The House select committee investigating the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the US Capitol by extremist supporters of then-president Donald Trump plans to request an interview with Virginia Thomas, the wife of US Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, according to a new report.
Yesterday, Adam Kinzinger, one of two Republican members on the committee, had vowed the panel will “get to the bottom” of events surrounding the 2021 insurrection but had refused to reveal whether they intended to question conservative activist Virginia “Ginni” Thomas over reports of her urging the White House then-chief of staff Mark Meadows to make all efforts to overturn Trump’s election defeat.
Kinzinger did however hint that it would be a topic of conversation on the panel this week and moments ago the Washington Post reported that the committee will indeed request to talk to Thomas, citing a source familiar with the investigation as confirming an earlier report to that effect by CNN.
Speaking on CBS yesterday morning, Kinzinger had refused to confirm or deny the existence of text messages Ginni Thomas is reported to have exchanged with Meadows, although he did not contest the Post and CBS’s joint revelation last week that they obtained copies of such messages from materials submitted to the congressional committee by Meadows.
Kinzinger, one of two Republicans on the House select committee investigating the events surrounding 6 January 2021, said of witnesses being summoned to give evidence to the committee: “We’ll call in whoever we need to call in.”
He added: “Was there an effort to overturn the legitimate election of the United States? What was January 6 in relation to that? And what is the rot in our system that led to that and does it still exist today?… We are going to get to the bottom of this.”
He did not say whether that “rot” extended to the nation’s highest court.
Thomas and her husband are rightwing political darlings who have described themselves as “one being – an amalgam,” according to the New York Times.
Amid the latest reports, Justice Thomas is now facing calls to recuse himself from any cases surrounding the 2020 presidential election, the insurrection and potentially the 2024 presidential election, should Trump run for re-election.
Also yesterday, Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, chairwoman of the Senate rules committee and a member of the Senate judiciary committee, which quizzes nominees for the supreme court, demanded that Clarence Thomas be removed from any cases surrounding the 2020 presidential election, the insurrection and potentially the 2024 presidential election, should Trump run for re-election..
“This is unbelievable,” Klobuchar told ABC’s This Week yesterday. “You have the wife of a sitting supreme court justice advocating for an insurrection, advocating for overturning a legal election, to the sitting president’s chief of staff. And she also knows this election, these cases, are going to come before her husband. This is a textbook case for removing him, recusing him, from these decisions.”
The 29 exchanges reported between Ginni Thomas and Meadows reveal how the wife of one of the land’s top jurists disseminated disinformation related to the QAnon conspiracy theory and other inaccurate arguments during the tempestuous days following the November 2020 election when rightwingers were claiming Democrat Joe Biden had not won.
Even as Trump strategized efforts to overturn his defeat through the courts, Virginia “Ginni” Thomas “spread false theories, commented on cable news segments and advocated with urgency and fervor that the president and his team take action to…
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