and surely sometimes the act of “peacemaking” involves little more than this. Here, though, the Times is writing of warring factions inside a criminal conspiracy. To play the “peacemaker” in the midst of a swirl of criminal conduct is to be a veritable consigliere to that conduct. Indeed, in his interview with the Times, Dustin Stockton—a longtime Bannon acolyte who was at the center of the insurrectionist camp for the entirety of Insurrection Week—makes clear that without Ginni Thomas’s hard work there would have been “division” within the ranks of the coup plotters and their soldiers. In other words, the coup would have been substantiallyless likely to succeed without Ginni’s repeated, willful interventions.
Here’s how Mr. Stockton put it in speaking to the nation’s paper-of-record: “[Ginni Thomas] united these different [insurrectionist] factions around a singular mission on January 6.” It’s unclear how to interpret Stockton’s words if not as positioning Mrs. Thomas as a leader of the January 6 insurrection. Leaders—literally and by definition—are self-tasked with “uniting” people “around a singular mission.” So when Stockton tells the Times that Thomas was “involved” in January 6, his description of her back-channel involvement can only now be described as a leadership position in the effort.
(2) Ginni Thomas had much more access to Trump in the months before January 6 than we knew—and exploited her access repeatedly and even ruthlessly.
In the last Proof report on Ginni Thomas, readers learned she had access to Trump inside the White House on more than one occasion: at a minimum, one time in the company of her husband (who was the one actually invited to the event in question) and once as part of a sit-down with Trump that her previous—arguably gatecrashing—social appearance at the People’s House had netted her.
The Times now reports that the level of Thomas-Trump contact went well beyond this.
According to the Times, “Trump courted Justice Thomas…[and] Ginni Thomas used that courtship to gain access to the Oval Office.” But it is the details of this courtship that are so shocking. The newspaper recounts a slew of “meetings and conversations” between “the Thomases” and the “White House” that occurred because Clarence Thomas being a Supreme Court Justice had “created an opening for his wife” to get close to then–President Trump. And so she did. In fact, Ginni Thomas became such a regular and forceful presence inside the West Wing—and in conversations amongst the president’s top advisers—that not just one such adviser but “several” of them told the Times that they couldn’t even figure out if Thomas had been given wide-ranging access to Trump as an “activist or a paid consultant.” This seemingly simple question remains unresolved to this day, and given the Thomases’ longstanding caginess in their federal filings (see below), it may be a while before the House of Representatives determines whether or not Ginni Thomas was ever paid by the Trump campaign. In any case, what is clear from members of Trump’s inner circle is that Ginni Thomas’s efforts to insinuate herself into the decision-making process of a sitting President of the United States were so “aggressive” that they prompted White House staff to draw up opposition-research documents about her.
Reading in the Times that Ginni Thomas “positioned herself [within Trump’s inner circle] as a voice of Trump’s grass-roots base” is considerably less important, however, than how she so positioned herself. From her first meeting with President Trump that didn’t involve her husband, she brought “members of Groundswell” into the White House with her—underlining, perhaps, why Trump would later select such members for his “election integrity” team (which was formed the very next year). One Trump aide called the first Ginni Thomas-Groundswell-Trump White House meeting “the craziest meeting I’ve ever been to”,[LEDEEN?] in part because throughout the meeting a contingent of Ginni Thomas’s acolytes were “audibly praying” (in fact, praying so loudly that one Trump aide said it was “hard to hear” anything said in the meeting).
However radical one might deem Trump’s actions in government, the Times reports that Ginni Thomas’s radicalism caught even Trump off-guard. In Groundswell’s first, “crazy” meeting with the president, Trump had to try to “rein it [Groundswell] in” as the meeting became increasingly “chaotic” and Ginni Thomas forcefully demanded a “purge” of the Trump administration’s Personnel Office. Thomas began unfolding far-right conspiracy theories about “closet liberals and Never Trumpers” literally hiding inside the Trump administration—even amongst the corps of political appointees that Trump himself had personally selected. Trump aides have now told the New York Times that at this first meeting, and indeed at a slew of future such meetings, Ginni Thomas was “out of bounds” in her stridency toward President Trump “many times.”
So what was Ginni Thomas’s extraordinarily inappropriate conduct in service of? We now know, thanks to the Times: she was seeking prominent positions of authority for “people [Trump administration job candidates] who couldn’t pass background checks”, “had security-clearance issues”, or “had done a lot of [problematic] business overseas.” In other words, even before the long ramp-up to January 6, Ginni Thomas was identified by members of Trump’s inner circle as the leading lobbyist trying to get Trump to put people in positions of power who even Team Trump didn’t feel belonged in federal service—which, candidly, is saying something.
But the Times also reports that, for all her craziness, aggressiveness, transgressions, and other inappropriate conduct in the White House, Trump indulged her—and even elevated her to special status within his inner circle. After their first meeting, the Times reports, having spoken with “multiple” Trump aides, “The president continued to allow Ginni Thomas access, telling aides that if she were in the White House visiting with other officials, she was welcome to drop by to see him. And she did on several occasions, while also passing notes on her priorities through intermediaries.”
While the existence of “several”—rather than just two—Ginni Thomas-Donald Trump meetings inside the White House in 2019 and 2020 is significant, so too is the notion that Trump repeatedly received “notes” from Thomas establishing her “priorities” for the Trump administration in two critical election years. One wonders if such “notes” were in the materials Trumpillegally took with him to Mar-a-Lago; or those materials Clarence Thomas tried to (temporarily or otherwise) block from any public disclosure; or the 11,000 documents the Thomases’ “close friend”, Trump lawyer John Eastman, is now seeking to block from congressional subpoena despite the possibility that his recalcitrance could lead to his incarceration.
Certainly, the Times reporting indicating that in the months before the insurrection Ginni Thomas’s “place in the presidential orbit [was] secure” underscores that we would expect to find substantive content written by Ginni Thomas in tranches of Trump’s most sensitive policy documents. What could having a “secure place” inside a president’s orbit—specifically, in the role of a leading adviser—really mean, otherwise?
Of course, Ginni Thomas didn’t merely have access to Trump because of her husband. As the Times reports, “By 2019, [Ginni Thomas’s] influence in Republican circles was growing” in part because “she took on a leadership role at the Council for National Policy, joining the board of CNP Action, which had become a key cog in the Trump messaging machine.” So apart from her direct preferential access to Trump, she was a leader of a “key cog” in a sprawling, nationwide Trumpist apparatus. How could such a person not be represented in the intimate correspondence of a president she served?
(3) Ginni Thomas (and her husband Clarence) are “close friends” with Trump attorney John Eastman—rather than, as was previously thought, merely acquaintances of his via his past clerkship for Justice Thomas.
Given that it is already universally accepted that John Eastman is a viable witness for Congress and the FBI—not only has Congress subpoenaed him, he’s already invoked his Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination, which surely caught the attention of the Department of Justice and FBI, if Eastman didn’t have it already—a key question in the January 6 investigation has become, “How much contact did Ginni Thomas have, on the subject of January 6, with a man whose written-out plan for that day is now widely deemed documentary evidence of a seditious conspiracy?”
On the answer to this question could hang Ginni Thomas’s own liability for January 6.
Per the Times, the relationship Eastman enjoyed with Ginni Thomas and her husband went well beyond what was previously thought. It had been assumed that, as a former Thomas clerk from decades ago, Eastman enjoyed a cordial relationship with Justice Thomas—much as you would with anyone you worked for many years ago in a way that was not unpleasant to either you or them. It was known, further, that Eastman and Ginni Thomas were “in touch” to the extent any two people who post regularly to a private listserv with approximately 150 members can be said to be “in touch.”
But now the Times has revealed that Eastman and the Thomases are not merely long-time professional acquaintances; they are “close friends.” This changes the calculus considerably for federal investigators wondering how much direct contact Eastman and Ginni Thomas would have had in November 2020, December 2020, and even January 2021 on the topic that was clearly—this much we know for certain—at the top of the agenda for both of them, that being the overturning of a presidential election during the joint session of Congress slated for January 6, 2021.
So while Proof previouslyreported that Thomas and Eastman were part of “private” conversations on the Thomas Clerk World listserv that were, nevertheless, public in a way—inasmuch as their content could be seen by the 150 or so listserv members—if in fact Thomas and Eastman were “close friends” at all times they were corresponding semi-privately on the listserv and participating in (as Proof reported) forceful debates in that venue (during which they took “the same side” on the matter of the election), there are likely no federal investigators remaining who now doubt that the two “close friends” were also in fully private (off-listserv) contact as well. This is especially likely given that we now know Ginni Thomas “friend” Cleta Mitchell was then working on Trump’s legal team with Eastman, and another longtime Ginni Thomas friend and associate at Groundswell, Barbara Ledeen, was at the time the “business partner” of Don Berlin, one of the “experts” Trump’s team was then employing in presentations to members of Congress. Another such “expert,” Russell Ramsland Jr., was a longtime member of Ginni Thomas’s Groundswell operation.
