The New York Times Magazine 51‘‘It was always: ‘We need more MAGA people in
government. We’re trying to get these résumés
through, and we’re being blocked.’ I appreciat-
ed her energy, but a lot of these people couldn’t
pass background checks.’’ Many of the people she
pushed, another former Trump aide said, ‘‘had
legitimate background issues, security- clearance
issues or had done a lot of business overseas.’’
The president continued to allow Ginni
Thomas access, telling aides that if she were in
the White House visiting with other offi cials,
she was welcome to drop by to see him. And
she did on several occasions, while also passing
notes on her priorities through intermediaries,
multiple aides said. With her husband, she also
attended a state dinner for the Australian prime
minister, and she went to the White House
when her husband administered the Constitu-
tional Oath to Amy Coney Barrett, Trump’s third
appointment to the Supreme Court, as guests
including Laura Ingraham, the Fox News host
and former Thomas clerk, celebrated.
With her place in the presidential orbit
secure, Thomas became even more outspo-
ken. In posts on Facebook, she shared a George
Soros conspiracy- theory meme and criticized
the teenage survivors of the school massacre
in Parkland, Fla., for supporting gun control.
She complained when a town near her Virginia
home put up a banner in support of Black Lives
Matter, saying the group was fi lled with extrem-
ists ‘‘seeking to foment a cultural revolution,’’
and traded barbs on her public Facebook page.
‘‘Hey, are you aware you married a black man?’’
one commenter wrote, to which she replied:
‘‘news tip, whitey, all blacks don’t think alike!’’
By 2019, her infl uence in Republican circles
was growing. She took on a leadership role at the
Council for National Policy, joining the board
of C.N.P. Action, which had become a key cog
in the Trump messaging machine. (The council
declined to comment.) The board holds break-
out sessions on ‘‘pressing issues,’’ then publishes
‘‘action steps’’ for members. That year, she and
her friend Cleta Mitchell, a council member and
Republican elections lawyer, conducted a joint
session at which Mitchell discussed harness-
ing charitable dollars for political purposes and
Thomas spoke on the culture war. Thomas told
her listeners that societal forces were arrayed
against them, while fl ashing a slide depicting
the left as black snakes coiled around cultural
institutions. ‘‘Our house is on fi re,’’ she declared,
‘‘and we are stomping ants in the driveway.’’
During Trump’s presidency, documents
obtained by The Times show, the council and its
affi liates routinely took on issues that were likely
to go before the Supreme Court. Ginni Thomas
personally co-moderated a panel called ‘‘The Pro-
Life Movement on Off ense’’ that laid out strat-
egies to energize ‘‘low turnout pro-life voters’’
and ‘‘persuadable Democrats and Hispanics’’
by talking to them ‘‘about late-term abortion,
taxpayer funding of abortion, and the Supreme
Court,’’ one of the slides in the presentation
read. Amid the pandemic and legal challenges
to lockdown restrictions, the organization urged
members to ‘‘pray for our churches to rise up.’’
The scope of potential confl icts has little prece-
dent beyond narrower episodes on lower federal
courts, as when the wife of Judge Stephen Rein-
hardt was an A.C.L.U. executive but he did not
always recuse himself from cases in which the
A.C.L.U. had an interest. But unlike the Supreme
Court, litigants there had the right to appeal.
As the 2020 election neared, C.N.P. Action
meetings and documents targeted Democratic
strategies that make it easier to vote, includ-
ing the practice of civic groups’ gathering
ballot applications, derided by many on the
right as ‘‘ballot harvesting.’’ Months later, the
Supreme Court upheld an Arizona ban on the
practice, with Thomas in the 6-to-3 majority.
C.N.P. Action also pressed for mandatory voter-
identifi cation laws and even fl oated the idea of
using former Navy SEALs to monitor polls.
