“The Sacred Lies of Virginia Thomas”

Frank Wilkinson:

Virginia Thomas — who goes by “Ginni” — occupies a singular place in elite conservative politics. Yet what’s striking about her testimony is how generically MAGA it is. She laments election “fraud and irregularities” for which she can summon no evidence; reveals deep resentment of political and media elites who are not like-minded conservatives; resorts to unabashedly opportunistic lapses of memory; and provides warm reminiscences of a morning spent on the Ellipse on Jan. 6, 2021. A 65-year-old suburban volunteer, Thomas appeared before the committee, after lengthy negotiations, with nothing to hide. But somewhere along the way she had obtained the Signal app for encrypting communications just the same.

Over the course of her interview with the committee, Thomas described her political efforts in 2020 as “minimal and mainstream.” She was “very active with Trump rallies” in her home state of Virginia, she said.

After Trump lost the election, her political enthusiasms evolved. Thomas repeatedly beseeched Mark Meadows, via text message, to find a way to invalidate the 2020 election and prevent Trump’s democratically elected successor from assuming office. She texted Trump’s White House chief of staff about her swooning appreciation of Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell, the axis of a Trump legal team described by Attorney General William Barr as a “clown car.” She sent robo-emails to Republican state legislators who were urged to carry out a plot, conjured in part by Thomas allies John Eastman and Cleta Mitchell, to send false electors to Washington to halt the democratic transfer of power.

“Make a plan, release the Kraken, and save us from the left taking America down,” Thomas implored Meadows on Nov. 19, 2020. If the spouse of Justice Thomas restricted herself to a particular lane in the days surrounding the 2020 election, it appears to have been a roadway heavily trafficked by the former president’s co-conspirators.

Thomas’s texts with Meadows are one of the topics she did not discuss with Justice Thomas. “I do know,” she told the committee, “he was completely unaware of the texts that I had with Mark Meadows until this committee leaked them to the press while my husband was in a hospital bed in March fighting an infection.” Justice Thomas provided the lone dissent in an 8-1 Supreme Court ruling against Trump, which gave the January 6 committee access to a trove of White House documents related to the insurrection.

The Washington Post published excerpts from 29 texts between Thomas and Meadows. They are mostly not the ambiguous sort.

“Help This Great President stand firm, Mark!!!” Thomas wrote to Meadows on Nov. 10, 2020, when Trump’s campaign to sabotage the peaceful transfer of power was well under way. “The majority knows Biden and the Left is attempting the greatest Heist of our History.”

Share this: