By Tierney Sneed | CNN
Virginia “Ginni” Thomas’ efforts to call on state lawmakers to disrupt President Joe Biden’s 2020 election win were broader than previously known, with The Washington Post reporting Friday that the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas had sent form letters to 29 Arizona legislators encouraging them to meddle in the state’s slate of presidential electors.
The new report adds 27 recipients of the messages to the two Arizona lawmakers who, it was reported last month, received apparently prewritten emails from Ginni Thomas.
Ginni Thomas’ support of the efforts to overturn former President Donald Trump’s electoral defeat have come under scrutiny given her husband’s participation in a case that was before the Supreme Court concerning the House’s January 6 investigation. There is the potential that he will be involved in other cases related to that investigation.
Justices decide for themselves whether cases present a conflict requiring their recusal. The Supreme Court public information office did not respond to CNN’s inquiry about the latest report.
Twenty members of the Arizona House and seven state senators received identical messages on November 9, 2020, the Post wrote.
The message urged the lawmakers to “fight back against fraud” and exercise their supposed constitutional authority to unilaterally choose a “clean” slate of presidential electors.
Another batch of letters from Thomas — aimed at 22 members of Arizona’s House and one of its state senators, according to the Post — went out on December 13, the day before representatives were set to meet at statehouses across the country to vote to certify their slates of electors. The messages asked the lawmakers that, before they chose the electors, they “consider what will happen to the nation we all love if you do not stand up and lead.”
Last month it was first revealed — in a previous report by the Post as well as in tweets by one of the lawmakers involved — that Ginni Thomas had participated in the messaging campaign to Arizona lawmakers.
One of the November form letters from Thomas went to state Rep. Shawnna Bolick, who responded to the message with a suggestion that Thomas file any complaints of fraud to the state attorney general and who posted the exchange on Twitter.
Thomas’ messages were sent via an online platform for sending prewritten messages to lawmakers called FreeRoots, the Post reported.
Justice Thomas was the only justice to publicly dissent from the Supreme Court’s move in January not to block a court order greenlighting the release of Trump White House documents to the House investigators. CNN has since reported that his wife exchanged texts with Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows in 2020 urging him to continue the fight to overturn Biden’s win. (Those texts had been turned over to the committee voluntarily by Meadows).
Ginni Thomas did not comment to the Post and didn’t immediately return a request for comment from CNN.
She has been publicly critical of the House January 6 investigation, calling on House GOP leaders to boot from their conference the two Republicans serving on the select committee. She attended the rally that preceded the attack on the Capitol, as she said in an interview with the Washington Free Beacon, where she stressed that her and her husband’s professional lives are kept separate. She said that she had left the gathering before the protesters turned violent.