Thomas was also busy with displays of devo-
tion: She boasted in an online biography that she
‘‘set agendas with President Trump’s White House
for quarterly conservative leader briefi ngs’’ and
started a group of Trump supporters called the
Northern Virginia Deplorables. But it was after
Trump’s November loss that she would prove her
loyalty beyond doubt, when she and her group
urged on eff orts to overturn the election.In the weeks after Trump’s loss, court challeng-
es began to pile up from his team, his allies and
even Republican lawmakers. They echoed the
call put out by C.N.P. Action to challenge swing-
state outcomes, with one Republican congress-
man, Mike Kelly of Pennsylvania, fi ling a lawsuit
against his own state to try to stop the certifi ca-
tion of its votes. On Dec. 8, the Supreme Court
refused a request to hear that case before the
certifi cation date in a one- sentence statement.
It remains unknown whether the justices were
unanimous in their decision.
By then, the network around the Thomases
was lighting up. On Dec. 10, a former Thom-
as clerk and close friend of the couple’s, John
C. Eastman, went on ‘‘War Room,’’ a podcast
and radio show hosted by Bannon. Eastman
argued that the country was already at the point
of a constitutional crisis — and he urged the
Supreme Court to intervene. Bannon eagerly
agreed. Behind the scenes, Eastman was advis-
ing Trump and his campaign on a new propos-
al to change the outcome of the election: Vice
President Mike Pence, he asserted, could refuse
to accept swing-state votes and send them back
to the state legislatures when he presided over
the certifi cation of the election in a joint session
of Congress on Jan. 6.
As the Trump court challenges to the election
multiplied, C.N.P. Action took up the chargeonce more, training its sights on the Jan. 6 certi-
fi cation. In December, it circulated a newsletter
that included a report titled ‘‘Five States and the
Election Irregularities and Issues,’’ targeting fi ve
swing states where Trump and his allies were
already pressing litigation. But time was run-
ning out for the courts to ‘‘declare the elections
null and void,’’ the report warned. The newslet-
ter advised: ‘‘There is historical, legal precedent
for Congress to count a slate of electors diff er-
ent from that certifi ed by the Governor of the
state.’’ One co- author of the ‘‘Five States’’ report
was Cleta Mitchell, who by that time was among
the lawyers advising Trump.
Soon a number of longtime friends and asso-
ciates of the Thomases were involved in eff orts
to overturn the election results, or helping plan
the Jan. 6 rallies. Besides Eastman and Bannon,
there was Mitchell, who took part in Trump’s
Jan. 2 call in which he exhorted Georgia’s sec-
retary of state to ‘‘fi nd’’ the votes he needed to
claim a victory. Turning Point USA, on whose
advisory board Ginni Thomas had served, was a
sponsor of the Jan. 6 event and provided buses
for attendees. (An early rumor suggesting that
she paid for the buses was debunked.)
Other sponsors included two more groups
with which Ginni Thomas had long ties. One
was the Tea Party Patriots, headed by Jenny
Beth Martin, a fellow Council for National Pol-
icy activist. The other was Women for America
First, which held the permit for the rally at the
Ellipse and was run by Amy Kremer. The two
women, and Ginni Thomas, had all been early Tea
Party activists, though Kremer and Martin had
been engaged for years in a bitter legal dispute.
‘‘That’s why it was interesting when I learned that
they’d been working together on the January 6
coordination,’’ Dustin Stockton said, adding that
he had been told by another organizer, Caroline
Wren, on Jan. 5 that it was Ginni Thomas who
worked to bring unity ahead of the rally. (Asked
about Thomas’s mediating role, Kremer’s daugh-
ter Kylie Jane Kremer, the executive director of
Women for America First, did not answer that
question, instead painting Stockton as someone
who makes ‘‘inaccurate and attention- seeking
statements.’’ Martin similarly avoided the ques-
tion, issuing a statement that condemned the vio-
lence at the Capitol. Wren disputed Stockton’s
account but declined to elaborate.)
The spectacle of a Supreme Court justice’s
spouse taking to Facebook to champion the
attempt of a defeated president to stay in power,
as Ginni Thomas did on the morning of Jan. 6,
crossed a line for several people in the Thomas-
es’ circle who talked to The Times. ‘‘That’s what
she does — it has nothing to do with him,’’ said
Armstrong Williams, Justice Thomas’s longtime
friend. ‘‘Should she use better judgment? Yes. You
can quote me on that.’’
Ginni Thomas posted a disclaimer after the
protests devolved into an (Continued on Page 53)