WASHINGTON — The House panel investigating last year’s insurrection at the U.S. Capitol is likely to seek an interview with Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, concerning her text messages with a top White House official about overturning the 2020 election, officials familiar with the matter said.
Committee Chair Bennie Thompson, a Mississippi Democrat, favors questioning the conservative activist. The panel’s Republican vice chair, Liz Cheney of Wyoming, doesn’t object and there is growing sentiment on the panel to bring Ginni Thomas in for a voluntary interview, two of the officials said.
Thompson said Monday night that no decision had been reached on inviting Thomas to appear.
The panel had met publicly a few hours earlier and voted unanimously to recommend contempt citations against two of former President Donald Trump’s White House advisers for defying subpoenas seeking testimony and documents in the investigation into the Jan. 6 insurrection.
Ginni Thomas has said publicly that she attended a rally on Jan. 6, 2021, but had no role in planning any events that day. The rally, held near the White House, preceded the violence at the Capitol as a mob of Trump’s supporters stormed the building as Congress was certifying Electoral College votes and Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election.
Some members of the panel had previously argued that interviewing Ginni Thomas about her actions surrounding Jan. 6 would distract from the committee’s other investigative pursuits and give Republicans another opportunity to charge that the inquiry is partisan, one of the officials said.
But Ginni Thomas, 65, has come under more scrutiny since The Washington Post and CBS News reported last week that she had texted Trump’s last chief of staff, Mark Meadows, to urge more be done to overturn Trump’s 2020 presidential election loss. Meadows had turned over text messages to the committee before refusing further cooperation.
The revelations prompted outside groups and some lawmakers to call for Thomas to recuse himself from any case involving the Jan. 6 probe. Thomas was the lone dissenter in a case this year on giving the panel access to some of Trump’s papers.
But Sen. John Cornyn, a Texas Republican, criticized what he called a “piling on” of a Supreme Court justice’s wife.
“We ought to leave family members out of all this,” Cornyn said Monday night. “It’s just ridiculous to attack members of a public figure’s family, whether it was my family or the Supreme Court or the president of the United States.”
The committee is investigating the origins of the siege at the Capitol. The panel of five Democrats and two Republicans is trying to wrap up what has been more than 350 interviews with witnesses, most behind closed doors. Thompson has said the panel intends to hold public hearings by May and issue an interim report of its findings in the coming weeks.
On Monday night, the committee took action, with a 9-0 vote, against ex-White House deputy chief of staff Dan Scavino and former trade adviser Peter Navarro. They would be the third and fourth Trump allies cited with contempt of Congress if the full House approves the resolution from the select committee’s probe of the Jan. 6, 2021, riot.
If the House majority gives its assent, criminal referrals would likely be sent to the U.S. Justice Department, which would decide whether to pursue prosecution.
Navarro and lawyers for Scavino have argued that contempt actions are premature until substantial legal and constitutional issues are resolved by the U.S. Supreme Court. Those questions include whether the two men might have a “legal duty” to invoke executive privilege under Trump’s instruction.
