House Committee Investigating Jan 6th Adds Ginni Thomas to the Roster

John and Ginni, sitting in a tree

• John Eastman is a former professor of Law at Chapman University. He is a conservative lawyer and was part of the campaign to push then Vice President Mike Pence to block Biden from taking office.
• Virginia "Ginni" Thomas is the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, the court's most conservative member. Thomas is already under scrutiny for emails she sent to Arizona representatives urging them to overthrow the electoral results.
• The January 6th special investigative committee obtained new emails between Ginni Thomas and John Eastman.
• In the emails, Eastman sends two memos that outline a strategy to block the certification of election results.
• The Committee is expected to subpoena Thomas to testify in the ongoing public hearings in light of the new evidence.

Key players

• John Eastman famously argued that Mike Pence had the legal authority to prevent the certification of the election results. The lawyer also worked as a clerk to Clarence Thomas, Ginni's husband.
• Clarence Thomas has dissented on a few critical cases which have related to the 2020 election, one in which Justices declined to hear a challenge to Pennsylvania's mail-in voting procedures and another where the court allowed the National Archives to release documents from Trump's White House to the committee investigating the Capitol Riots.
• Justice Thomas's efforts to block access to documents are made more suspicious considering his wife's correspondences with Eastman and other lawmakers that were released from the White House.

Up in the air

• A federal judge ordered Eastman to turn over more than 100 documents last week. Amongst the documents were the correspondences with Ginni Thomas.
• The new emails have renewed calls for Justice Clarence Thomas to recuse himself from cases related to the election or attempts to overthrow the results because of his wife's heavy-handed involvement in trying to block Biden from taking office.
• The committee is using the emails to make the case that there was a coordinated effort to block the election results from being certified on January 6th.

Ginni Thomas to the stand, please

• Leaders of the January 6th committee will request that Virginia Thomas testify in an upcoming public hearing.
• Thomas exchanged text messages with White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, in which she pushed him to fight to overturn the election and referenced her involvement with other members of Trump's orbit.
• Once those texts were released, the committee began investigating Thomas further, finding emails with Arizona representatives and John Eastman.