{Note: Cleta Mitchell isn’t just Ginni Thomas’s friend, the Times reports—she’s also a member of both of Thomas’s secretive groups: Groundswell and the CNP. Thomas and Mitchell have even convened “joint sessions” at which they speak together under the aegis of these groups.}:
(4) Eastman’s backchannel communications with Ginni Thomas and the rest of Thomas Clerk World eventually involved an entreaty—one that he would have been sure Ginni Thomas would read—for those reading him (including Ginni Thomas) to “contact him directly.”
By the late summer of 2020, when John Eastman first joined Trump’s legal team at the urging of Ginni Thomas’s close friend and associate Cleta Mitchell, Thomas’s online biography—written, apparently, by her—crowed that she personally “set agendas with President Trump’s White House for quarterly conservative leader briefings”, which we can take to mean she was one of Donald Trump’s primary liaisons to the #MAGA “grassroots.” It was this same grassroots that Trump would rely upon to illegally delay a joint session of Congress on January 6, 2021.
But by the time Eastman had become heavily involved in Trump’s post-election legal maneuvers—this would be in December of 2020—he was apparently regularly posting on the intimate Thomas Clerk World listserv he well knew his “close friend” Ginni frequented, and he wasn’t merely posting pleasantries but engaging actively in debates over the 2020 presidential election and his own course of advocacy as a Trump lawyer.
All these missives would have been, he well knew, read by Clarence Thomas’s self-declared soulmate.
By mid-January 2021—after the attack on the U.S. Capitol, but while Trump was still president, and far-right hope for an eleventh-hour coup hadn’t diminished—Eastman wasn’t just posting messages; he was serving up open invitations, too. He wrote Ginni Thomas and the 150 or so others on the listserv that “those of you interested in more information” about Team Trump’s post-election strategy should “get in touch” (as the Times summarized it) to discuss the effort to overturn the 2020 election. It is difficult, reading this January 17 invitation, to imagine that Eastman hadn’t sent an identical one to his good friend Ginni Thomas in the days and weeks before January 6.
{Note: The day after Eastman’s entreaty, Ginni Thomas decided that things had deteriorated sufficiently within the group that she needed to issue an apology of sorts to its many members, writing, “I have likely imposed on you my lifetime passions. My passions and beliefs are likely shared with the bulk of you, but certainly not all. And sometimes the smallest matters can divide loved ones for too long. Let’s pledge to not let politics divide THIS family, and learn to speak more gently and knowingly across the divide. I am certainly on the humble side of awareness here” (emphasis in original). While intended as an apologia, Thomas’s mea culpa contained within it an important admission: that the effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election was indeed a key part of her pursuit of her “lifetime passions.”}:
Indeed, in the days and weeks immediately preceding January 6, the Times reports, the actions of Trump’s “team, allies, and [GOP] lawmakers”—a cadre that included John Eastman—were “echo[ing]” the “call put out [in November 2020] by [Ginni Thomas’s CNP Action] to challenge swing-state outcomes.” This would seem to confirm that Thomas and her group had launched the very charge that Eastman was simply picking up as he became heavily involved in Donald Trump’s legal gambits in December 2020.
So by the time of his January 17, 2021 invitation to Thomas and others, Eastman had already spent many weeks neck-deep in an effort to woo almost the entirety of Ginni Thomas’s inner circle. On December 10, 2020, for instance, he’d made an appearance on Groundswell co-founder Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast to strongly urge Clarence Thomas and his peers to intervene in the aftermath of the 2020 election. Meanwhile, “behind the scenes”, writes the Times, Eastman was “advising Trump and his campaign on a new proposal to change the outcome of the election” that mirrored Ginni Thomas’s “alternate-electors” plot. And of course Ginni Thomas’s CNP Action peer and friend Cleta Mitchell was working with Eastman on Trump’s legal team, not only appearing on a now-under-criminal-investigation phone call between Trump and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) but authoring documents like the now-infamous “Five States” pre-January 6 report, which argued—just as her friend and peer Ginni Thomas had argued the month before—that “There is historical, legal precedent for Congress to count a slate of electors different from that certified by the Governor of the state.”
In fact, observes the Times, by December 2020 “a number of longtime friends and associates of the Thomases were involved in efforts to overturn the election results or helping plan the January 6 rallies”—a group that went well beyond Eastman, Bannon, and Mitchell. From Turning Point USA (on whose advisory board Ginni Thomas had served) sending buses of insurrectionists into Washington on January 6, to the heavy involvement of the Tea Party Patriots, a far-right group with which Mrs. Thomas “had long ties” that was “headed by Jenny Beth Martin, a fellow Council for National Policy activist [with Thomas]”, Ginni’s political allies seemed to be in all the positions of authority and influence in the days and weeks before the January 6 attack—consistent with the job she’d set for herself starting in early 2019 in the Oval Office, namely ensuring that it was largely people of her selection in Trump’s political orbit.
Caroline Wren, the top aide of top Trump adviser (and then-secret Donald Trump Jr. fiancée) Kimberly Guilfoyle, told Dustin Stockton that Jenny Beth Martin’s group and Women for America First—the latter the insurrectionist outfit behind the January 6 event that incited the attack on the Capitol—were only able to work together because Ginni Thomas, who’d served as an “early Tea Party activist” with Women for America First leader Amy Kremer, had worked diligently to make that cooperation possible.
Without Ginni Thomas, the Times indicates, the “years[-long]…bitter legal dispute” between Kremer and Martin would have made their cooperation impossible—and thus the January 6 White House Ellipse event that launched an insurrection a non-starter.
(5) Ginni Thomas used one of her operations to promote the effort that ultimately came to be known as the “Green Bay Sweep”—the coup plot.
While the Times doesn’t reference the Peter Navarro–drafted coup plot by its name, that it was the “Green Bay Sweep” that Ginni Thomas began working on as soon as Trump lost the 2020 election in a popular-vote and electoral-college landslide is clear.
As the Times writes,
The [November 2020] call to action [sent out by Ginni Thomas’s Council for National Policy] was titled “Election Results and Legal Battles: What Now?”….[and] it urged the members of [the] influential if secretive right-wing group to contact legislators in three of the swing states that tipped the balance for Biden—Arizona, Georgia and Pennsylvania. The aim was audacious: Keep President Donald J. Trump in power.
The notion that state GOP legislators in the battleground states Trump lost could overturn the 2020 presidential election and “keep Trump in power” would be taken up, a few weeks later, not only by Navarro but Thomas’s “close friend” John Eastman in his capacity as legal counsel for Donald Trump.
Those who might deem it overstatement to call—as Proof has, above—the Council for National Policy “Ginni Thomas’s” operation should consider this Times reporting:
[In November 2020] one of [the Council for National Policy’s] newest leaders was Virginia Thomas, the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas and a longtime activist in right-wing circles. She had taken on a prominent role at the council during the Trump years and by 2019 had joined the nine-member board of CNP Action, an arm of the council organized as a 501(c)4 under a provision of the tax code that allows for direct political advocacy. It was CNP. Action that circulated the November “action steps” document, the existence of which has not been previously reported. It instructed members to pressure Republican lawmakers into challenging the election results and appointing alternate slates of electors: “Demand that they not abandon their Constitutional responsibilities during a time such as this.”
{Emphasis supplied.}:
In short, it appears that as one of the nine “leaders” of the CNP in November 2020, Ginni Thomas used her license to engage in “direct political advocacy” via an IRS-blessed 501(c)4 institution to push a coup plot identical to Peter Navarro’s, and did so well before Navarro had passed around his own document—and likewise before her good friend John Eastman, who she was at a minimum indirectly in touch with in late 2020, pursued a strategy identical to the course she had already charted. That strategy, now known as the Green Bay Sweep, had five distinct components easily identifiable to federal investigators and provably traceable to Ginni Thomas’s CNP Action efforts.
The 5 Components of Ginni Thomas’s November 2020 Coup Plot (the “Green Bay Sweep”)
{Note: Proof does not endorse or agree with any of the five core principles enumerated below.}....
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BREAKING NEWS: New Revelations Indicate Ginni Thomas Was a Key Author of Trump’s January 6 Coup Plot
A recent NYT report explosively updates past reporting at PROOF on Ginni Thomas’s involvement in January 6. The new revelations—taken in sum—position Thomas as a chief author of the insurrection.
Seth Abramson
Feb 23
ABOVE: United States Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas (l) with his wife of thirty-five years, Virginia (Ginni) Thomas (r).
{Note: While it is not, strictly speaking, absolutely necessary, Proof recommends that readers of this article be familiar with the first portion of this report before reading the portion below.}
Introduction
The most comprehensive reporting on Ginni Thomas’s involvement in the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol continues to be this exclusive Proof report from January.
