Jan. 6 committee reaches deal with Ginni Thomas for an interview

The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection has reached an agreement with Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, to be interviewed by the panel in coming weeks, according to her attorney and another person familiar with the agreement.

Thomas’s attorney, Mark Paoletta, confirmed the agreement in a statement.

“I can confirm that Ginni Thomas has agreed to participate in a voluntary interview with the Committee,” Paoletta said. “As she has said from the outset, Mrs. Thomas is eager to answer the Committee’s questions to clear up any misconceptions about her work relating to the 2020 election. She looks forward to that opportunity.”

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CNN was first to report on the agreement.

The committee had earlier announced a public hearing for next week.

The panel had contemplated issuing a subpoena to compel her testimony. Thomas, a longtime conservative activist, had pushed lawmakers and top Republican officials to overturn Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election, citing baseless claims of widespread voter fraud.

Her efforts caught the attention of lawmakers and legal scholars who questioned whether it could prompt Clarence Thomas to recuse himself from any cases linked to causes on which his wife had worked.

Ginni Thomas repeatedly pressed White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows to find ways to overturn the election, according to messages she sent to him weeks after the election. The messages represent an extraordinary pipeline between Thomas and one of Trump’s top aides as the president and his allies were vowing to take their efforts all the way to the Supreme Court.

The Post’s Aaron Blake explains how Virginia Thomas’s texts pressing former White House staff to overturn the 2020 election affect the Supreme Court. (Video: Mahlia Posey/The Washington Post)

The Attack: Before, during and after

She emailed 29 Arizona state lawmakers in November and December 2020, urging them to set aside Biden’s popular-vote victory and “choose” their own presidential electors. She also emailed a pair of Republican lawmakers in Wisconsin urging them to do likewise.

On March 6, 2021 — two months after a mob of Trump supporters attacked the U.S. Capitol as Congress was certifying Biden’s victory — Thomas attended a gathering of right-wing activists where a speaker declared to thundering applause that Trump was still the “legitimate president,” a video recording of the event shows.