Legal reporter explains how the Jan. 6 committee gets to Ginni Thomas
New York Times justice reporter Katie Benner explained to MSNBC on Monday evening that the House Select Committee investigating Jan. 6 has a lot of barriers to get to Ginni Thomas, wife of Justice Clarence Thomas.
Mrs. Thomas was caught text messaging with Donald Trump's chief of staff Mark Meadows about overturning the election. Her husband was the only justice who voted to block revealing those text messages. Now, questions are surrounding her role in Jan. 6 and whether she used her influence as the wife of a Supreme Court Justice to influence the efforts to overthrow the election.
At their meeting Monday evening, the Jan. 6 committee met to decide whether they would call Thomas to testify, with one committee staffer telling CNN that they weren't throwing out the idea of a subpoena.
MSNBC host Stephanie Ruhle asked what the hold-up was and said that the text messages were "unbelievable."
"I think one thing that the committee might want to pause, and it was clear that Ginni Thomas was prolific in her messaging a variety of people, with Mark Meadows, and others close to Trump. Would it be better to wait to see how much information that they can get? How many text messages they can get that Ginni Thomas may have said before calling her in? She will be a hard witness to get. She will be a hard person to question. It may be better for them to, first, gather as much evidence as possible."
She went on to say that there is a conundrum with the Justice Department highlighted from the court filing from Judge David Carter in the John Eastman case. Benner described it as a case that is "way bigger" than whether or not they bring federal charges against Donald Trump.
"It's the fact that you have a judge now, you have people in public, you have lawmakers, you have a lot of people saying, Trump committed a crime, in broad daylight," she explained. "He undermined the rule of law, and that is the accusation. If the Justice Department's job to uphold that, and if they feel they can't, you talk about a larger question for the department, for the democracy, the rule of law."
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