Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, was acting as former President Donald Trump's "henchwoman" in the weeks following the 2020 presidential election, according to MSNBC contributor and The Washington Post reporter Carol Leonnig.
Leonnig appeared on MSNBC on Friday to discuss new reporting from her paper about Thomas' alleged assistance to the former president in the wake of the 2020 election. Thomas reportedly encouraged 29 state lawmakers in Arizona to assist in an attempt to overturn the election results, according to emails obtained by the Post.
The paper previously reported that Thomas thought legislators had a "Constitutional duty" to heed her guidance on how to handle the election results.
Thomas' alleged involvement in the attempt to overturn the 2020 election, including text message exchanges in early January of 2021 with former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, has led to questions about whether her husband had ties to efforts to flip the election's results amid the current investigations into the Capitol riot on January 6, 2021.
The significance of the Post's latest reporting "can't be understated," Leonnig said. In both November and December of 2020, Thomas reportedly argued to the 29 state legislators that they "should not fall to pressure from the media and political actors, and that they should lead by resisting the election results in Arizona.
"She claimed, falsely, that they were fraudulent, and that is why they needed to not certify, not agree, that these election results were accurate and fight them all the way."
As Thomas was reportedly applying pressure to state lawmakers in Arizona, Trump was doing the same to state lawmakers in Michigan and Pennsylvania, Leonnig said.
"This is right in the wake of, basically every reasonable human and all of the arbiters of the administration, announcing that Joe Biden had won the election fair and square by quite a large margin," Leonnig said.
"And the pressure is on from the president, and now we know his henchwoman, Ginni Thomas, to block states, in swing states, from agreeing those are the right results."
Leonnig added that Post reporters do not know if Trump and Thomas had any direct conversations at that time.
"It would be not shocking for Ginni Thomas, a sort of standard bearer in her part of the Republican Party, to have a conversation with the president, the titular head of the Republican Party. It would not be unusual," Leonnig said, noting that her paper does not have reporting showing that such a conversation occurred.
Newsweek reached out to Trump's office for comment.
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
About the writer
Meghan Roos is a Newsweek reporter based in Southern California. Her focus is reporting on breaking news for Newsweek's Live ... Read more
To read how Newsweek uses AI as a newsroom tool, Click here.
