Conservative activist Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, who is also the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, sent messages to state lawmakers in Wisconsin urging them to overturn the 2020 presidential election results and assign its Electoral College votes to former President Donald Trump, who had lost in the state election.
Thomas sent the messages on November 9, the same day she sent similar messages to dozens of Republican lawmakers in another state asking them to do the same thing — to overturn Joe Biden’s presidential win in the state and to give their electors to Trump, against the wishes of voters in that election.
The Wisconsin emails were sent to state Sen. Kathy Bernier (R), who was chair of the Senate elections committee at the time, and state Rep. Gary Tauchen (R). They were obtained by separate open records requests by The Washington Post and the watchdog organization Documented.
“Please stand strong in the face of media and political pressure. Please reflect on the awesome authority granted to you by our Constitution. And then please take action to ensure that a clean slate of Electors is chosen for our state,” Thomas said in the emails.
Thomas, like many Trump-aligned conservatives at the time, was pushing for state legislatures to take an action they couldn’t legally take. While the federal Constitution allows states to determine the manner in which they select their electors, it does not empower them to rescind an election result and to decide for themselves who should “win” if they don’t like a certain outcome.
Wisconsin is now the second state where it’s known that Thomas urged state lawmakers to overturn election results. It was previously established that she had done so in Arizona as well, sending requests to dozens of Republicans using almost the exact same language.
Thomas also sent text messages directly to Trump’s chief of staff at the time, Mark Meadows, in November and December, telling him to “stand firm” against the legitimate outcome of the election, and calling him a leader who, with Trump, “is standing for America’s constitutional governance at the precipice.”
“The majority knows Biden and the Left is attempting the greatest Heist of our History,” she insisted, wrongly attributing Trump’s loss to election fraud, a baseless claim that’s come to be known as “The Big Lie.”
Thomas’s advocacy to overturn the election is startling on its own, but made all the more alarming by the fact that her husband is a sitting Supreme Court justice. Many times while on the bench, Justice Thomas has refused to recuse himself from cases that involved his wife’s work — and earlier this year, he was the sole dissenter in a case that involved sharing Mark Meadows’s text messages with the January 6 committee. That case likely included Ginni Thomas’s messages, presenting a clear conflict of interest for Clarence Thomas.
More than 1.2 million individuals have signed a petition calling for Thomas to resign from the Supreme Court, or, failing that, for him to be impeached by Congress. Among the reasons outlined in the petition is his failure to recuse himself from the cases that involve his wife.
