The January 6th Committee is investigating Ginni Thomas’, wife of Justice Thomas, emails with John Eastman, the lawyer who planned to overturn the 2020 election results.
Legal experts agree that their emails create conflict of interest for Justice Clarence Thomas, forcing him to recuse himself from January 6 cases.
Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and attorney John Eastman strategized legal and political maneuvers to keep Donald Trump in power after he lost the 2020 election.
Reports indicate that Justice Thomas “was ‘key’ to their plan to delay certification of the 2020 election.” On December 31st, 2020, Eastman agreed by email with Trump attorney Kenneth Chesebro’s plan to “frame things so that Thomas could be the one to issue a temporary order putting Georgia’s results in doubt.
Thomas and Eastman’s actions placed them at the center of the Congressional Investigation on January 6th.
John Eastman and Kenneth Chesebro have since been charged in the Georgia 2020 election probe for conspiring to overturn the 2020 election results.
Ginni Thomas testified for over seven hours before the committee regarding her role in efforts to overturn the election. Thomas strategized with Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows on how to urge Arizona Republicans to seat “alternate electors”; she also corresponded with Eastman as he was drafting the plan for overturning the 2020 election.
While Eastman, who also clerked for Justice Thomas, has repeatedly invoked the fifth amendment in testimony before the committee and in the Georgia Election Probe, legal experts have strongly asserted that the Thomas-Eastman-Thomas connections and the correspondence between Ginni Thomas and John Eastman present conflicts that raise significant concerns about Justice Clarence Thomas’ ability to rule impartially in Jan-6 related cases.
"The subpoena of documents when his wife's own texts are among the pile of documents responsive to the subpoena — that's a slam dunk," says Richard Painter, who served as ethics counsel for the George W. Bush White House. "He had to recuse. He didn't. I'd want to know why."
As the committee prepares to release their final report and is considering criminal referrals, the correspondence between Thomas and Eastman and the ethical concerns about Justice Thomas remain key elements of Jan-6 investigation.
