2016–present
Thomas endorsed Ted Cruz in the 2016 Republican Party presidential primaries. She supported Donald Trump after he won the Republican nomination, and has served on the advisory council of Turning Point USA. Thomas has drawn attention for making controversial social media posts; The Washington Post wrote that she had shared "nakedly partisan, erroneous propaganda". On Facebook, she has shared a George Soros conspiracy theory meme and criticized gun control advocates such as survivors of the 2018 Stoneman Douglas High School shooting.
Thomas is a member of the informal conservative Groundswell group, which she founded with the support of Steve Bannon, a former Trump advisor. According to a February 2020 report by Jonathan Swan in Axios, Thomas actively urged Trump to change the personnel in his administration. Swan reported that Thomas had given Trump a memo with names of individuals recommended by the Groundswell network.
On May 28, 2020, Trump appointed Thomas as a member of the trust fund board of the Library of Congress. She is a member of the conservative Council for National Policy, and in 2019, she became part of its board.
According to The New York Times, in the days following the 2020 presidential election, the board of the Council for National Policy issued a call to action to its members to keep Trump in power, despite his loss. The call to action instructed members to "pressure Republican lawmakers into challenging the election results and appointing alternate slates of electors." Days after the November 2020 election, with Biden declared the winner in Arizona, Thomas sent emails to 29 of the state's legislators, urging them to choose "a clean slate of Electors." Thomas also emailed Wisconsin state senator Kathy Bernier and Wisconsin state representative Gary Tauchen with verbatim copies of the Arizona emails, urging them to set aside the results of the popular vote in their state and instead choose their own electors.
Prior to January 6, Thomas promoted a Stop the Steal rally on Facebook. Thomas said that she attended the Stop the Steal rally that preceded the January 6 U.S. Capitol attack but left before Trump took the stage at noon.
After January 6, baseless claims that Thomas had paid to shuttle demonstrators to Washington D.C. proliferated online. A year after the storming of the U.S. Capitol, fact checkers again debunked claims that Thomas was one of the organizers of the events of January 6, 2021.
After the Capitol attack, Thomas, on a private email list of her husband's former law clerks, expressed her apologies for contributing to a rift among the group. The internal rift reportedly concerned "pro-Trump postings and former Thomas clerk John Eastman, who spoke at the rally and represented Trump in some of his failed lawsuits filed to overturn the 2020 election results." Eastman is a close friend of both Thomases.
An April 2022 Quinnipiac poll found that 52% of Americans said that, in light of Ginni Thomas's texts to Trump's White House Chief of Staff, Mark Meadows about overturning the results of the 2020 presidential election, Clarence Thomas should recuse himself from cases about the 2020 election.
In March 2022, texts between Thomas and White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows from 2020 were handed to the Select Committee on the January 6 Attack. The texts show her repeatedly urging Meadows to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, which she called "the greatest Heist of our History," and repeating conspiracy theories about ballot fraud. She urged that conspiracy theorist attorney Sidney Powell be retained by the Trump campaign efforts to overturn the 2020 election. In the quoted texts, Thomas described an unknown number of American citizens that she hoped would be "living in barges off GITMO" in accord with the QAnon-affiliated conspiracy theory that President Biden, his family, and thousands of state and county election officials, administrators, and volunteers successfully orchestrated and performed a vast conspiracy to rig the 2020 elections across thousands of administrative districts or wards. Public perception of the likelihood of such QAnon-style conspiracy theories influencing a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court was widespread enough that President Biden was asked what he thought about whether Clarence Thomas should recuse himself from any January 6-related cases. He replied that the answer is for others to determine, mentioning the congressional investigating committee and the Department of Justice. Under U.S. law, each justice of the court is the main and possibly only person who has power over his or her own recusal.
CNN reported in June 2022 that the Select Committee possessed email correspondence between Thomas and John Eastman. The emails were part of Eastman's correspondence related to efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. In the wake of revelations regarding her correspondence with Eastman, Thomas was asked to testify before the committee. In an interview with the Daily Caller, Thomas stated that she "can't wait to clear up misconceptions. I look forward to talking to them." Thomas previously signed on to a letter to House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, calling for the removal of Rep. Liz Cheney and Rep. Adam Kinzinger from the Republican conference for their participation on the Select Committee and describing the January 6 investigations as "bringing disrespect to our country's rule of law." Mark Paoletta, Thomas's attorney, wrote the committee days later that she would not agree to be interviewed unless additional information came to light that might warrant testimony, but one of her attorneys subsequently announced she would speak voluntarily with the committee. The committee interviewed her on September 29.
Days after it became known Eastman and Thomas had communicated by email, Eastman posted on his new Substack blog one email that he captioned, "OMG, Mrs. Thomas asked me to give an update about election litigation to her group. Stop the Presses!" In the December 4, 2020 email, Thomas invited Eastman to speak four days later at a gathering of "Frontliners," which she described as a group of "grassroots state leaders." A private Facebook group named "FrontLiners for Liberty," which included over 50 people and was created in August 2020, showed Thomas as an administrator. The group's front page carried a banner stating, "the enemy of America...is the radical fascist left." After CNBC asked Thomas about the group, its public pages were either made private or deleted. CNBC also contacted Stephanie Coleman, who was also listed as a group administrator. She is the widow of former Texas solicitor general Greg Coleman, who had clerked for Clarence Thomas. Numerous photos of her and Thomas are on her personal Facebook page, including one of both of them with former Trump chief strategist Steve Bannon in December 2016. The Thomas email was among those federal judge David Carter ordered Eastman to release to the January 6 committee in June 2022, as Eastman sought to withhold them. Carter found ten documents he ordered released to the committee relating to three December 2020 meetings by a secretive group strategizing about how to overturn the election, which included who he characterized as a "high-profile" leader. Carter noted one email in particular among those he ordered released that contained what he found was likely evidence of a crime. Thomas attended a meeting of FrontLiners for Liberty on March 6, 2021, at which a speaker declared Trump was still the "legitimate president," to enthusiastic applause.
Thomas also emailed state lawmakers in Arizona and Wisconsin, urging them to ignore the results of the 2020 presidential election and vote instead for an alternate slate of electors.
According to transcripts of her interviews with the Select Committee on the January 6 attack, Thomas noted that she communicated with Mark Meadows to advocate for Trump's support of Sidney Powell, who was pushing false accusations about hacked voting machines. She further claimed that she did not communicate her election-related activities to her husband, Clarence. However, Thomas also noted that she referenced her "best friend" (i.e. her husband) in her texts to Meadows when discussing the support that her husband provided when she was upset over Trump's election defeat. In her interviews, Thomas also admitted that she had sent emails to lawmakers in key states and that she still believed that the 2020 election results were impacted by fraud, despite not being able to provide any evidence. Thomas also noted that with regard to her texts to Meadows, she "would take them all back if I could today;" she attributed her communications with Meadows as being the result of her being "emotional" after Trump's election defeat.
On January 4, 2023, the Conservative Action Project published an open letter opposing Kevin McCarthy during the election of the Speaker of the House of Representatives and supporting the House Freedom Caucus's efforts to vote against him. Thomas signed the open letter.
