Panel to summon justice’s wife

WASHINGTON — The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection will seek an interview with Virginia Thomas, a conservative activist and the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, according to a source familiar with the investigation.

Virginia Thomas, who goes by Ginni, has drawn scrutiny for her text messages to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows in which she repeatedly pressed Meadows to work aggressively to overturn the election and keep former president Donald Trump in power, in a series of urgent exchanges in the critical weeks after the vote, according to copies of the messages obtained by The Washington Post and CBS News.

The messages — 29 in all — reveal an extraordinary pipeline between Ginni Thomas and Trump’s top aide during a period when Trump and his allies were vowing to go to the Supreme Court in an effort to negate the election results.

The committee’s plans to ask Thomas for an interview were first reported by CNN.

In a series of text exchanges with Meadows, Thomas sought to influence former president Trump’s strategy to overturn the election results and lobbied for lawyer Sidney Powell to be “the lead and the face” of Trump’s legal team.

Thomas’s repeated outreach to Meadows came at a period when Trump and his allies sought to enlist the Supreme Court to negate the results of the election. The revelations of his wife’s texts have drawn calls from Democrats urging Clarence Thomas to recuse himself from cases related to the 2020 election.

The Jan. 6 committee’s legal battles in its effort to subpoena records that would help committee members investigate the insurrection have not been limited to individuals. Earlier this month, the Republican National Committee filed a lawsuit against the Jan. 6 committee seeking to block the panel’s subpoena of data from Salesforce, a software vendor used by the RNC.