However, the New York Times just published a very lengthy feature on the Thomases—Ginni Thomas and her husband, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas—that gave its readers a series of buried ledes about Ginni Thomas and January 6. It’s unclear why the Times did little to highlight these revelations; all are ensconced deep within an article it takes more than an hour and a half to listen to via an audio reading supplied by the newspaper. Whatever the explanation for the odd framing of Ginni Thomas’s role in January 6 by the Times, Proof has decided to update its prior report with a clear summary of the Times feature that focuses only on the elements of the feature that will matter to federal investigators. {Note: The author of this Proof article is a former criminal investigator in the federal criminal justice system in Washington, D.C., and was a longtime criminal defense attorney in Massachusetts and New Hampshire. You can read his bio here.}
These elements, combined with the January Proof report, confirm that Ginni Thomas was one of the chief architects of the events of January 6, 2021.
While it remains unclear whether the House January 6 Committee will now subpoena Ginni Thomas, it is increasingly evident that the Committee is gathering all available data on potential witnesses—including data published in venues like Proof, which the Committee has previously cited in its formal filings. For this reason, the article below may be of assistance to decision-makers wondering if Ginni Thomas has valuable evidence about the January 6 attack on the Capitol to offer both Congress and the FBI.
The short answer: she does. And indeed the evidence curated in the article that follows warrants the immediate issuance of a subpoena to Ginni Thomas for both testimony and documents. It warrants, further, the interrogation of Thomas by agents of the FBI.
Addressing the Elephant in the Room: Clarence Thomas
The New York Times focuses a majority of its article on Ginni Thomas on her husband, Clarence Thomas—a common mistake that Proof warned about at the very beginning of its own feature on Ginni Thomas. While the Times does admirably substantiate long-standing claims that the Thomases don’t segregate their professional careers in anything like the manner they might like observers to think they do, it remains the case that, whatever the framing employed by the Times, Ginni Thomas’s activities are considerably more newsworthy and influential than her husband’s, deserving coverage exclusive from any consideration of Justice Thomas’s arch-conservative jurisprudence.
How could the public and private actions of a political activist be “more influential” than those of a Supreme Court Justice? It seems unlikely, and yet Clarence and Ginni Thomas offer us a unique—even unprecedented—case study in this seeming paradox.
When I studied at Harvard Law School in the 2000s, it was commonly understood—even among conservative students self-identifying as constitutional “originalists”—that Clarence Thomas was perhaps U.S. history’s least interesting Supreme Court Justice, as despite his lofty position he simply had no evident governing judicial philosophy for a law student to analyze, let alone internalize. Indeed, Justice Thomas had made clear by the early 2000s that his tenure on the bench was in substantial part an act of revenge: as punishment for his historically bruising confirmation process, he would thwart the advance of anything he deemed a byproduct of American liberalism at every turn and by any means—not merely because doing so was in keeping with his politics, though it was, but because it’d be a stick in the eye of the very politicians and political party that had only narrowly failed to keep him off the Supreme Court (he was confirmed in the United States Senate with only 52 votes; much more on this later on).
Known for years and years for never asking questions of the parties before him during oral argument—one of the few justices in American history to be so melodramatically passive—many court-watchers assumed that one reason for Thomas’s odd practice was that he simply had no difficulty making up his mind about cases. That is, he didn’t need input from practitioners to know which arch-conservative, doctrinaire position he’d take at the conclusion of a case. Unlike his friend and mentor Antonin Scalia, whose occasional bouts with draconian intellectual integrity made him a favorite of the well-heeled, self-styled intellectuals of The Federalist Society, Thomas was seen by many in the American legal community as little more than a far-right foot-soldier with an ax to grind. The notion that this rather uncharitable view wasn’t far from the mark is bolstered by current facts on the ground: while Justice Scalia was a favorite of the Republican Party while it still existed, Thomas is now the favorite of the principle-free MAGA “movement”, which as a matter of temperament and inclination puts ends above means—and indeed values means not at all.
All of this is to say that from the time he was seated on the Supreme Court in the early 1990s, Clarence Thomas’s influence on the court and position on individual issues has been predictable in advance. Thomas is not so much a jurist who is studied as a reliable vote whose presence is appreciated by those with whom he agrees (and vice versa). So he is “influential” when it comes time to tally votes in the Supreme Court’s private chambers almost exclusively because he offers—as many, even countless others might have done in the very same way—one vote for the conservative position on any legal question, and without fail. Just as a Major League Baseball team could find hundreds of players in its own or other teams’ minor leagues to elevate to its starting lineup and reliably hit .240, Justice Thomas, for all his quite evident intelligence and wisdom, in the final accounting merely admirably fulfills the expectations of his political “team.”
By comparison, Ginni Thomas’s role in U.S. politics is not merely unprecedented but has been influential in a way that never could’ve been predicted—and remains wholly unpredictable. And this fact is still, decades on, woefully under-reported in U.S. media.
It’s a decades-long trend that continued with the recent feature by the New York Times.
The New York Times Feature
Beyond the components of the feature that rehash what Proof readers already found in these digital pages many weeks ago—that Ginni Thomas used her husband’s access to President Donald Trump to gain significant access to the sitting president herself; that she has been a significant influence on her husband, even as he has never recused himself from a case or dispute due to her extensive prior involvement with it; and that she has had leadership roles in at least two profoundly influential far-right operations, Groundswell and the Council for National Policy, both which have unscrupulously sought to influence U.S. politics behind the scenes for many years—the Times mostly focuses on Clarence Thomas’s judicial career and the nature of his marriage, despite the feature’s provocative and somewhat misleading headline and sub-headline, “The Long Crusade of Clarence and Ginni Thomas: The Supreme Court Justice and His Wife Battled for Years for a More Conservative America, [and Now] New Reporting Shows How Far She Was Willing to Go After Donald Trump’s 2020 Election Loss.”
In fact, unless you really know what you’re looking for, you’re likely to miss any utility the Times article offers in revealing “how far [Ginni Thomas] was willing to go after Donald Trump’s 2020 election loss.” Proof is concerned that congressional and federal criminal investigators may take the Times report at face value, therefore, and wrongly deem it the best case possible for Ginni Thomas becoming a federal witness over her role in the events leading up to January 6. Unfortunately, the Times report can’t be readily approached in this way. Instead, it must be deconstructed and networked with other reporting to determine its value—which is surprisingly high when approached in this fashion.
Here, then, are the five key revelations we’ve just gotten from the New York Times.
5 New Revelations About Ginni Thomas and January 6
(1) Ginni Thomas’s 2012 formation of Groundswell, and her role in the controversial Council for National Policy, includes shocking details not previously reported upon—all of which have immediate repercussions for the ongoing January 6 investigation.
It was previously thought that Steve Bannon—then–President Trump’s top adviser on the subject of January 6; a man now being criminally prosecuted by DOJ for refusing to reveal what he knows about that day and the planning for it; and the highest-profile Trump adviser who appeared to have advance knowledge of the violence planned for January 6—was involved in Thomas’s secretive far-right Groundswell cabal only as a sometime speaker. We now know this woefully understates his role in Groundswell.
The Times implies Bannon was quite nearly a co-founder of Groundswell with Thomas, writing that not only did she “found[ ]…Groundswell with the support of Stephen K. Bannon, the hard-line nationalist and former Trump adviser”, but that Bannon was so central to the founding of Groundswell that Ginni Thomas sought an audience with him before she created the group—and apparently did so to get his blessing, support, and endorsement. It is therefore difficult to see the far-right group as anything less than a Bannon co-creation. Here’s what the Times reports on Groundswell’s founding:
A few weeks after Mitt Romney lost the 2012 presidential election, Ginni Thomas called Steve Bannon, then the chairman of Breitbart, and they had lunch at the Washington townhouse that was both Bannon’s residence and Breitbart’s headquarters. Romney’s loss presaged a battle for the Republican Party’s direction, and Thomas wanted to start a hard-right round table to serve as an alternative to an establishment meeting run on Wednesdays by Grover Norquist, the anti-tax crusader. “She had the idea, ‘I think we need something to counter Grover’s Wednesday meeting,’” recalled Bannon, who didn’t know her well at the time. “And I said, ‘That’s a brilliant idea.’”
The implications of this tête-à-tête in Bannon’s home-cum-office are extraordinary.
We know that in the weeks before January 6, Steve Bannon was using every means at his disposal to play a “central role” in ensuring January 6 would be the “hell” he publicly predicted it would be—24 hours before the attack on the Capitol. The House January 6 Committee has found that Bannon occupied “multiple roles” relevant to the planning of the events of January 6. So with the news that he was a seminal partner with Thomas in creating Groundswell, and that Groundswell members Cleta Mitchell and Barbara Ledeen were on-the-ground operators in the insurrection effort (see the prior Proof report on this), it can hardly be doubted that Trump was able to reach out to Groundswell, either directly or through Bannon, to weaponize it in service of his political objectives during November and December of 2020.
