Inside Ginni Thomas ‘Insane’ Hiring Memorandum for Former President Donald Trump

Years before she became one of then-President Donald Trump’s most prominent coup supporters, Ginni Thomas was famous in her West Wing that, among other things, ruined the afternoon. employees by sending Trump into a vengeful rage.

A former senior Trump administration official said: “We all know that within minutes of Ginni leaving a meeting with the president, he will start shouting about firing people who are not in the air. Fort. “When Ginni Thomas shows up, you know your day has been destroyed.”

Since becoming a welcome guest at Trump’s residence, Thomas – a longtime and influential conservative activist and wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas – has perfected a recipe proven to manipulate and manipulate the president’s emotions and moods. On several occasions throughout the Trump era, Thomas would appear at the White House, sometimes for private meetings or luncheons with the president. She’s often armed with written memos about who she and her allies believe Trump should hire to do the plum job — and who she thinks Trump should purge immediately. — which she distributed to Trump and other senior government officials.

According to people who have seen them in the Trump administration. Hiring lists are often filled with notorious bigots and conspiracy theorists, shoddy names, and Thomas’s obvious close friends that some senior Trump aides would laugh at them. — that is, until Trump forces his staff to come up with certain names, said three sources familiar with the matter.

During the Trump years, these memos would wow various administration officials, including those working in the White House Presidential Personnel Office (PPO). Some of these officials find that as the Trump presidency goes on, Thomas’ list will grow more disproportionately proportional to the names that are more relevant to the OAN client stream than any other functional government. (To be fair, before Ginni Thomas became a recurring visitor, Trump would regularly hire people because they entertained or excited him, through Fox and appearances on cable news. other).

Officials in the PPO regularly annotate Thomas’s job listings in the margin, often including a unique line for each rejected name, explaining why the potential hire failed. Some background checks fail or have security bottlenecks. Other footnotes note that a particular individual was offered a job in the Trump administration, but declined for whatever reason.

Sometimes, the reason for the White House’s first refusal, despite the best efforts of Thomas and Trump, is more outlandish. According to someone who reviewed one of Thomas’ lists, a caption for a MAGA candidate indicated that the individual had made too many extreme or offensive jokes on social media and still display.

One of the other footnotes suggested that a proposal for the Trump administration’s position was in fact a suspected foreign intelligence or espionage asset.

Thomas did not respond to a request for comment on this story.

Over the years, a number of specific names that Thomas has compiled and pushed for Trump and his West Wing have appeared in the press. Among them are Fox News character Dan Bongino, and Sheriff David Clarke pursuing Trump.

And according to two sources familiar with the matter, Thomas unsuccessfully advised the then president to hire Frank Gaffney.

Gaffney, a former Pentagon official in the Reagan administration, has spent the past two decades embracing some of the more absurd conspiracy theories circulating on the far right. He has accused anti-tax conservative Grover Norquist of being an agent for the Muslim Brotherhood and believes America’s adversaries are working on secret electrical equipment frying “electromagnetic pulses” weapons to bring America to back to the pre-industrial era.

“These damn lists are crazy and unworkable,” said a former Trump White House official who had to personally handle the memos provided by Thomas and Trump’s infatuation with them. said. “A lot of them have fallen into a state of paranoia and read as if they were written by a disturbed person.”

After Thomas leaves, he will soon summon many government employees — West Wing associates, national security aides, attorneys, and other underlings, depending on the nearness of time — to informed them that he had just talked to “Ginni”.

Trump will then identify an official—or, at times, he rummages through a string of names—who he says needs to be fired “immediately,” according to people familiar with the matter.

When they can get away with it, some of the Trump administration’s hands will be slow to execute Thomas-inspired firing directives, and wait until Trump always forgets it, cools down, and moves on to directions and rules. other switches. Others will scramble to try to calm Trump down, advising their bosses to reconsider, telling him that a layoff or a larger purge in the middle of Trump’s term will put him off. look bad or attract negative media attention.

Thomas’ interactions with the Trump administration have taken on new meaning since the House Select Committee released text messages showing her urging Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows to help overturn the 2020 election. Committee members are currently seeking to interview Thomas, whose efforts to overturn the 2020 election included attending the “Stop Theft” rally on the National Mall on the day of the uprising.

“Trump loves talking to Ginni because he loves to hear about someone who was never a Trumper, or supposedly one. He loves people who will flatter him, [as Ginni would do]”, said Stephanie Grisham, a former top White House aide to Trump who has since had a public relationship with the former president. he ignores, he just likes to gossip – all the time. That’s another thing he pulled out of his series of meetings at the White House with Ginni Thomas.”

In text messages released by the committee last month, Thomas defended Sidney Powell, the “Kraken” attorney, whose election conspiracy theory was so outlandish that it landed her a thousand dollars worth of defamation lawsuits. billion dollars, contempt for the ranks and records of Republican officials, and sanctions from a Michigan court. At the time, several Trump aides were trying to separate the president from Powell because of her increasingly outlandish comments about voter fraud that were bogus. Thomas, however, urged Meadows not to give in to mainstream Republicans, according to New York Times.

In her messages to Trump’s delivery man, Thomas also showed a fondness for Steve Pieczenik, a far-right pundit and one-time Tom Clancy co-author with conspiracy theories and claims of no so far even InfoWars has encouraged him to appear online for a short time. Before starting to publish fake stories of fraudulently marked ballots corroborated by Thomas, Pieczenik launched QAnon conspiracy theories, claimed to have arrested Pope Francis and released uncovering bogus stories of prominent mass shootings as false flags.

During the Obama administration, Thomas and Gaffney were involved in a conservative messaging effort known as “Groundswell.” The group, an informal network of conservative journalists, pundits and politicians, meets regularly in the offices of right-wing activist group Jud Justice Watch to coordinate discussions against the chapter agenda of the Obama administration and the plot to oust so-called Republican moderates like Karl Rove from the broader conservative movement.

According to CNN, the disclosure of Thomas’ texts to Meadows prompted the Jan. 6 Committee to seek an interview with her, but that effort did not align with the legally more convincing option of subpoenas. to appear in court.

Meanwhile, Democrats in Congress are divided over how to handle Thomas’s cameo in the January 6 scandal. Some, like Oregon Senator Ron Wyden, have called for Thomas to reprise his role. used himself in cases involving January 6 while others such as Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called for him to resign or be impeached.

But the lack of a Democratic majority in the Senate means that neither Thomases is likely to have to give up their jobs.