The wife of conservative US Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas continues to falsely believe that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump, according to the House select committee investigating the attack on the US Capitol fuelled by the same lie.
On his Truth Social platform on 30 September, the former president congratulated Ginni Thomas following her interview with the committee “for having the courage of her convictions” and believing that the election was “rigged and stolen”.
“By the way, her husband is Great!” he wrote.
Committee chair Bennie Thompson told reporters on Friday that Ms Thomas continues to cling to bogus election conspiracy theories, which she shared in texts and emails with White House officials and Trump allies in her efforts to reject the outcome.
“She absolutely has a First Amendment right to take whatever positions she wants, and that means she can take as deranged a position she wants about the 2020 election,” Democratic US Rep Jamie Raskin told reporters. “I don’t expect anything more from her right-wing politics than I do of anybody else who is steeped in that cultish orthodoxy today.”
Ms Thomas’s opening statement to the committee, obtained by The New York Times, claims that the couple maintain an “ironclad” agreement to avoid discussing cases in front of the nation’s high 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,” the right-wing activist said.
Justice Thomas, however, was the only justice who opposed an order that would grant the committee access to hundreds of Trump White House documents – including text messages sent by Ms Thomas to Mr Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows.
Those messages urged Mr Meadows to pursue efforts to overturn the results of the election, undermining and dismissing millions of Americans’ votes to seat Mr Trump for a second term.
She also pressed state lawmakers to ignore Mr Biden’s victory and “choose” their own electors who are loyal to Mr Trump.
This fall, the justices will weigh in on the validity of that right-wing conspiracy theory, promoted by Trump allies like John Eastman, whose radical and dubious legal arguments animated the former president’s attempts to toss out the 2020 election.
According to the theory, partisan state legislators – not the courts – would have effective control over the electoral process.
After elections analysts called the race for Mr Biden in Arizona in November 2020, Ms Thomas pressed 29 state lawmakers to reject the outcome, telling them in emails to “stand strong in the face of political and media pressure” and claiming that the responsibility to choose electors was “yours and yours alone.”
They have the “power to fight back against fraud” and “ensure that a clean slate of Electors is chosen,” she wrote.