But we needn’t speculate on this.
The Times has now confirmed this presumption by noting that, as Groundswell’s head, Ginni Thomas served a specific function in the post-election, pre-January 6 Trumpist camp: as the very glue that held it together. Per the Times reporting, “[Thomas’s] role [in the post-election effort to overturn the 2020 election] went deeper, and beyond [the] Council for National Policy[’s] Action [group]. Dustin Stockton, an organizer who worked with Women for America First, which held the permit for the [January 6] Ellipse rally, said he was told that Ginni Thomas played a peacemaking role between feuding factions of rally organizers ‘so that there wouldn’t be any division around January 6.’”
It is easy to skim through the notion of a “peacemaking role” as constituting little more than some form of handshake-and-smile diplomacy, and surely sometimes the act of “peacemaking” involves little more than this. Here, though, the Times is writing of warring factions inside a criminal conspiracy. To play the “peacemaker” in the midst of a swirl of criminal conduct is to be a veritable consigliere to that conduct. Indeed, in his interview with the Times, Dustin Stockton—a longtime Bannon acolyte who was at the center of the insurrectionist camp for the entirety of Insurrection Week—makes clear that without Ginni Thomas’s hard work there would have been “division” within the ranks of the coup plotters and their soldiers. In other words, the coup would have been substantially less likely to succeed without Ginni’s repeated, willful interventions.
Here’s how Mr. Stockton put it in speaking to the nation’s paper-of-record: “[Ginni Thomas] united these different [insurrectionist] factions around a singular mission on January 6.” It’s unclear how to interpret Stockton’s words if not as positioning Mrs. Thomas as a leader of the January 6 insurrection. Leaders—literally and by definition—are self-tasked with “uniting” people “around a singular mission.” So when Stockton tells the Times that Thomas was “involved” in January 6, his description of her back-channel involvement can only now be described as a leadership position in the effort.
(2) Ginni Thomas had much more access to Trump in the months before January 6 than we knew—and exploited her access repeatedly and even ruthlessly.
In the last Proof report on Ginni Thomas, readers learned she had access to Trump inside the White House on more than one occasion: at a minimum, one time in the company of her husband (who was the one actually invited to the event in question) and once as part of a sit-down with Trump that her previous—arguably gatecrashing—social appearance at the People’s House had netted her.
The Times now reports that the level of Thomas-Trump contact went well beyond this.
According to the Times, “Trump courted Justice Thomas…[and] Ginni Thomas used that courtship to gain access to the Oval Office.” But it is the details of this courtship that are so shocking. The newspaper recounts a slew of “meetings and conversations” between “the Thomases” and the “White House” that occurred because Clarence Thomas being a Supreme Court Justice had “created an opening for his wife” to get close to then–President Trump. And so she did. In fact, Ginni Thomas became such a regular and forceful presence inside the West Wing—and in conversations amongst the president’s top advisers—that not just one such adviser but “several” of them told the Times that they couldn’t even figure out if Thomas had been given wide-ranging access to Trump as an “activist or a paid consultant.” This seemingly simple question remains unresolved to this day, and given the Thomases’ longstanding caginess in their federal filings (see below), it may be a while before the House of Representatives determines whether or not Ginni Thomas was ever paid by the Trump campaign. In any case, what is clear from members of Trump’s inner circle is that Ginni Thomas’s efforts to insinuate herself into the decision-making process of a sitting President of the United States were so “aggressive” that they prompted White House staff to draw up opposition-research documents about her.
Reading in the Times that Ginni Thomas “positioned herself [within Trump’s inner circle] as a voice of Trump’s grass-roots base” is considerably less important, however, than how she so positioned herself. From her first meeting with President Trump that didn’t involve her husband, she brought “members of Groundswell” into the White House with her—underlining, perhaps, why Trump would later select such members for his “election integrity” team (which was formed the very next year). One Trump aide called the first Ginni Thomas-Groundswell-Trump White House meeting “the craziest meeting I’ve ever been to”, in part because throughout the meeting a contingent of Ginni Thomas’s acolytes were “audibly praying” (in fact, praying so loudly that one Trump aide said it was “hard to hear” anything said in the meeting).
However radical one might deem Trump’s actions in government, the Times reports that Ginni Thomas’s radicalism caught even Trump off-guard. In Groundswell’s first, “crazy” meeting with the president, Trump had to try to “rein it [Groundswell] in” as the meeting became increasingly “chaotic” and Ginni Thomas forcefully demanded a “purge” of the Trump administration’s Personnel Office. Thomas began unfolding far-right conspiracy theories about “closet liberals and Never Trumpers” literally hiding inside the Trump administration—even amongst the corps of political appointees that Trump himself had personally selected. Trump aides have now told the New York Times that at this first meeting, and indeed at a slew of future such meetings, Ginni Thomas was “out of bounds” in her stridency toward President Trump “many times.”
So what was Ginni Thomas’s extraordinarily inappropriate conduct in service of? We now know, thanks to the Times: she was seeking prominent positions of authority for “people [Trump administration job candidates] who couldn’t pass background checks”, “had security-clearance issues”, or “had done a lot of [problematic] business overseas.” In other words, even before the long ramp-up to January 6, Ginni Thomas was identified by members of Trump’s inner circle as the leading lobbyist trying to get Trump to put people in positions of power who even Team Trump didn’t feel belonged in federal service—which, candidly, is saying something.
But the Times also reports that, for all her craziness, aggressiveness, transgressions, and other inappropriate conduct in the White House, Trump indulged her—and even elevated her to special status within his inner circle. After their first meeting, the Times reports, having spoken with “multiple” Trump aides, “The president continued to allow Ginni Thomas access, telling aides that if she were in the White House visiting with other officials, she was welcome to drop by to see him. And she did on several occasions, while also passing notes on her priorities through intermediaries.”
While the existence of “several”—rather than just two—Ginni Thomas-Donald Trump meetings inside the White House in 2019 and 2020 is significant, so too is the notion that Trump repeatedly received “notes” from Thomas establishing her “priorities” for the Trump administration in two critical election years. One wonders if such “notes” were in the materials Trump illegally took with him to Mar-a-Lago; or those materials Clarence Thomas tried to (temporarily or otherwise) block from any public disclosure; or the 11,000 documents the Thomases’ “close friend”, Trump lawyer John Eastman, is now seeking to block from congressional subpoena despite the possibility that his recalcitrance could lead to his incarceration.
Certainly, the Times reporting indicating that in the months before the insurrection Ginni Thomas’s “place in the presidential orbit [was] secure” underscores that we would expect to find substantive content written by Ginni Thomas in tranches of Trump’s most sensitive policy documents. What could having a “secure place” inside a president’s orbit—specifically, in the role of a leading adviser—really mean, otherwise?
Of course, Ginni Thomas didn’t merely have access to Trump because of her husband. As the Times reports, “By 2019, [Ginni Thomas’s] influence in Republican circles was growing” in part because “she took on a leadership role at the Council for National Policy, joining the board of CNP Action, which had become a key cog in the Trump messaging machine.” So apart from her direct preferential access to Trump, she was a leader of a “key cog” in a sprawling, nationwide Trumpist apparatus. How could such a person not be represented in the intimate correspondence of a president she served?
(3) Ginni Thomas (and her husband Clarence) are “close friends” with Trump attorney John Eastman—rather than, as was previously thought, merely acquaintances of his via his past clerkship for Justice Thomas.
Given that it is already universally accepted that John Eastman is a viable witness for Congress and the FBI—not only has Congress subpoenaed him, he’s already invoked his Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination, which surely caught the attention of the Department of Justice and FBI, if Eastman didn’t have it already—a key question in the January 6 investigation has become, “How much contact did Ginni Thomas have, on the subject of January 6, with a man whose written-out plan for that day is now widely deemed documentary evidence of a seditious conspiracy?”
On the answer to this question could hang Ginni Thomas’s own liability for January 6.
Per the Times, the relationship Eastman enjoyed with Ginni Thomas and her husband went well beyond what was previously thought. It had been assumed that, as a former Thomas clerk from decades ago, Eastman enjoyed a cordial relationship with Justice Thomas—much as you would with anyone you worked for many years ago in a way that was not unpleasant to either you or them. It was known, further, that Eastman and Ginni Thomas were “in touch” to the extent any two people who post regularly to a private listserv with approximately 150 members can be said to be “in touch.”
But now the Times has revealed that Eastman and the Thomases are not merely long-time professional acquaintances; they are “close friends.” This changes the calculus considerably for federal investigators wondering how much direct contact Eastman and Ginni Thomas would have had in November 2020, December 2020, and even January 2021 on the topic that was clearly—this much we know for certain—at the top of the agenda for both of them, that being the overturning of a presidential election during the joint session of Congress slated for January 6, 2021.
