According to a report from the Daily Beast's Will Sommer, a man whose name popped up in the texts sent by Ginni Thomas to former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows has a long history of spinning fantastical conspiracy theories that grew more and more extreme to the point where he was banished from InfoWars by host Alex Jones.
As the report notes, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who is now facing increasing scrutiny over her part in the Jan 6th insurrection, mentioned Steve Pieczenik during her flurry of texts, exhorting Meadows to examine some of his election claims.
According to Sommers, Pieczenik has a long history of histrionic claims that range from calling mass shootings false flags to stating that he once arrested Pope Francis.
According to the report, "Thomas appeared to have wholly embraced Pieczenik’s off-the-wall claims in her texts, including the idea that Trump’s election defeat was really a ruse meant to entrap Democratic voter fraudsters."
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According to Jordan Holmes, who monitors InfoWars broadcasts, Pieczenik's claims have grown increasingly erratic and extreme.
“If you believe what Steve Pieczenik has to say, you have completely lost all touch with reality,” he told Sommers. “Pieczenik goes on to hit the ball out of the fences every single time, which means he goes too far sometimes."
Case in point, the Beast reports, "Whatever grip Pieczenik had on reality began to slip decades ago, when he began to appear on InfoWars. Pieczenik became known for claiming that a tragic event, often a mass shooting, was in fact a false flag event or even faked entirely. He’s argued that the 9/11 attacks, the Sandy Hook shooting, and Pearl Harbor were all false flags. Among other claims, Pieczenik insists he once arrested Pope Francis," adding, "His stories were so wild they even became too much for Jones. After he claimed the 2017 Las Vegas mass shooting that killed 60 people was fake, for example, Jones appeared to temporarily block him from appearing on the outlet. All that has given him a reputation as a loose cannon even by the already outré standards of the InfoWars green room."
Nonetheless, the report states that, two days after the 2020 election, Thomas sent a video of Pieczenik, which has since been deleted by YouTube, that described how to look for watermarks on fake ballots.
The report notes that Pieczenik claimed that evidence would lead to Democrats being arrested for voting fraud, which led Ginni Thomas to excitedly text to Meadows, "I hope this is true; never heard anything like this before, or even a hint of it. Possible???”
Commenting on the hold Pieczenik has on people, Holmes pointed out, "It’s so funny how crazy this guy is. But at the same time he’s been around pulling these weirdo [psychological operations] for the past 50 years, and it does seem like he’s had a pretty big effect on people.”
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