Jan 6 committee to seek testimony from Ginni Thomas

The January 6 committee will seek testimony from Ginni Thomas about her efforts to persuade Trump officials to participate in the attempt to overturn the 2020 election, the panel’s chairman said on Thursday.

Rep Bennie Thompson made the remarks ahead of the committee’s third public hearing, scheduled for early in the afternoon.

News was recently reported by several outlets indicating that the panel’s lawmakers now have evidence of her correspondence with John Eastman, a central figure on Donald Trump’s legal team who worked unsuccessfully to convince Mike Pence to interfere in the certification of the 2020 election.

“We think it’s time that we, at some point, invite her to come talk to the committee,” Mr Thompson told reporters on Thursday.

Ms Thomas’s alleged role in the efforts to overturn the election has long been a touchy subject in Washington. The wife of a sitting Supreme Court justice who has never held elected office, her political activities were already a source of criticism given the supposed nonpartisan nature of the court even before January 6, 2021. In general, sitting justices avoid appearing before overtly political groups and taking political causes; Ms Thomas, however, has been a conservative activist for many years even while her husband, Clarence Thomas, has gained his own reputation as one of the court’s most hardline conservatives and member of the right-leaning Federalist Society.

More recently, text messages between Mark Meadows and Ginni Thomas were released by the panel indicating that Ginni Thomas had played an active role in attempting to convince White House staff to go along with then-President Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the election. It was further revealed that she had done the same in messages to dozens of GOP-aligned state lawmakers in Arizona, a key swing state that went for Joe Biden in 2020. And she would go on to admit to attending the January 6 ‘Stop the Steal’ rally in Washington DC itself, though she is not believed to have entered the Capitol building during the riot.

Those revelations have struck a serious nerve in Washington as it appears to most observers that Ms Thomas was leveraging prominence that, despite her own career, is due in least part to her husband’s job in her efforts to thwart the will of American voters across the country. There have been calls on the left, particularly among progressives, for Democrats to start demanding that Mr Thomas resign from the Court due to his wife’s role in what many are now calling an overt attempt to overthrow the lawfully-elected president of the United States before his term could even start.

Those calls have not been taken up by lawmakers in DC as of yet, however.

The statement by Mr Thompson on Thursday is also evidence of just how much work the committee intends to do after public hearings conclude in the weeks ahead. The panel is still expected to release a final report on its findings sometime in the months following its final prime time public hearing.

Republicans have continued to denounce the Jan 6 committee’s hearings as theater but have been largely drowned out by the chorus of voices from the Trump campaign and Mr Trump’s own family that the panel have chosen to elevate in recent days rather than deliver their own narratives.