So while Proof previously reported that Thomas and Eastman were part of “private” conversations on the Thomas Clerk World listserv that were, nevertheless, public in a way—inasmuch as their content could be seen by the 150 or so listserv members—if in fact Thomas and Eastman were “close friends” at all times they were corresponding semi-privately on the listserv and participating in (as Proof reported) forceful debates in that venue (during which they took “the same side” on the matter of the election), there are likely no federal investigators remaining who now doubt that the two “close friends” were also in fully private (off-listserv) contact as well. This is especially likely given that we now know Ginni Thomas “friend” Cleta Mitchell was then working on Trump’s legal team with Eastman, and another longtime Ginni Thomas friend and associate at Groundswell, Barbara Ledeen, was at the time the “business partner” of Don Berlin, one of the “experts” Trump’s team was then employing in presentations to members of Congress. Another such “expert,” Russell Ramsland Jr., was a longtime member of Ginni Thomas’s Groundswell operation.
{Note: Cleta Mitchell isn’t just Ginni Thomas’s friend, the Times reports—she’s also a member of both of Thomas’s secretive groups: Groundswell and the CNP. Thomas and Mitchell have even convened “joint sessions” at which they speak together under the aegis of these groups.}
(4) Eastman’s backchannel communications with Ginni Thomas and the rest of Thomas Clerk World eventually involved an entreaty—one that he would have been sure Ginni Thomas would read—for those reading him (including Ginni Thomas) to “contact him directly.”
By the late summer of 2020, when John Eastman first joined Trump’s legal team at the urging of Ginni Thomas’s close friend and associate Cleta Mitchell, Thomas’s online biography—written, apparently, by her—crowed that she personally “set agendas with President Trump’s White House for quarterly conservative leader briefings”, which we can take to mean she was one of Donald Trump’s primary liaisons to the #MAGA “grassroots.” It was this same grassroots that Trump would rely upon to illegally delay a joint session of Congress on January 6, 2021.
But by the time Eastman had become heavily involved in Trump’s post-election legal maneuvers—this would be in December of 2020—he was apparently regularly posting on the intimate Thomas Clerk World listserv he well knew his “close friend” Ginni frequented, and he wasn’t merely posting pleasantries but engaging actively in debates over the 2020 presidential election and his own course of advocacy as a Trump lawyer.
All these missives would have been, he well knew, read by Clarence Thomas’s self-declared soulmate.
By mid-January 2021—after the attack on the U.S. Capitol, but while Trump was still president, and far-right hope for an eleventh-hour coup hadn’t diminished—Eastman wasn’t just posting s; he was serving up open invitations, too. He wrote Ginni Thomas and the 150 or so others on the listserv that “those of you interested in more information” about Team Trump’s post-election strategy should “get in touch” (as the Times summarized it) to discuss the effort to overturn the 2020 election. It is difficult, reading this January 17 invitation, to imagine that Eastman hadn’t sent an identical one to his good friend Ginni Thomas in the days and weeks before January 6.
{Note: The day after Eastman’s entreaty, Ginni Thomas decided that things had deteriorated sufficiently within the group that she needed to issue an apology of sorts to its many members, writing, “I have likely imposed on you my lifetime passions. My passions and beliefs are likely shared with the bulk of you, but certainly not all. And sometimes the smallest matters can divide loved ones for too long. Let’s pledge to not let politics divide THIS family, and learn to speak more gently and knowingly across the divide. I am certainly on the humble side of awareness here” (emphasis in original). While intended as an apologia, Thomas’s mea culpa contained within it an important admission: that the effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election was indeed a key part of her pursuit of her “lifetime passions.”}
Indeed, in the days and weeks immediately preceding January 6, the Times reports, the actions of Trump’s “team, allies, and [GOP] lawmakers”—a cadre that included John Eastman—were “echo[ing]” the “call put out [in November 2020] by [Ginni Thomas’s CNP Action] to challenge swing-state outcomes.” This would seem to confirm that Thomas and her group had launched the very charge that Eastman was simply picking up as he became heavily involved in Donald Trump’s legal gambits in December 2020.
So by the time of his January 17, 2021 invitation to Thomas and others, Eastman had already spent many weeks neck-deep in an effort to woo almost the entirety of Ginni Thomas’s inner circle. On December 10, 2020, for instance, he’d made an appearance on Groundswell co-founder Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast to strongly urge Clarence Thomas and his peers to intervene in the aftermath of the 2020 election. Meanwhile, “behind the scenes”, writes the Times, Eastman was “advising Trump and his campaign on a new proposal to change the outcome of the election” that mirrored Ginni Thomas’s “alternate-electors” plot. And of course Ginni Thomas’s CNP Action peer and friend Cleta Mitchell was working with Eastman on Trump’s legal team, not only appearing on a now-under-criminal-investigation phone call between Trump and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) but authoring documents like the now-infamous “Five States” pre-January 6 report, which argued—just as her friend and peer Ginni Thomas had argued the month before—that “There is historical, legal precedent for Congress to count a slate of electors different from that certified by the Governor of the state.”
In fact, observes the Times, by December 2020 “a number of longtime friends and associates of the Thomases were involved in efforts to overturn the election results or helping plan the January 6 rallies”—a group that went well beyond Eastman, Bannon, and Mitchell. From Turning Point USA (on whose advisory board Ginni Thomas had served) sending buses of insurrectionists into Washington on January 6, to the heavy involvement of the Tea Party Patriots, a far-right group with which Mrs. Thomas “had long ties” that was “headed by Jenny Beth Martin, a fellow Council for National Policy activist [with Thomas]”, Ginni’s political allies seemed to be in all the positions of authority and influence in the days and weeks before the January 6 attack—consistent with the job she’d set for herself starting in early 2019 in the Oval Office, namely ensuring that it was largely people of her selection in Trump’s political orbit.
Caroline Wren, the top aide of top Trump adviser (and then-secret Donald Trump Jr. fiancée) Kimberly Guilfoyle, told Dustin Stockton that Jenny Beth Martin’s group and Women for America First—the latter the insurrectionist outfit behind the January 6 event that incited the attack on the Capitol—were only able to work together because Ginni Thomas, who’d served as an “early Tea Party activist” with Women for America First leader Amy Kremer, had worked diligently to make that cooperation possible.
Without Ginni Thomas, the Times indicates, the “years[-long]…bitter legal dispute” between Kremer and Martin would have made their cooperation impossible—and thus the January 6 White House Ellipse event that launched an insurrection a non-starter.
(5) Ginni Thomas used one of her operations to promote the effort that ultimately came to be known as the “Green Bay Sweep”—the coup plot.
While the Times doesn’t reference the Peter Navarro–drafted coup plot by its name, that it was the “Green Bay Sweep” that Ginni Thomas began working on as soon as Trump lost the 2020 election in a popular-vote and electoral-college landslide is clear.
As the Times writes,
The [November 2020] call to action [sent out by Ginni Thomas’s Council for National Policy] was titled “Election Results and Legal Battles: What Now?”….[and] it urged the members of [the] influential if secretive right-wing group to contact legislators in three of the swing states that tipped the balance for Biden—Arizona, Georgia and Pennsylvania. The aim was audacious: Keep President Donald J. Trump in power.
The notion that state GOP legislators in the battleground states Trump lost could overturn the 2020 presidential election and “keep Trump in power” would be taken up, a few weeks later, not only by Navarro but Thomas’s “close friend” John Eastman in his capacity as legal counsel for Donald Trump.
Those who might deem it overstatement to call—as Proof has, above—the Council for National Policy “Ginni Thomas’s” operation should consider this Times reporting:
[In November 2020] one of [the Council for National Policy’s] newest leaders was Virginia Thomas, the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas and a longtime activist in right-wing circles. She had taken on a prominent role at the council during the Trump years and by 2019 had joined the nine-member board of CNP Action, an arm of the council organized as a 501(c)4 under a provision of the tax code that allows for direct political advocacy. It was CNP. Action that circulated the November “action steps” document, the existence of which has not been previously reported. It instructed members to pressure Republican lawmakers into challenging the election results and appointing alternate slates of electors: “Demand that they not abandon their Constitutional responsibilities during a time such as this.”
{Emphasis supplied.}
In short, it appears that as one of the nine “leaders” of the CNP in November 2020, Ginni Thomas used her license to engage in “direct political advocacy” via an IRS-blessed 501(c)4 institution to push a coup plot identical to Peter Navarro’s, and did so well before Navarro had passed around his own document—and likewise before her good friend John Eastman, who she was at a minimum indirectly in touch with in late 2020, pursued a strategy identical to the course she had already charted. That strategy, now known as the Green Bay Sweep, had five distinct components easily identifiable to federal investigators and provably traceable to Ginni Thomas’s CNP Action efforts.
