Recent news makes it clear: to get to the bottom of the events surrounding the January 6th domestic terrorist attack on the Capitol, the House Select Committee tasked with investigating the attack will have to call two people who will make Republicans very, very uncomfortable: Republican Texas Senator Ted Cruz and lobbyist Ginni Thomas, the spouse of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.
Having already received an invitation to an interview, Ginni Thomas is particularly fraught for the GOP. Thomas is paid a lot of money by conservative think tanks to, allegedly, influence policy. She was aggressive in trying to influence the White House Chief of Staff and others to reinstall Trump into office through any means possible, at one point telling Mark Meadows there are “no rules in war.” (She’s wrong: there are actually volumes of laws that apply to wars, and there are such things as “war crimes.” But I digress.). She’s also believed to have coordinated efforts with Trump’s legal team and other organizations.
Her husband, Clarence, was the sole vote on the Supreme Court to side with an absurd claim by Donald Trump that his claims of executive privilege are nearly universal so he could hide documents from the House Committee. A potential subpoena for Ginni Thomas should automatically recuse Clarence Thomas from cases involving January 6th that rise to SCOTUS.
When Ginni Thomas goes under oath, GOP sphincters will pucker. She knows where the bodies are buried–particularly about the Republican agenda. She’s the personification of corruption in Washington: she’s paid hundreds of thousands of dollars annually by conservative organizations, but we’re expected to believe that Clar and Ginni have an impenetrable wall between their professional actions and their private lives, even as their finances mingle. Should the House committee dig into who financed her organizations, it may find the deep pockets of some influential GOP friends funding the Dark Money operations they’ve cheered in the past.
Cruz, on the other hand, will be more comical than archcriminal. As the Washington Post’s story today details, Cruz was running a Congressional scam, trying to claim there were sufficient questions about the vote integrity to merit a ten-day delay before certifying the election. (Of course, there was no widespread voter fraud as Cruz claimed.)
The question for Cruz is how much he and other Republican Senators were coordinating with the White House, the Trump campaign and the various groups–militias, paramilitary groups, or Ginni Thomas’s favored white-collar thugs–were coordinating their efforts.
Cruz and Trump lawyer John Eastman clerked for the same judge early in their careers, and they supposedly independently came up with an idea to decertify state electors’ slates and having state legislatures appoint the electors–who would favor Trump in six contested states controlled by Republicans, not Joe Biden, for whom the citizens of those states voted.
To support their claim that they developed their plans of attack independently, they will likely spout something along the lines of, “Well, we have the same judicial philosophy, so obviously, we came up with the same way to undermine the Constitution.” Perhaps true, but it was too coincidental that in an early draft of Eastman’s plan, he names Cruz specifically as the Senator who would likely oppose certification.
Cruz faces a hard choice: does he admit under oath that he was working with a number of others to reject the electorate’s choice for president, or does he declare himself a single traitor who independently decided to use an unconstitutional ploy to overturn an election? Either way, he’s kinda screwed for any future presidential campaign.