Ginni Thomas Was Written Out of the January 6 Committee's Final Report

But that doesn't mean she wasn't involved in the violent attempt to to overturn the 2020 election--and that Clarence Thomas did not condone it

If you are a regular reader, you may have noticed that one of my New Year’s resolutions is to use this space to help you understand American conservatism's history and its current state. If you know someone who would like to join us on this journey, please:

I am also pleased to announce that I have recruited a second writer for Political Junkie, who will debut at the end of January and provide bonus posts. Stay tuned!

Photo credit: Gage Skidmore/Wikimedia Commons

---

One of the great mysteries of The January 6th Report, which came out in December 2022, and details the findings of the United States House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack, is the absence of conservative activist Virginia “Ginni” Thomas from its pages.

Ginni Thomas, I suspect, dislikes the limelight. Have you ever wondered why the picture illustrating this article is so ubiquitous, even in major publications? I suspect it's because there aren’t that many of them. This one is cropped from a group photo taken on the stage at the 2017 Conservative Political Action Conference, but normally? Ginni Thomas works behind the scenes. They don’t take pictures behind the scenes.

But since Thomas didn’t get to choose whether or not she appeared in the January 6 Report, we must speculate about other reasons for her omission. Prominent in shaping that speculation is our collective uncertainty about what extreme right-wing Supreme Court Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, Ginni’s ultra-conservative spouse, knew about his wife’s role in the attempted coup d’état or the events that led up to it. So, perhaps the committee restrained itself: at a moment when the Supreme Court has never been more distrusted by the American people, fueling doubts about an Associate Justice’s integrity without being able to do anything about it might further the erosion of governmental authority that permitted the attack on Congress in the first place.

Nevertheless, there were things we needed to know, rumors, and accusations that needed to be addressed. So, on Thursday, September 29, 2022, Ginni Thomas came before the Committee voluntarily to explain her possible collusion in an attempt to overthrow a duly elected President of the United States.

One early accusation was that Thomas had sponsored 80 buses to bring Trump supporters to Washington on January 6. But that was misinformation. Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA chartered the buses: while Thomas serves on the board, there is no evidence she paid to transport potential insurrectionists to the Capitol.

A second, more plausible accusation against Ginni Thomas is that she misused her authority. No one would care what she thinks, nor would she have a direct line to the White House, the theory goes, if she were not Clarence Thomas’s wife. This is debatable, in my view: we don’t know who Ginni Thomas would be if she were single or married to someone else. But more importantly, using your influence isn’t a crime in Washington. It’s a virtue, and the Supreme Court is hardly exempt from that system.

But Thomas also claimed that she doesn’t use her husband to open doors nor attempt to influence her husband’s work on the Court. They live, it appears, parallel lives: Thomas swore to the committee that she and Clarence have “an ironclad rule” to not speak to each other about their work. This strikes me as a polite fiction that the January 6 Committee, Chief Justice John Roberts, and the federal prosecutors making their way up the list of those charged with attempting to overthrow the government a year ago are also—politely—pretending to believe.

The rest of us don’t have to believe it because it is utterly implausible that two right-wing zealots never speak about their life’s mission.

But do we need evidence that Ginni Thomas used her husband’s position to support a conspiracy to hold her accountable for playing a role in the events of January 6? No, because Thomas has been a political extremist for her entire adult life. Every cause she worked for, every organization she started and raised money for, every person she recommended for a government appointment, led to the moment when armed partisans, called to Washington by Trump and inflamed by his speech on the Ellipse, fought to stop Congress from certifying Joe Biden as President of the United States.

Furthermore, Ginni Thomas was called before the January 6 Committee, not because she married and lives with a Supreme Court judge, but because she vocally supported overturning a legal and fair election. Even though we rarely criminalize political speech nowadays, 29 text messages (which Thomas now “regrets”) sent to Trump's chief of staff, Mark Meadows, in the days and weeks after the 2020 presidential election prove that Thomas was 100% behind the criminal and delusional maneuvering that preceded the attack on the Capitol.

In other words, although Thomas began her testimony to the committee by describing her involvement with January 6 as “minimal and mainstream,” that depends on how you define the words “minimal” and “mainstream.” It also depends on how long you think the timeline for those events is. Because even though she claims to have attended the “Stop the Steal” rally for only a short time, sent a few regrettable texts, and done nothing else, overturning our government as it exists is the career Ginni Thomas chose.

And what she does is neither minimal nor mainstream.