The 5 Components of Ginni Thomas’s November 2020 Coup Plot (the “Green Bay Sweep”)
{Note: Proof does not endorse or agree with any of the five core principles enumerated below.}
State GOP legislators are entitled to replace the votes of citizens with their own judgment, and may do so pursuant to their own unilateral understanding of their “Constitutional responsibilities”, whether or not these alleged legal responsibilities have ever been exercised this way before in American history.
Backchannel political lobbying of state GOP legislators to cajole them into viewing their “Constitutional responsibilities” in this way is appropriate, as it falls under the general heading of legitimate “direct political advocacy”—itself an acknowledgment that such lobbying (as well as any of its fruits) are partisan rather than grounded in legal principle or the investigations of duly appointed fact-finding entities.
Legislative challenges of election results, influenced by such direct partisan lobbying, can themselves be partisan—that is, not based in any analysis of the results of an election that has been accepted by any court or fact-finding entity.
State legislators can send alternate slates of electors to Washington whether or not their actions are approved by state elections officials. The purpose of this gambit is to throw a national election to the House of Representatives, where members vote by delegation for President of the United States. In 2020, the GOP controlled more House delegations than the Democratic Party did.
It is acceptable partisan conduct—not seditious conspiracy—for a group of Americans to come to a “meeting of the minds” (element #1 of a criminal conspiracy); develop “action steps” for the said group to take (element #2 of a criminal conspiracy); then execute these steps with illegal purpose (element #3 of a criminal conspiracy). In the case of the so-called “Green Bay Sweep,” the illegal purpose constituted one or more of the federal crimes of Conspiracy to Defraud the United States, Obstruction of An Official Proceeding, Seditious Conspiracy, and Voter Fraud.
Had Ginni Thomas and her two semi-clandestine advocacy groups developed and acted upon the plot outlined above only after developing substantial and credible evidence of voter fraud or election fraud—which evidence of course has still not emerged as of February 2022—an argument could perhaps be made that their final ambition was not to defraud the United States. But the fact that the conspiracy was formed and began taking “action steps” in November 2020, at a time that none of its members had any evidence that the results of the election just past were inaccurate, confirms that their goal was to commit fraud and subvert the will of voters they’d no reasonable basis to suspect had done anything but exercise their most sacred civic duty.
Lest anyone deem it unlikely that a woman so prominent in far-right circles would act not only in ignorance of—but indeed in defiance of—hard evidence in the pursuit of her political aims, here’s the Times reporting on Ginni Thomas’s own recitation of her family’s political ethos: “Our family didn’t believe [former president Richard] Nixon did anything wrong in [the] Watergate [scandal] until way after he admitted guilt. We believed any Republican until all the evidence was in, and then a little more.”
That CNP Action began its approach of state legislators in November of 2020, before even Team Kraken had established fraudulent and false evidence of a “stolen election,” confirms that Ginni Thomas believed GOP state legislators didn’t need to have any basis at all for overturning the results of a democratic election on nakedly partisan grounds.
So What Does It All Mean?
In view of the foregoing, Ginni Thomas can rightly be seen as the “first author of the insurrection”—a title she clearly deserves much more than the men (Peter Navarro and John Eastman) who heretofore have been seen as the key progenitors of Trump’s coup plot. That Eastman may have been acting on marching orders from a close friend who ran a group he’d been associated with for years further burnishes Ginni Thomas’s credentials as a chief architect of January 6.
Perhaps most stunning, however, is that Clarence Thomas may well have been Ginni Thomas’s co-conspirator. Unless it turns out that Mrs. Thomas was hiding her actions from her husband—a possibility it appears every friend of the two who’s ever spoken to American media immediately discounts—Clarence Thomas had some knowledge of the plot his wife put in motion in November 2020. As the Times reports, Clarence Thomas and his wife have for decades now “worked in tandem from the bench and the political trenches to take aim at [progressive policy] targets.” In the post–2020 election period in particular, writes the Times—as “the effort to overturn the 2020 election” was in full swing—“the lines between the couple’s interests” got “blurred.”
As for Ginni Thomas’s awareness that her plot would ultimately be put before the judgment of the man married in 1987, here’s what the Times has to say on that score:
[The CNP Action] plan, if carried out successfully, would have almost certainly landed before the Supreme Court—and Ginni Thomas’s husband. In fact, [President] Trump was already calling for that to happen [by December 2020]. In a December 2 [2020] speech at the White House, the president falsely claimed that “millions of votes were cast illegally in swing states alone” and said he hoped “the Supreme Court of the United States will see it” and “will do what’s right for our country, because our country cannot live with this kind of an election.”
Did President Trump know that the plot he wanted to see before the Supreme Court had been devised by the spouse of a Supreme Court Justice? On the facts above, it is nearly impossible to imagine how he could have been unaware of this.
Lest anyone doubt that Ginni Thomas was far and away the most important of the nine leaders of CNP Action—given her special access to the President of the United States and her unique access, moreover, to his legal team—any doubt on this score must be erased by the fact that, of the nine CNP Action ringleaders, only Ginni Thomas’s husband was going to be in a position to directly influence whether the course CNP Action had embarked upon would be retroactively blessed by the U.S. Supreme Court. As the Times notes, Justice Thomas is not just the judicial hero of the MAGA movement, he is the accepted leader of the current conservative majority on the Court.
Per the Times, “With Trump’s three [SCOTUS] appointments reshaping the Supreme Court, [Ginni Thomas’s] husband finds himself at the center of a new conservative majority poised to shake the foundations of settled law.”
Unlike Chief Justice John Roberts, in December 2020 Thomas was perfectly placed to influence the newest members of the Court—Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett—into forming, along with him and Justice Samuel Alito, an impenetrable far-right bloc willing to protect Ginni Thomas and her co-conspirators. It is unthinkable that Ginni Thomas would have been anything less than a co-leader of the CNP Action effort on these grounds alone, even if she didn’t have a direct line to the president and his lawyers and a significantly more impressive and voluminous resume as a far-right lobbyist than most of her CNP peers.
And has Clarence Thomas spent the last twenty years staying away from the Council for National Policy, given its evident radicalism? No, reports the New York Times:
Justice Thomas headlined an event for the group in 2002, and in 2008 he attended one of its meetings and was photographed with a gavel behind a lectern bearing the group’s name.
{Emphasis supplied.}
While the two intersections noted above may seem rather remote in time and limited in scope, they confirm that in December 2020 the CNP would have had some cause (beyond the inescapable fact of Ginni Thomas’s leadership of it) to see Clarence Thomas as an ally—indeed, an ally willing to publicly himself to their cause(s).
Note too that the Thomases’ social circle is very much a CNP social circle. As the Times notes, Leonard Leo, a member of both the CNP and Groundswell, is a “close family friend of the couple’s.” In fact, Clarence Thomas is the godfather of one of Leo’s children. Could there ever have been any doubt, as CNP formed its coup plot, that Justice Thomas would seek to provide its members and leaders—like Leo and his own wife—any cover they might ultimately need? And wouldn’t CNP’s plotters have believed Thomas, the “north star” of the current GOP according to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, could bring along Alito and Trump’s three Supreme Court justices with him? It certainly would have if its leadership held the view held by CNP “stalwart” (and notorious Islamophobe) Brigitte Gabriel, who said in December 2021, per the Times, that Clarence Thomas is the U.S. Supreme Court’s “real chief justice.”
Ginni Thomas’s After-the-Fact Consciousness of Guilt
In criminal investigations, we often look at how various parties acted after a crime was committed. Such actions may indicate what those who traffick in trial evidence term “consciousness of guilt”—an awareness that one has done something illicit (a form of self-awareness often accompanied by an intense desire to make sure no one else sees what one has done). The Times report details the actions of Thomas’s CNP outfit after January 6, and they couldn’t possibly speak louder about how Ginni and her group saw their own conduct:
In the weeks that followed January 6, as public condemnation of the insurrection grew to include some Republican leaders like Senator Mitch McConnell, the Council for National Policy circulated in its newsletter another previously unreported memo, written by one of its members, that outlined strategies to make the Capitol riot seem more palatable. “Drive the narrative that it was mostly peaceful protests”, a leading member of the [CNP] advised. “Amplify the concerns of the protestors and give them legitimacy.”
But the prolonged cover-up effort by Ginni Thomas’s CNP Action didn’t stop there.
Ginni Thomas co-signed a letter in December [2021] calling for House Republicans to expel Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger from their conference for joining the [House] January 6 Committee. Thomas and her co-authors said the [House January 6 Committee] investigation “brings disrespect to our country’s rule of law” and “legal harassment to private citizens who have done nothing wrong”, adding that they [the signatories of the letter] would begin “a nationwide movement to add citizens’ voices to this effort.”
