22 THENEWYORKER,JANUARY31, 2022
“a wacko,” adding, “She never would
have been there if not for Clarence.
She had access because her last name
was Thomas.”
G
inni Thomas rarely speaks to main-
stream reporters, but she often gives
speeches in private forums. The Web
site of the watchdog Documented has
posted a video of her speaking with strik-
ing candor. In October, 2018, she led a
panel discussion during a confidential
session of the Council for National Pol-
icy. At the time, the Senate was caught
up in the fight over the confirmation of
Brett Kavanaugh, who had been accused
of sexual assault. “I’m feeling the pain—
Clarence is feeling the pain—of going
through false charges against a good
man,” she said. “I thought it couldn’t get
worse than Clarence’s, but it did.” Amer-
ica, she said, “is in a vicious battle for its
founding principles,” adding, “The deep
state is serious, and it’s resisting Presi-
dent Trump.” She declared twice that
her adversaries were trying “to kill peo-
ple,” and drew applause by saying, “May
we all have guns and concealed carry to
handle what’s coming!”
This warlike mentality is shared by
Groundswell, the political group that
Thomas has chaired. In a 2020 session
of the Council for National Policy, Ra-
chel Bovard, the senior director of pol-
icy at the Conservative Partnership In-
stitute, described meeting weekly with
Groundswell members to “vet” officials
for disloyalty, saying, “Ginni has been
very instrumental in working with the
White House.... She really is the tip
of the spear in these efforts.” Bovard
lamented Groundswell’s failure to weed
out the whistle-blower Lieutenant Col-
onel Alexander Vindman before he gave
testimony at Trump’s first impeachment
trial. “We see what happens when we
don’t vet these people,” Bovard said.
“That’s how we got Lieutenant Colo-
nel Vindman, O.K.?” Vindman, then
the director for European affairs on
Trump’s National Security Council, tes-
tified that the President had tried to
pressure Ukraine’s leaders into produc-
ing dirt on Joe Biden’s family. In retal-
iation, a smear campaign was mounted
against Vindman. He suddenly found
himself fending off false claims that he
had created a hostile work environment
at the N.S.C., and fighting insinuations
that, because he was born in Ukraine
and had been invited to serve in its gov-
ernment, he had “dual loyalty.” (Vind-
man had self-reported Ukraine’s offer,
which he had rejected.) The Defense
Department conducted an internal in-
vestigation of the accusations and ex-
onerated him. But, Vindman told me,
the attacks “harmed my career.” He went
on, “It’s un-American, frankly, that a
sitting Justice of the Supreme Court,
who is supposed to be apolitical, would
have a wife who is part of a political
vendetta to retaliate against officials who
were dutifully serving the public inter-
est. It’s chilling, and probably has al-
ready had an effect on silencing other
whistle-blowers.”
Another target of Groundswell mem-
bers was Trump’s former national-secu-
rity adviser H. R. McMaster, who was
deemed insufficiently supportive of the
President. According to the Times, in
2018 Barbara Ledeen, a Republican Sen-
ate aide who had reportedly developed
Groundswell’s enemies list with Ginni
Thomas, participated in a plot to oust
McMaster by secretly taping him bad-
mouthing Trump. Ledeen, who is a close
friend of Ginni Thomas’s, told the Times
that she’d merely acted as a messenger
in the scheme. The plan was to send an
undercover female operative to snare
McMaster at a fancy restaurant. But
McMaster quit before the sting was ex-
ecuted. The Times also reported that an-
other undercover operation—which tar-
geted government employees, including
F.B.I. agents, suspected of trying to
thwart Trump’s agenda—involved op-
eratives from Project Veritas, the under-
cover-video group led by James O’Keefe.
Ginni Thomas has given O’Keefe an
Impact Award, too.
It’s unclear whether the Crowd-
sourcers project that Thomas said she
was launching with O’Keefe’s help ever
got off the ground. There’s little public
trace of Crowdsourcers, other than a tax
filing from 2019, showing that it was de-
veloped under the oversight of the Cap-
ital Research Center, a right-wing non-
“Do you have any true-crime podcasts?”
• •
