Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, the conservative activist married to controversial Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, admitted in a deposition held earlier this year that she did not have any evidence of widespread fraud in the 2020 presidential election, a transcript revealed Friday.
Ginni Thomas spent weeks working behind the scenes around the time of the election to boost then–President Donald Trump. Text messages previously released by the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack showed how Thomas sowed doubt about the election’s legitimacy in direct conversations with Mark Meadows, Trump’s chief of staff at the time.
The Jan. 6 committee managed to secure testimony from Thomas in September, nearly two years after the last presidential election.
Asked about the strongest evidence she had of the alleged fraud, Thomas responded: “I can’t say that I was familiar at that time with any specific evidence.”
Instead, she said she had been relying on “news reports” and “friends on the ground” who visited polling places and “found things suspicious.”
“I was not an expert of the fraud and irregularities that were starting to be talked about,” she told the panel’s Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.).
Thomas had been part of the crowd that assembled to hear Trump’s angry speech about the election results before a deadly mob of his supporters went on to breach the Capitol building.
A 136-page transcript of her deposition was part of a cache of documents released by the committee Friday as it wraps up its work before the new Congress convenes in January.
Raskin went on to press Thomas about her current views, but she declined to say which states’ election results still concern her. Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) also tried to squeeze more information out of Thomas by reminding her that Trump’s campaign had lost over 60 legal challenges regarding the 2020 election for failure to provide evidence. Trump’s attorney general, Bill Barr, was also aware there was no evidence of fraud, along with lawyers for Vice President Mike Pence, Cheney recalled.
While Thomas asserted that she knew President Joe Biden was currently the president, she also said she had put stock into the fraud claims because so many people around her were pushing them, and did not refute the claims.
Asked by Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) whether it would have swayed her position to know, two years ago, that Barr and Trump’s campaign lawyers were aware there was no truth to the fraud claims, Thomas replied, “I don’t know.”
In recent years, Thomas’ conservative activism and her links to Trump’s false election claims has cast heavy doubt on her spouse’s ability to remain a neutral arbiter of justice on the nation’s highest court.
Yet Clarence Thomas was a relatively brief topic of conversation in the deposition.
Ginni Thomas said in her opening statement before the panel that the idea that her husband could ever be swayed by her political views was “laughable” because he is too “independent and stubborn, with strong character traits of independence and integrity.”
Later on, she was asked about some of the text messages she had sent to Meadows after the 2020 election. Thomas said at the start of her testimony that she regretted “the tone and content” of the messages, and expressed frustration at the fact they were made public.
In one of the texts, sent during a press conference pushing election fraud claims that featured Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, Thomas wrote: “Tears are flowing in what Rudy is doing right now.”
In another text, sent on Nov. 24, 2020, Meadows told Thomas that Trump’s post-election legal battles were part of “a fight of good versus evil.” Thomas replied: “Thank you. Needed that, this plus a conversation with my best friend just now. I will try to keep holding on.”
Thomas confirmed that when she mentioned her “best friend,” she was referring to her husband. But when asked what she and Justice Thomas had talked about, Ginni Thomas said she did not know.
“My husband often administers spousal support to the wife that’s upset,” she said. “So I assume that’s what it was. I don’t have a specific memory of it.”
Thomas claimed her husband was not aware of her friendship with Meadows, and only found out when her text messages hit newspapers earlier this year.
She told Schiff, “Regarding the 2020 election, I didn’t speak with him at all about the details of my volunteer campaign activities, no.”
Thomas said it was “embarrassing” to be confronted with her old digital communications.
“It was an emotional time,” she told the committee at several points.
Read Ginni Thomas’ testimony here.