-In yet another stunning development,
the committee investigating the coup attempt
on January 6th deposed Ginni Thomas,
the spouse of a sitting Supreme Court justice,
as more video evidence emerged
of another Trump ally, Roger Stone, discussing plans
before the election to declare victory
and overturn the results if Trump lost.
For more on this, it's time for A Closer Look.
♪♪
There was a huge development in the congressional investigation
of the January 6th insurrection today,
when the committee investigating the attack
took the unprecedented step of deposing the spouse
of a sitting Supreme Court justice.
-Happening today here in Washington, Ginni Thomas,
the wife of the Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas,
is meeting with the January 6th Committee.
-We know that members want to talk to her about text messages
she exchanged with Mark Meadows,
the former White House Chief of Staff,
about efforts to overturn the election.
-She also texted with Trump's then Chief of Staff,
Mark Meadows, after the election,
pressing him not to concede to Joe Biden.
-That's right -- Ginni Thomas,
the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas,
was texting Donald Trump's Chief of Staff,
urging him not to concede.
I feel like that's not what the framers had in mind
when they imagined separate but equal branches of government.
I'm just guessing here, but I'm going to assume
Martha Washington wasn't writing secret letters by candle light
to the first Chief Justice, John Jay -- history fact.
I'm guessing she wasn't writing him letters on parchment
that said, "John Adams is a moron.
Don't let him win the election of 1796
or they'll make a miniseries about him one day
starring Paul Giamatti.
Yeah, the guy from 'Billions'!"
I'm no legal expert,
but I feel like if you're the spouse
of a sitting Supreme Court justice,
you shouldn't be texting anyone in the government
about anything, let alone a coup.
That'd be like if I found out my wife was texting James Corden
about how great his monologue was last night.
And then I'd confront her and I'd say,
"But he's on at the same time as me."
And she'd say, "Wait, you're on at 12:30?"
And then I'd say, "Actually, it's 12:37,
and please don't ask me why,
because the network won't explain it to me either."
And by the way, those clips are underselling
what Ginni was actually doing.
She wasn't just texting Trump's Chief of Staff
and urging Trump not to concede.
She had direct communications
with state lawmakers in Arizona and Wisconsin,
pressuring them -- again, as the spouse
of a sitting Supreme Court justice --
to overturn Biden's victory.
And she was also texting
some truly bat[bleep] conspiracy theories
from the craziest corners of the Internet --
stuff I had honestly never even heard about
until the Ginni Thomas story broke.
-The Washington Post obtained copies of messages
that had been turned over to the January 6th committee
revealing that Ginni Thomas sent
former Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows
a barrage of texts
in the weeks after the 2020 election,
urging him to try to overturn the results.
She referred to wild far-right conspiracy theories,
sending Meadows a link to an absolutely,
just insane YouTube video that's since been taken down
which was centered around a fake QAnon conspiracy theory.
After she texted that video to Meadows,
Thomas added, "I hope this is true."
-Right after the election, she quoted to Meadows
the language then circulating on pro-Trump sites,
"Biden crime family and ballot fraud co-conspirators
(elected officials, bureaucrats, social media censorship mongers,
fake stream media reporters, etc)
are being arrested and detained for ballot fraud right now
& over coming days, & will be living in barges off GITMO
to face military tribunals for sedition,"
adding, "I hope this is true."
-You know, it almost -- almost -- makes me feel bad
for Clarence Thomas.
I mean, we all know a couple
that has to leave every party early
because one spouse decided to pre-game
with back pills and Everclear, and 20 minutes in,
they're loudly describing some foot problem they have.
"Yeah, it's turning green. It's about to fall off.
Now, who wants to dance?"
But think about how insane that is.
Ginni Thomas didn't just think the election was stolen.
She thought Joe Biden and the "Biden crime family"
would be arrested and living on barges off Gitmo.
And here's my question --
Why a barge off Gitmo instead of just Gitmo itself?
Let's just assume for the sake of the argument
that all the crazy [bleep] she was texting
turned out to be true -- that Hugo Chávez teamed up
with the CIA and Dominion voting machines
to rig the election using ballots
smuggled in from China covered in bamboo fibers,
but then Trump caught them
by secretly watermarking the real ballots
and then conducted a sting operation
to arrest the Biden crime family
and prove that the election was, in fact, stolen.
Let's just assume for a moment that all of that is true,
and, whoa, whoa, I see why they're into this!
Wh-- It's like being on Molly and Mountain Dew
at the same time.
Whoa.
[ Laughter ]
Okay, if all of that is true, why would the military
go to all the extra trouble of building a barge off Gitmo
when they already have Gitmo?
That's what Gitmo is for.
Is the assumption that Biden can't swim,
so he'd never escape?
Because he does seem like one of those old dudes
who would just strip down and jump in the lake
no matter how cold it was.
"Grandpa, the water's freezing." "Come on in.
It'll put some hair on your chest."
Seriously? Why a barge off the prison?
Have they ever done that with any other criminal suspect ever?
Alright, we caught the River City Strangler.
Should we put him in Alcatraz?
Nah, for a guy that bad, he goes on the Alcatraz catamaran.
[ Laughter ]
And in case all of this isn't weird enough for you,
Thomas made her appearance today even weirder
when she arrived and a reporter caught up to her
and tried to ask her questions.
-Ms. Thomas, why do you feel like you need
to speak to the committee to clear your name?
-Thank you for being here.
-Did you speak with your husband
about your beliefs of the election being stolen?
-Thank you for your question.
Look forward to answering the members.
-[ Laughing ] Oh! What is going on here?
Is this one of those promotions for that new movie "Smile"?
If you only -- If you had only been communicating
with Ginni Thomas via text
and this was the first time you saw her face, you'd think,
"Oh, no.
