Texts show justice's wife pressed to get vote overturned
In the weeks between the 2020 presidential election and the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, Virginia Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas sent a barrage of text messages imploring President Donald Trump's chief of staff to take steps to overturn the vote, according to a person with knowledge of the texts.
In one message sent in the days after the election, she urged the chief of staff, Mark Meadows, to “release the Kraken and save us from the left taking America down,” invoking a slogan popular on the right that refers to a web of conspiracy theories that Trump supporters believed would overturn the election.
In another, she wrote: “I can't see Americans swallowing the obvious fraud. Just going with one more thing with no frickin consequences. We just cave to people wanting Biden to be anointed? Many of us can't continue the GOP charade.”
The texts were first reported by The Washington Post and CBS. They were among about 9,000 pages of documents that Meadows turned over to the congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack. The texts detailed Meadows' interactions with Republican politicians as they planned strategies to try to keep Trump in office in the weeks before the riot.
The committee obtained 29 texts between Virginia
Thomas and Meadows — 28 exchanged between Nov. 4 and Nov. 24, and one written on Jan. 10.
The text messages, most of which were written by Thomas, represent the first evidence that she was directly advising the White House as it sought to overturn the election. She was communicating not only with Meadows, but also with Connie Hair, the chief of staff to Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Texas.
The text traffic also suggests that Thomas was in contact with Jared Kushner, the former president's son-in-law and adviser.