In a last desperate attempt to delay or disrupt the certification of Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential race, allies of Donald Trump sought to appeal to conservative supreme court Justice Clarence Thomas, new emails show.
The emails, recently obtained by the House select committee investigating the January 6 insurrection, show that members of Trump’s legal team considered Thomas to be “key” to their efforts to overturn Georgia’s election results.
“We want to frame things so that Thomas could be the one to issue some sort of stay or other circuit justice opinion saying Georgia is in legitimate doubt,” Trump attorney Kenneth Chesebro wrote in an email sent on 31 December 2020. Chesebro, who is now facing the threat of potential disciplinary action over his work supporting Trump’s election denialism, argued Thomas represented “our only chance to get a favorable judicial opinion by Jan 6, which might hold up the Georgia count in Congress”.
January 6 marked the day that Congress was scheduled to convene to certify Biden’s victory, but lawmakers’ work on that day was disrupted by a group of Trump’s supporters storming the Capitol. The ensuing violence resulted in the deaths of seven people, according to a bipartisan Senate report.
The emails from Chesebro, which were first reported by Politico, were turned over to the January 6 committee after Trump lawyer John Eastman unsuccessfully attempted to fight a subpoena for his communications. US district judge David O Carter ruled late last month that several of Eastman’s documents should be made public, as they demonstrated how Trump’s allies participated in a “knowing misrepresentation of voter-fraud numbers in Georgia when seeking to overturn the election results in federal court”.
Carter, an appointee of Bill Clinton who previously said it was “more likely than not” that Trump had committed a crime in his efforts to overturn the 2020 results, ruled that Eastman’s emails “sufficiently related to and in furtherance of a conspiracy to defraud the United States”.
“The emails show that President Trump knew that the specific numbers of voter fraud were wrong but continued to tout those numbers, both in court and to the public,” Carter wrote in his decision.
The newly released messages indicate that Eastman agreed with Chesboro’s plan to involve Thomas and expressed hope that a favorable ruling from the supreme court would help to “kick the Georgia legislature into gear”, potentially preventing Biden from claiming his earned electoral votes. Three counts of Georgia’s 2020 ballots confirmed that Biden defeated Trump in the battleground state by roughly 12,000 votes.
The release of the emails represented only the latest legal setback for Eastman, who repeatedly invoked his fifth amendment right against self-incrimination when he testified before the January 6 committee. FBI agents seized Eastman’s phone in June, as part of a justice department investigation of efforts to overturn the 2020 election results, and the Trump lawyer’s appeals to reclaim the device have failed.
The latest batch of emails do not include any correspondence from Thomas, although the justice’s wife, conservative activist Ginni Thomas, has become entangled in the January 6 committee’s investigation.
Thomas voluntarily spoke to January 6 investigators in late September, after her communications with Trump’s former chief of staff, Mark Meadows, were made public. In her text messages with Meadows, Thomas repeatedly urged the Trump adviser to stand firm in efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, even after it became clear that Biden had won.
“Help This Great President stand firm, Mark!!!” Thomas wrote in a text message sent on 10 November, after news networks had called the election for Biden. “You are the leader, with him, who is standing for America’s constitutional governance at the precipice. The majority knows Biden and the Left is attempting the greatest Heist of our History.”
Thomas also lobbied legislators in Arizona and Wisconsin, encouraging them to help overturn Biden’s victories in the two battleground states, according to emails obtained by the Washington Post earlier this year.
Speaking to January 6 investigators behind closed doors, Thomas indicated that she still believes Trump’s baseless claims of widespread fraud in the 2020 election, committee chair Bennie Thompson told reporters. In her opening statement before the committee, Thomas also insisted that she did not discuss efforts to overturn the election results with her husband, saying they have “an ironclad rule” not to speak about cases pending before the supreme court.
“It is laughable for anyone who knows my husband to think I could influence his jurisprudence – the man is independent and stubborn, with strong character traits of independence and integrity,” Thomas said in the statement, which was obtained by the New York Times.
Nonetheless, the mention of Thomas’s name in the emails between Chesebro and Eastman will likely intensify calls for the conservative justice to recuse himself from cases related to January 6. So far, those calls have gone ignored.
