-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. ♪♪ The midterm elections
are coming up, so to make sure that you're
good to vote in this election, visit our good friends
at HeadCount.org to check your voter registration
status or to register to vote.
Why are all Trumps henchmen so…criminally stupid.
LOLOLOL! Ginny a walking advertisement for the new movie "Smile".
Ginny Thomas is a real-life Smiling Psychopath.
Edit to say, I love Seth. He keeps me sane.
OK, now I realize what Ginny Thomas reminded me of as she walked past that reporter smiling…the Manson girls. Charlie Manson’s girls had that same weird smiling affect.
She actually believes in watermarked ballets and white hat sting operations. And sent that in text messages to the White House. It really makes me think covid caused brain damage.