What’s the deal with Ginni Thomas?
Post Reports
The Washington Post
4.4 • 5.1K Ratings
🗓️ 25 March 2022
⏱️ 19 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On today’s Post Reports, what we can learn from texts between President Donald Trump’s top aide and the wife of a Supreme Court justice. Plus, why protesters in the Caribbean have not been charmed by William and Kate’s royal “charm offensive.”
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In text messages obtained by The Washington Post and CBS News, Virginia Thomas — a conservative activist and the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas — repeatedly pressed White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows to keep up the relentless effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election, calling Joe Biden’s victory “the greatest Heist of our History.”
The messages, 29 in all, reveal an extraordinary pipeline between Virginia Thomas, who goes by Ginni, and President Donald Trump’s top aide at a time when Trump and his allies were vowing to go to the Supreme Court in an effort to negate the election’s results.
Despite these ties, Justice Thomas chose not to recuse himself in a case deciding whether the former president could block the committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol from obtaining certain records, including these text messages between Ginni Thomas and Meadows.
On today’s episode of Post Reports, CBS’s Robert Costa tells us about the process of reporting out this story with The Post’s Bob Woodward and shares the questions he’ll be asking next.
Critics say Ginni Thomas’s activism is a Supreme Court conflict. Under court rules, only her husband can decide whether that’s true. Michael Kranish reports on the criticism that Justice Thomas has exploited a hole in the court’s rules to ignore the conflict of interest created by his wife’s activism.
Plus, Karla Adam explains why Britain’s Prince William and his wife, Catherine, have been met with anti-colonial protests and demands for reparations on their first official overseas visit together since the start of the pandemic.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Tell me about this big scoop that you and our colleague, Bob Woodward, had last night. |
| 0:08.4 | CBS News and the Washington Post collaborated on an investigation of text messages, 29 |
| 0:16.1 | in total, between the spouse of a Supreme Court justice, Ginny Thomas, wife of Clarence |
| 0:22.4 | Thomas, and Mark Meadows, when he was serving as Chief of Staff of President Donald Trump's |
| 0:29.1 | White House. Bob Costa is Chief Election and Campaign correspondent for CBS News. He and |
| 0:36.2 | Post reporter Bob Woodward obtained these text messages that Mark Meadows turned over |
| 0:40.3 | to the committee investigating January 6th. And these messages fill in the picture of |
| 0:45.1 | what was happening behind the scenes in the weeks after the 2020 election. When, according |
| 0:50.5 | to the texts, Ginny Thomas was urging Mark Meadows to keep doing everything he could to overturn |
| 0:56.5 | it. These messages reveal an extraordinary pipeline between the spouse of a Supreme Court |
| 1:02.8 | justice and a key official inside of the executive branch. All as then President Trump was pushing |
| 1:09.8 | to bring his own election fight all the way to the Supreme Court. It raises new questions |
| 1:15.8 | about this kind of relationship and its appropriateness. Congress is already investigating the |
| 1:21.9 | January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol, and now they've obtained these text messages that |
| 1:27.9 | show some kind of communication at the very least on legal strategy between the spouse |
| 1:33.9 | of a justice and the White House Chief of Staff. |
| 1:38.5 | From the newsroom of the Washington Post, this is Post Reports. I'm Martin Powers. It's |
| 1:43.7 | Friday, March 25th. Today, we're hearing more from Bob about these incredible text messages, |
| 1:50.0 | and the questions they're raising about efforts to overturn the election. Then, later on |
| 1:54.6 | the show, why Prince William's Caribbean tour is bringing up issues of reparations, independence, |
| 2:00.8 | and what royalty represents in the 24th century. |
| 2:05.0 | I want to ask more in a second about some of the details of these text messages and the |
... |
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