Majorie Taylor Greene and Donald Trump also spent the weekend justifying political violence
Ginni Thomas is sticking to the Big Lie, even when testifying before the January 6 committee. We still don’t know her exact phrasing, but reports from members of the January 6 committee indicate that the right-wing activist and wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas reiterated during her testimony last week the false belief that President Joe Biden stole the 2020 election from Donald Trump. Whether or not she was sincere in this claim is hard to discern. She also told the committee she never speaks about her extensive political activism with her husband, a claim so implausible that it casts doubt on the truthfulness of anything she said during an interview in which she was not put under oath.
Telling the January 6 committee that you still believe the Big Lie may seem, on its surface, to be a really bad idea, but there may be a method to the madness here. After all, Ginni Thomas was deeply involved in Trump’s attempted coup in 2020, as shown by a bevy of text messages to Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows and emails to swing state legislators urging them to throw out the results of the election. Unable to plead innocence, Thomas may have decided the better course of action is to argue that her actions were justified by a sincere belief in the Big Lie.
Even while the riot was going on, Trump and his allies were strategizing about how to spin the insurrection and the efforts to overthrow the election that preceded the violent assault on the Capitol. As insurrectionists were still battling Capitol police, the text message log from Meadows shows that both Trump advisor Jason Miller and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., were brainstorming lies that Trump and his team could tell to deflect blame. Miller suggested falsely claiming the rioters were “likely ANTIFA or other crazed leftists,” a lie that ended up getting leveraged at various times by right-wing pundits over the next year and a half.
But the Trumpist line on January 6 has been slowly morphing from “it wasn’t us” into “it was justified” for months now.