It’s now clear that Ginni Thomas herself was among the “private citizens” she sought to protect with her letter demanding an end to any congressional probe of January 6.
And following January 6, Justice Thomas began acting—even for him—stranger than usual, abandoning his conservative peers on the Supreme Court to take a position (in effect) on Trump’s right to hide the identities of co-conspirators via document-production refusals that not one of his stalwart allies on the Court would condone.
As the Times reports,
[In January 2022], the Supreme Court ruled 8 to 1 to allow the release of records from the Trump White House related to the January 6 attack. Justice Thomas was the sole dissenter.
If congressional and federal criminal investigators ever had cause to wonder whether Ginni Thomas shared her clandestine post-election activities with her husband—as she’s universally said to share everything else with him (one of the Thomases’ closest friends, Armstrong Williams, calls Ginni indisputably Clarence’s “closest confidant”)—perhaps Thomas being so off-the-grid on a historic SCOTUS holding should now remove that doubt. Or one could listen to the words of Mitch McConnell, who calls the supposedly neutral Thomas (per the Times) a “leader” in the era of Trump’s GOP.
The Times even notes that in public speeches Clarence Thomas implicitly alludes to the fact that he and the far-right movement his wife co-leads have a “shared purpose.”
As the Times writes of Clarence and Ginni Thomas,
If Thomas has been laying the groundwork for a conservative revolution, so has his wife, who once worked at [the] Heritage [Foundation] herself. Groundswell, the group she founded, plotted what it called a “30-front war” on hot-button issues and seeded talking points throughout the right-wing media, including with [Steve] Bannon’s publication at the time, Breitbart News. “She’s an operator; she stays behind the scenes”, Bannon said in an interview. “Unlike a lot of people who just talk, she gets shit done.”
The Thomases have long emphasized how little distance there is between them. As Justice Thomas once wrote, his searing 1991 confirmation, buffeted by sexual-harassment allegations, brought them closer together: “The fiery trial through which we passed had the effect of melding us into one being—an amalgam, as we like to say.”
….
[Clarence Thomas] has frequently appeared at highly political events hosted by advocates hoping to sway the court. He and his wife sometimes appear together at such events, and their appeal is apparent: He fulfills the hard right’s longing for a judge—and especially a Black judge—oblivious to the howls of the left, while she serves up the red meat the base wants to hear in her speeches. They often portray themselves as standing in the breach amid a crumbling society.
It Gets Worse
Per the reporting of Politico reporter Kyle Cheney, Eastman—the author of a so-called “coup memo” who has refused to send certain subpoenaed documents to Congress and asserted his Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination—“was first recruited to advise [Donald] Trump on election matters on September 3 [2020] by Cleta Mitchell, who he says was tasked by Trump in August [2020] with assembling an ‘election integrity working group’ to prepare for post-election litigation.”
This means that at a time Ginni Thomas was directly advising the president on whom to appoint to key roles in his political operation, Trump selected a person—a person there’s no present evidence to suggest he knew previously—who is a good friend of Ginni Thomas. Ginni’s friend Cleta, having been so selected by her advisee Donald Trump, then chose another “close friend” of hers, John Eastman, to work with her.
In the map of interrelationships that launched Donald Trump’s post-election “legal” efforts, Ginni Thomas sits at the very center of the web.
Despite all this—and quite shockingly—when the House January 6 Committee set out to send John Eastman a list of names to search for in his subpoenaed materials, the words “Ginni” and “Thomas” were nowhere to be found. See for yourself, below: [doc list]
The list of individuals the House January 6 Committee expressed an intense interest in—without even once mentioning Ginni Thomas—is stunning in its length and breadth.
It includes Trump, Bannon, Navarro, Vice President Mike Pence, former Attorney General Bill Barr, President Joe Biden, Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ), Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL), Arizona state representative Rusty Bowers (R), former White House Counsel Pat Cipollone, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), Arizona state representative Mark Finchem (R), Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX), Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ), Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), former (now deceased) Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-MS), Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL), Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL), Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA), former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows (R-NC), former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-WY), Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA), former federal judge J. Michael Luttig, former Trump deputy counsel Patrick Philbin, former Pence chief of staff Marc Short, former Trump press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, former Acting Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Division of the Department of Justice Jeffrey Clark, former Trump White House lawyer Eric Herschmann, Pennsylvania state representative Doug Mastriano (R), former North Carolina Supreme Court Chief Justice Mark Martin, and others with names less well-known to domestic U.S. politics-watchers.
All of the names on the Committee’s list are well-deserved selections—and not one of them attaches to a person closer to John Eastman than Ginni Thomas.
Conclusion: The “Cone of Silence”
In what is sure to be one of the less-noticed components of the Times report—perhaps one whose importance even the Times didn’t consider, buried as it is amidst thousands of words of lesser significance—the paper’s journalists offer a tantalizing view of how Ginni Thomas and her jurist husband might have perceived a 2020 presidential victory by Joe Biden over the man Ginni Thomas had advised for years and Clarence Thomas had to thank for finally getting a far-right SCOTUS majority he’d wanted for decades.
Keeping in mind that it was Joe Biden who presided over Justice Clarence Thomas’s historically contentious Supreme Court confirmation hearings in 1991, consider the following sentence from the Times report:
Friends and associates said that the couple’s rage over the [1991] confirmation battle came to both define and unify them.
“Rage”? Indeed, not just rage but a rage that “define[s]” you and actually cements the most important relationship in your life? And a rage of this magnitude that has now lasted decades? And attaches—singularly—to an event that Joe Biden presided over?
In considering the likelihood that Ginni Thomas chose to intimately involve herself in the battle to overturn Joe Biden’s election as president, and then in considering the further likelihood that Ginni Thomas kept her husband apprised of all her activities in this regard, the fact that both husband and wife have for decades been “defined” and “unified” by their “rage” at an event that Joe Biden conducted cannot be overlooked.
Indeed, it is valuable evidence for congressional and criminal investigators of a very common sort: evidence of bias, temperament, and motive.
The Times even goes so far as to note more esoteric reasons the Thomases might have found common cause with Donald Trump: just as Trump has been publicly accused of both sexual harassment and sexual assault, so too, the Times notes, has Mr. Thomas been accused of sexual harassment and sexual assault. Like Trump, Clarence Thomas denies the allegations and has made his denials a part of his public identity and ethos.
And just as Trump has often been deemed an embarrassment to America’s wealthiest citizens—a premise that’s launched a thousand thinkpieces—Clarence Thomas, fairly or otherwise, has faced accusations for decades (accusations, it’s worth noting, that he has spoken about publicly for decades) that he is and should be a pariah in America’s Black community. It is not hard to see why Trump would not only “court” Thomas, as the Times reports he did, but that he would be as successful in doing so as he was. And for the entirety of the Donald Trump-Clarence Thomas courtship, Ginni Thomas was by her husband’s side and—in some cases—even well out in front of him.
Nor can it be said that the Thomases’ have been as open about their allegiances and activities as their supporters would have the American public believe. Per the Times,
[In 2011], [Ginni] Thomas’s activism drew scrutiny of her and her husband, when Common Cause, an advocacy group, reviewed IRS filings and criticized Justice Thomas for failing to disclose his wife’s income—nearly $700,000 over five years from the Heritage Foundation—as required by federal law. He subsequently amended twenty years of filings.
Has any Supreme Court Justice ever hidden two decades of far-right political activism by his spouse in federal filings? Let alone done so under circumstances in which he would have known—as one of America’s leading lawyers—he was effectively hiding hundreds of potential conflicts of interest? Who in the public eye to the degree Justice Thomas is hides $700,000 of marital income, requiring 20 years of amended tax filings? This history, too, must have given Ginni Thomas and Clarence Thomas a sense of déjà vu—and empathy—when tax disclosures became a central component of the public discourse surrounding Donald Trump.
Ginni Thomas, writes the Times, even “briefly ran her own advocacy group called Liberty Central, which campaigned against a planned Islamic community center and mosque in Lower Manhattan near ground zero”—an echo of Donald Trump’s own campaign to turn September 11, 2001 into a locus for anti-Muslim hatred (in Trump’s case, by lying repeatedly, and in the most vile fashion imaginable, about U.S. Muslims publicly “celebrating” the deadly attacks on the Twin Towers on that day).
So while Ginni Thomas may have at first supported Ted Cruz for president in 2016, it’s not so hard to understand why she came around on Trump as quickly as she did.
No wonder Steve Bannon now says, of the organization that he helped Ginni Thomas grow, Groundswell, that it represents “all the stuff that became the foundational stuff of the Trump movement.” No wonder the Times notes, in calling “voting…an early focus” of Groundswell, that Ginni Thomas’s outfit quickly attracted the far-right Ramsland—who not only ended up as one of the top election “experts” on Trump’s legal team but was photographed inside Trump’s Insurrection Day “command center” at the Willard Hotel.
