Former President Donald Trump has said that he spoke to Ginni Thomas during his presidency. The wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has recently found herself in hot water following the publication of texts she sent to Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows urging him to fight hard to overturn the 2020 election.
The House Select Committee investigating 6 January is also looking into a gap of seven hours and 37 minutes in Mr Trump’s call records on the day of the Capitol riot.
Mr Trump told The Washington Post on Wednesday that he was unaware of Ms Thomas’ attempts to help overturn the election. He didn’t comment on whether Mr Meadows should have provided the committee with the text messages.
“First of all, her husband is a great justice. And she’s a fine woman. And she loves our country,” Mr Trump told the paper.
Ms Thomas urged Mr Meadows on several occasions to push conspiracy theories to halt the certification of President Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory.
Between early November 2020 and the middle of January 2021, they sent 29 messages to each other – 21 were sent by Ms Thomas and eight were sent by Mr Meadows. She urged him to support Mr Trump’s false claims of a rigged election.
Mr Meadows handed over 2,320 messages before ceasing to cooperate with the committee.
The first text from Ms Thomas provided to the committee included a link to a YouTube video from far-right commentator Steve Pieczenik that’s now been removed. In it, he speaks about the watermarking of ballots, a QAnon-connected conspiracy theory.
“I hope this is true; never heard anything like this before, or even a hint of it. Possible???” she asked.
“Watermarked ballots in over 12 states have been part of a huge Trump & military white hat sting operation in 12 key battleground states,” she added.
“Biden crime family & ballot fraud co-conspirators (elected officials, bureaucrats, social media censorship mongers, fake stream media reporters, etc) are being arrested & detained for ballot fraud right now & over coming days, & will be living in barges off GITMO [Guantanamo Bay] to face military tribunals for sedition,” she later wrote.
“Help This Great President stand firm, Mark!!!” she wrote on 10 November. “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.”
Mr Trump also told The Post on Wednesday that he wanted to join his supporters as they walked from his rally on 6 January 2021 to the Capitol where many of them later turned violent.
“Secret Service said I couldn’t go. I would have gone there in a minute,” he said. But his private schedule says nothing of going to the Capitol on that day.
He also blamed Speaker Nancy Pelosi for the riot, falsely claiming she was in charge of the US Capitol Police.
Pelosi spokesperson Drew Hammill told The Post that Ms Pelosi “was no more in charge of the security of the US Capitol that day than Mitch McConnell”.
Mr Trump also denied using burner phones and claimed that he didn’t get many calls during the riot.
“From the standpoint of telephone calls, I don’t remember getting very many,” he told The Post. “Why would I care about who called me? If congressmen were calling me, what difference did it make? There was nothing secretive about it. There was no secret.”
