Ginni Thomas says she and her husband did not talk about trying to change the outcome of an election.
In an interview behind closed doors with a House committee looking into the Jan. 6 attack, Ms. Thomas repeated her false claim that President Donald J. Trump's 2020 election was stolen from him.
Virginia Thomas, the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas and a conservative activist who worked to overturn the 2020 election, told the House committee looking into the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol that she never talked about those efforts with her husband. She said this in a closed-door interview where she also repeated the false claim that the election was stolen.
When Ms. Thomas left the interview, which took place in an office building near the Capitol and lasted about four hours, she smiled at reporters' questions but didn't answer any of them in public.
She did, however, answer questions behind closed doors, said Representative Bennie Thompson, a Democrat from Mississippi and the chairman of the committee. He also said that her answers could be part of a future hearing.
He said, "If there's something good, it will be."
During her interview, Ms. Thomas, who goes by the name Ginni, said again that President Donald J. Trump's 2020 election was stolen, Mr. Thompson said. She stuck to this belief in late 2020, when she pushed state lawmakers and the White House chief of staff to do more to try to overturn the results.
In a statement she read at the start of her testimony, Ms. Thomas denied that she had talked to her husband about what she was going to do after the election.
The New York Times got a copy of Ms. Thomas's statement, in which she said that she and Justice Thomas never talk about cases that are still before the Supreme Court. "Anyone who knows my husband would laugh at the idea that I could change his legal decisions. He is independent and stubborn, with strong traits of independence and integrity," she said.
The committee and Ms. Thomas had talked about her testimony for months before the interview. The committee's investigators were especially interested in what she said to conservative lawyer John Eastman, who was close to Mr. Trump and wrote a memo that Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans have called a coup plan.
Mr. Thompson said, "At this point, we're glad she came."
After Ms. Thomas's Thursday appearance, her lawyer Mark Paoletta said, "She was happy to work with the committee to clear up the misunderstandings about what she was doing around the 2020 elections."
In a statement, Mr. Paoletta said, "She answered every question the committee had." "As she said from the beginning, Mrs. Thomas was very worried about fraud and other problems in the 2020 election. She told the committee that her main and most important job was to make sure that reports of fraud and other problems were looked into. After the 2020 election results, she had no part in any other events. As she told Mark Meadows in a text message at the time, "I hate violence on both sides of the aisle," she also spoke out against the violence on January 6.
A committee spokesman wouldn't say anything.
Ms. Thomas sent text messages to Mr. Meadows, the White House chief of staff, in which she asked him to challenge Joseph R. Biden Jr.'s victory in the 2020 election, which she called a "heist." She also said that she had talked to Jared Kushner, the president's son-in-law, about Mr. Trump's attempts to use the courts to stay in power. She even suggested the name of the lawyer who should lead this effort.