Oh, that lady was crazy the whole time.
Oh, no!
I texted her about government stuff."
So, Thomas' texts were insane.
But in a way, they weren't shocking
because, as we've said many times before,
Trump surrounds himself with a group of people
who are, in addition to being very dangerous
and deeply corrupt, also just incredibly weird.
As a New York City real-estate mogul,
Trump could have had his pick
of sophisticated white-collar criminals.
Instead, he assembled a team of mutants
who failed their X-Men auditions.
"There's Pillow Man. His pillows may be soft,
but his voice is loud enough to shatter glass.
There's Former Mayor.
He can pull the skin all the way back behind his head.
Not sure what good that's going to do,
but it's cool to watch him do it.
Then there's Roger, the time-traveling drug dealer.
You know, he's the one who gave Sherlock Holmes all that opium."
Now, we'll get to the newest developments
involving Trump confidant Roger Stone in a second.
But first, let's start with My Pillow CEO Mike Lindell,
because, you know, why not?
Lindell had his phone seized by the FBI
while he was in a Hardee's drive-through
as part of an investigation
into a voting-machine breach in Colorado
that he may have been connected to.
And now he's complaining that his new phone has nothing on it
because he didn't back up any of the data on his old phone.
-I don't use a laptop. I don't use a computer.
Everything was on that phone.
One of the things -- there were files on that phone
that you can't get through the cloud that were passwords.
Some of them passwords were so --
I wire money from different accounts back and forth.
And I have to look those passwords up in those files.
I can't get to those, Steve. I can't get anything.
I took the number and transferred it
from my carrier to another phone,
but the phone is blank.
It's missing all these things.
We -- This phone -- Like I said, Steve,
I would've rather -- almost rather they arrested me
than took my phone.
-I bet he offered that to the FBI and they said no.
"Just take me with you!" "No, we're good."
"Please! Everything was on that phone,
including my address,
so I don't know how to get home without it.
Just let me come sleep with you
and sleep in jail behind -- oh, bars."
Also, Mike, every time you defend yourself,
you seem to describe a different potential crime
you maybe committed.
Why are you wiring money back and forth
between different accounts all the time?
"I'm always moving money around in an effort
to make it look like I got enough to cover my debts.
And now I can't -- Things are about to get bad."
For some reason, these doinks are always on camera
complaining about something extremely weird, like Rudy,
who recently went on his podcast
to insist once again that the election was stolen
and also complained that no one was inviting him on TV anymore.
-They're lying about January 6th.
They're trying to make alternate electors look like a crime.
There's nothing wrong with it. It was absolutely in the open.
There was no fraud attached to it.
They want us ignored. They want us put in prison.
They want all our property taken from us.
They don't want us to be allowed to be employed.
And they don't want any television station to put us on.
And they say so.
And the television stations comply.
That's not fascism?
-No, it's not. I don't...
I don't think it's fascism so much as not wanting
to scare the children at home.
I mean, this should come with a content warning.
This looks like one of those photos they used for
the Surgeon General's warning on a pack of cigarettes.
Also, can we go back to this?
-They don't want us to be allowed to be employed.
-Who's "us"? They don't want you employed.
And you shouldn't be employed. You're 78.
You should be retired and enjoying your golden years,
just playing golf in your JNCO shorts.
Look at those shorts.
[ Laughter ]
I've never seen shorts that big
that didn't also have a wallet chain.
[ Laughter ]
And then there's Roger Stone,
the Fourth Horseman of the Weird-ocalypse.
Stone's been a long-time confidant of Donald Trump.
And we told you yesterday, the January 6th Committee
has also obtained damning new footage
of Stone explaining the Trump team's plan
to steal the election to a documentary film crew.
For example, in one clip,
he just straight up says, before the results are in,
that if the outcome isn't clear right away,
the Trump team will just claim victory anyway.
-Let's just hope we're celebrating.
-[ Laughs ] -Oh, I know.
-I suspect it'll be -- I really do suspect
it will still be up in the air.
When that happens, the key thing to do is to claim victory.
Possession is 9/10s of the law.
"No, we won. [Bleep] you. Sorry. Over.
We won. You're wrong. [Bleep] you."
-He thinks he's a criminal mastermind,
but he talks like your father-in-law
over a game of Pictionary.
"No. [Bleep] you. We won. I drew --
No. [Bleep] you.
I drew a way better pickle than you, and Sarah said, 'Pickle.'
Tell them, Sarah."
"Actually, I said, 'Microphone.'"
"Oh, my God, Sarah.
You're on your mother's side now, Sarah?
[Bleep] you too."
[ Laughter ]
It's both dangerous and also incredibly pathetic.
I mean, seriously, can you imagine
these four in a room together?
"We won. [Bleep] you." "My phone is blank."
"Oof! I sat on my balls." "Thank you for being here.
Thank you for being here."
[ Cheers and applause ]
That -- You guys, that was very exciting, what you just saw.
[ Laughter ]
That was rehearsal for my new one-man show,
"Waiting for Go-D'oh."
[ Laughter ]
Ginni Thomas is just the latest example,
but she is by no means the only one.
Trump's gang,
and virtually the entirety of the Republican Party,
have, like, bought into a series
of increasingly deranged conspiracy theories,
and they were so devoted to those insane theories
that they actually took the very real steps
to overturn the election -- steps they laid out
in highly specific detail in text messages and e-mails,
or on camera over and over and over again.
There are so many different stories.
The committee has to interview so many different people
so they can go through...
-Different accounts back and forth.
[ Laughter ]
-This has been -- Well, yeah, look.
Just remember how good the one-man show was.
This has been A Closer Look.
♪♪
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