Ginni Thomas texts reveal fears, motivation to overturn 2020 election

“Release the Kraken and save us from the left taking America down.”

What more does anyone need to know about the many text messages sent by Virginia “Ginni” Thomas to then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows in the weeks after the 2020 election? A dozen words sum up everything.

That the spouse of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was imploring the president’s highest-ranking adviser to do all he could to overturn the 2020 election may seem beyond extraordinary. It is, but it is more than that.

The messages once again show how former president Donald Trump’s conspiracies, lies and obsessions infected the Republican Party (and in many quarters still do), from its rank-and-file base to some of its most establishment figures. The more that is known about the events between Election Day 2000 and the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, the clearer it is just how extensive the efforts to overturn the election were and how high up they went.

The Ginni Thomas text messages, first revealed by The Washington Post and CBS News, are among the many documents that Meadows turned over to the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot before he stopped cooperating with the committee. They show the fervor with which believers in Trump could embrace the wildest of conspiracy theories, as well as their apocalyptic vision of what they believed the inauguration of President Joe Biden could mean for the country.

The text messages have put Justice Thomas in an uncomfortable ethical position. Once again, partisan politics has splashed onto the high court. He was the lone dissenter in the court’s ruling that Trump had to turn over documents to the House committee. His reasons for the dissent were never publicly explained. He is now under much greater pressure to recuse himself from any future decisions related to these matters, and some Democrats are calling on him to resign.

The shock value of the Thomas-Meadows texts goes without saying. The underlying implications are more troublesome. Ginni Thomas was not someone in a Proud Boys cell or living on the fringes of the Republican Party. She has straddled hard-right activism and establishment politics for decades, operating for years in the most rarefied circles within the conservative movement.

[Ethics experts see Ginni Thomas’s texts as a problem for Supreme Court]

If not true conservative royalty, the Thomases come awfully close to it. Justice Thomas’s long record as one of the most conservative members of the Supreme Court is indisputable. His wife has collected accolades of her own as an activist on the far right. They have said many times that their professional lives are kept separate, though their causes are certainly shared.

Now it’s known just how much Ginni Thomas pushed senior officials in the government to embrace allegations that were unproven at the time and ultimately disproved, claims that embodied some of the most outlandish of the ideas that were circulating then.

The “kraken” - a mythological multi-armed sea monster - to which she referred to included such things as assertions of malevolent computer tampering with election results from afar, of Dominion Voting Systems servers using software created at the direction of Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, and on and on.

These allegations were advanced without evidence by Trump legal adviser Sidney Powell and by Rudy Giuliani, who was acting as the president’s lawyer and who once was a respected mayor of New York and Justice Department official. So outlandish were Powell’s conspiracies that, in response to a lawsuit by Dominion against Powell and others, her attorney said, “No reasonable person would conclude that the statements were truly statements of fact.” Ginni Thomas, however, promoted these conspiracies with the White House chief of staff, as if she actually believed them.

For anyone who thought that Trump’s claims of a stolen election were a game to salve a bruised presidential ego and that those around him went along to humor him, the Thomas texts speak to the real threats that existed at the time. To Thomas, this was deadly serious because she saw Trump as a bulwark against what she apparently believed was a threatening liberal movement. The texts suggest she was driven by ideology.

She was not alone in pushing to overturn the election. Lots of actors were involved. But the texts with Meadows - and his replies - offer undeniable evidence that the president’s closest advisers were in the thick of trying to find a way to delay the certification process and possibly stop Biden from taking office.

Maybe that isn’t news to a lot of people. After all, there is ample proof from post-election books by journalists and by others, as well as new information that has come out of the work of the Jan. 6 committee, that the efforts to obstruct Biden’s certification and possibly overturn the election were serious, concerted and involved high-ranking officials.

Nor is it news how many Republican officials around the country were prepared to participate in the effort, despite the absence of real evidence. When Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a flawed lawsuit to have results in four states overturned, the suit was eventually joined by 18 Republican state attorneys general and 126 House Republicans, including House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif.

The Thomas-Meadows texts provide a behind-the-scenes look at how the battle was being cast and the angst and emotional energy that was being invested in that fight.

On Nov. 10, Thomas texted Meadows and pleaded with him to prevent Biden “and the left” from carrying out “the greatest Heist in our history.”

Meadows replied, “This is a fight of good versus evil. Evil always looks like the victor until the King of Kings triumphs. Do not grow weary in well doing. The fight continues. I have staked my career on it. Well at least my time in DC on it.”

Thomas thanked Meadows with multiple exclamation points and added, “I will try to keep holding on. America is worth it!!”

The fiction of a stolen election continues today, causing problems inside the party. David Perdue, the former senator from Georgia who was defeated in 2020 and is now running for governor, is claiming that not only was Trump’s election stolen but his own was as well. In Wisconsin, the Republican speaker of the state assembly, Robin Vos, is caught up in an ongoing mess related to a review of the 2020 election - a mess partly of his own making as he sought to satisfy Trump’s claims of theft.

It might be easy for senior Republican officials to dismiss Thomas’s texts as the work of someone who represents only the most far-right fringe of the party. But that’s an escape from the continuing influence and downright domination of Trump’s leadership of the Republican Party.

Thomas’s fear of a takeover by the left binds the Republican Party together. Many on the left have similar worries about what Republican control of the government - and especially a return of Trump to the White House - would mean for the country.

What makes the two sides different is how many Republicans who otherwise have broken with Trump on his baseless claims of a stolen election, and who might see Ginni Thomas as having gone off the rails in the weeks after the election, nonetheless say they will vote for Trump if he becomes the party’s 2024 nominee. That, too, sums up the state of the party.

Dan Balz is chief correspondent at The Washington Post. He has served as the paper’s deputy national editor, political editor, White House correspondent and Southwest correspondent.