Nor is it any wonder that the same year Donald Trump decided to run for president (2013, as established, with detailed sourcing, by the 2018 Simon & Schuster book Proof of Collusion) Ginni Thomas was as obsessed in private as Trump was on Twitter about how elections are won and lost in America. The Times mentions a Thomas sent to her Groundswell subordinates that year that “list[ed] key House staff members working on elections matters and asked, ‘Who else are key working group members on ELECTION LAW, ELECTION REFORM and THE LEFT’S NARRATIVES, Groundswell???’” (emphasis in original).
That same year, the Republican Party released an autopsy of the 2012 presidential election—the election that prompted Trump to run for president, according to his longtime aide Sam Nunberg—stating that the GOP needed to broaden its appeal. Ginni Thomas’s reaction was identical to Trump’s and Bannon’s, the Times recounts:
[The autopsy’s] prescriptions—[that the GOP needed] to broaden [its] base and appeal to minorities and gay people—were roundly rejected by Ginni Thomas and Bannon. “It’s a joke, and it has nothing to do with what happened”, Bannon said in an interview, recalling how he reacted to the report. “We have to have something to counter it.”
Fortunately, Bannon and Ginni had just co-founded Groundswell a few weeks earlier—and done so with the precise ambition of countering prevailing narratives in the GOP.
As the Times notes, “Groundswell, in a circulated among its members after the autopsy, said that ‘[RNC chairman Reince] Priebus is sending s to the party….[suggesting that] if we were all gay illegal aliens, the party [would] like[ ] us. He is preparing the way for a change on social issues by giving a warning: “Don’t go Old Testament.”’” Groundswell’s contrary view was one that Trump—an indifferent Christian who couldn’t correctly name even a single book of the New Testament— would eagerly (and very publicly) adopt.
Even in initially supporting Cruz over Trump in 2016, Ginni Thomas indicated an odd indifference to the fundamentals of voting, “back[ing] a [2016 RNC] convention-floor effort to overturn the will of Republican primary voters by awarding Trump’s delegates to Cruz.” Just 48 months later, Thomas would be advocating again for the overturning of the will of U.S. voters: this time, however, the votes of every American were at stake.
And yet it was by 2018—well before 2020—that Ginni Thomas had already become such a Trump fanatic that she could seamlessly entwine Trump, her husband, and Trump’s second pick to be a new Supreme Court colleague for her husband, Brett Kavanaugh. At an event that was supposed to be kept secret (recording devices were prohibited), she thundered, “Even if [Kavanaugh] gets in [to the Supreme Court]—I believe he’ll get in, I’m hoping he gets in—they’re not going to leave him alone. They’re trying to impeach him [already]! They’re coming for my husband! They’re coming for President Trump!” The Thomases’ cause had become Trump’s, and vice versa; the purported suffering of the men Ginni Thomas had put in Trump’s path as ideal federal appointments had synchronized itself with the Thomases’ own history of (as they saw it) suffering at the hands of their enemies. The Times recounts that it was the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings that first brought the Thomases and Trumps into one another’s social orbits—an unsurprising concurrence, given that contentious Court confirmation hearings “define” the Thomases’ decades-long history of “rage.”
And yet, none of this evidence is needed to make Ginni Thomas a prime suspect in the planning of Trump’s coup plot. While there is no evidence excluding Mrs. Thomas from suspicion, there is a mountain of evidence placing her at the scene of the crime. Her January 6 Facebook s ardently supporting the rally at which Mr. Trump incited an insurrection via enraged partisans who later attacked the U.S. Capitol seem quaint by comparison to the hard evidence of her relevant involvements with Trump, Mitchell, Ledeen, Eastman, Meadows, Bannon, Kremer, Martin, Rich Higgins, and indeed almost every coup plotter at the heart of Donald Trump’s insurrection scheme. As Proof has reported, even Ali Alexander has been a Groundswell “participant.”
So the question remains: what is the House January 6 Committee waiting for? Why is Ginni Thomas sacrosanct in a way no other witness is? Certainly it is not that she is a woman, nor even that she’s associated with a key figure in American public life; many of the Committee’s subpoenas have been sent to women, and some to men or women even more powerful and well-ed than Ginni Thomas (though the list of those answering to this description is short indeed).
In 1995, the Times recounts, Ginni Thomas told a U.S. News & World Report journalist, “I wouldn’t be in [Washington] if I wasn’t on a mission.” Does the Committee—or anyone in America, including Ginni Thomas’s most ardent friends, advocates, and supporters—believe she would abandon her “mission” just as it came to a head after Trump’s landslide election defeat at both the polls and in the Electoral College? We must not forget, here, that Ginni Thomas has always spoken in the language of radical revolution, confirming that the events of January 6 would indeed have been the apex of her political career. In 2010, during that period she was co-founding the far-right Tea Party movement, she told a crowd of activists at the 2010 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) that “I adore all of the new citizen patriots who are rising up across this country, and I’m happy to help show you the ropes in the Washington area, ’cause we need help.” Those words— “patriots”; “rising up”—echo the rhetoric that would ring across The Mall and in the halls of the Capitol just over a decade later.
In a 2021 email Ginni Thomas never thought would become public, she assured agents of the man most likely to be the 2024 GOP presidential nominee if Trump doesn’t (or can’t) run for the White House again—Florida governor Ron DeSantis—that her long-standing Groundswell outfit offered all those within its ambit a “cone of silence.” Thomas’s assurance to DeSantis’s people that Groundswell not only regularly acts with secrecy but apparently engages in the sort of activities one must regularly hide was accompanied by what—in retrospect—serves as a sort of “proof of concept”: that is, Thomas’s acknowledgment, in her email to to DeSantis’s camp, that her husband Clarence “had been in contact with the governor ‘on various things of late.’” Though we can’t know for certain, this may have been Ginni Thomas’s way of assuring the governor’s aides that—because her emails (and Groundswell’s emails) would never be seen by the public—she could make such bold, even tawdry admissions within them that would, in any subsequent public reading of them, be quickly deemed scandalous.
And this—this precisely—is what is now at stake in the continued refusal of the FBI or Congress to publicly acknowledge that Ginni Thomas was one of the key architects of the January 6 insurrection. These investigative entities are ensuring for Ginni Thomas precisely the cone of silence and cloak of secrecy she (and for that matter her husband) have enjoyed for decades, within which cone and under which cloak it now appears they both have done things that’d make any American blanch. As the Times notes, at the time of Ginni Thomas’s wink-wink nudge-nudge email to DeSantis about secret contacts between him and her husband, “DeSantis was in the midst of a number of high-profile federal court battles.”
No person who believes they can be held accountable for their actions sends an email like the Thomas-DeSantis email. The most charitable reading of such communications is that Ginni Thomas is certain that nothing she does will influence her husband, and that she feels this certainty for the simple reason that the two think so alike that she can be sure of how he’ll rule in a given case without ever speaking to him about it. As the Times reports, in one February 2021 lawsuit involving the Trump campaign’s legal team, Clarence Thomas “sharply dissented when a 6-to-3 majority rejected the case brought by Pennsylvania Republicans that the court had refused to take up in December”, in doing so “echoing the arguments advanced by [Ginni’s] CNP Action.”
In the case in question, Thomas took the view, as had his wife beginning in November 2020, that during the 2020 presidential election “non-legislative officials in various States took it upon themselves to set the rules [for the election].” Thomas even went so far as to say that it didn’t really matter whether the claims of “fraud” being made by Trump partisans—his wife, he didn’t say, chief among them—were true or not, as they should automatically be heard by the Supreme Court even if they facially lacked merit.
CNP Action and Ginni Thomas, if ever they’d doubted that Justice Thomas would’ve looked favorably on their coup plot in November and December of 2020 (not that there is any indication they feared this), must have been enormously heartened by Thomas’s extraordinary statements about baseless allegations of a “stolen election.” Even when Thomas, in an easily missed footnote, acknowledged the weakness of Donald Trump’s post-election litigation, he would say only that the 2020 election had been “free from strong evidence of systemic fraud” (emphasis supplied). That there might have been some evidence of systemic fraud—as his wife was then loudly claiming—went implied but unwritten.
While the focus of the recent New York Times feature on the Thomases takes a long-range view of their ambitions, Congress cannot now afford—nor can America—such bespectacled tunnel vision. The evidence that Ginni Thomas was at the heart of the planning of the events of January 6 is now overwhelming; the evidence that she kept clear of the pinnacle moment of her life’s “mission” is non-existent. Her apparent lifetime of arrogant, “out of bounds” political advocacy has left her open to the ambit of responsible congressional and federal criminal investigations—if only Congress and the FBI will lift the “cone of silence” the Thomases have so carefully constructed.
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