Liz Cheney: “We Will Contemplate a Subpoena” of Ginni Thomas If She Won’t Willingly Testify

Liz Cheney on Jake Tapper’s State of the Union show, July 24. Screenshot/CNN

Facts matter: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter. Support our nonprofit reporting. Subscribe to our print magazine.Ginni Thomas is a right-wing activist and superfan of former president Donald Trump—and the wife of Clarence Thomas, the intellectual lodestar of the current US Supreme Court. After Trump failed to win reelection in Nov. 2020, she sent a flurry of text messages to Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, promoting false conspiracy theories and urging the administration to overturn the results, the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol revealed in March. What else does Ginni Thomas know about Trump’s failed putsch? Did her husband take part in her behind-the-scene effort to encourage Trump to “stop the steal”? 
So far, she has refused to testify before the committee, but that could soon change. “We certainly hope that she will agree to come in voluntarily, but the committee is fully prepared to contemplate a subpoena if she does not. I hope it doesn’t get to that. I hope she will come in voluntarily,” Rep. Liz Cheney (R.-Wyo.), the committee’s vice chair, told CNN’s Jake Tapper Sunday, said. “So it’s very important for us to speak with her and as I said, I hope she will agree to do so voluntarily but I’m sure we will contemplate a subpoena if she won’t.”
In addition to the text messages with Meadows, revealed by The Washington Post, the committee also possesses email correspondence between Thomas and former President Donald Trump’s election attorney John Eastman. The contents of those emails have not been made public. 
If compelled to testify, Thomas will likely be a hostile participant in the investigation. She has “openly opposed the committee and called for Republicans who serve on it to be expelled from the House Republican conference,” CNN reports.