RALEIGH, N.C. (WGHP) — North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson’s office is responding to a left-leaning news outlet’s report that Robinson met with a high-profile activist with a history of denying the results of the 2020 election “weeks” after the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol.
The Daily Beast reports that obtained documents indicate that the lieutenant governor met with Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, a little less than eight weeks after Jan. 6.
The lieutenant governor’s office says that the meeting was about election security and decried the Daily Beast’s article as part of an ongoing effort to discredit Clarence and Ginni Thomas.
According to the Daily Beast, Robinson and Thomas, as well as members of Thomas’s group Frontliners For Liberty met on March 30. Frontliners for Liberty later drew the scrutiny of the House Select Committee to Investigate Jan. 6.
“Frontliners for Liberty morphed into a key organizing venue for far-right activists nationwide working desperately to keep Trump in power—even after Trump was out of office,” according to the article’s reporting.
John Waugh, the director of communications for the lieutenant governor’s office, released the following statement about the article:
“The Daily Beast is a left-wing outlet their own editor called a ‘tabloid’ and this story is part of the ongoing liberal smear campaign against U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife Virginia. How could it be a secret meeting? The article even states they learned about it from a records request that we readily complied with.
“It was a routine conversation that took place months after President Biden took office about nationwide election integrity efforts – something the Lt. Governor takes very seriously and even testified to Congress about just a few weeks later – you can view that testimony online here; he discusses the importance of enforcing our state’s voter ID law (which NC voters passed with overwhelming bipartisan support) and other ways to keep improving and modernizing our election systems.”
Ginni Thomas on the 2020 election
Thomas has long been under fire for false claims about the 2020 election, even texting North Carolina’s Mark Meadows, then chief of staff for the White House, writing in part, “The majority knows Biden and the Left is attempting the greatest Heist of our History.”
Meadows turned over thousands of texts in connection to the investigation into Jan. 6, including just over two dozen between him and Thomas, with many of the messages asserting the belief that the election had been stolen, with Thomas echoing QAnon and other far-right talking points in her messages, according to reports.
“The intense pressures you and our President are now experiencing are more intense than Anything Experienced (but I only felt a fraction of it in 1991),” Thomas texted Meadows, seeming to reference her husband Clarence Thomas’s confirmation hearing where he was accused of sexual harassment by Anita Hill, which Thomas denied.
“Sounds like Sidney and her team are getting inundated with evidence of fraud. Make a plan. Release the Kraken and save us from the left taking America down,” another text to Meadows read, referencing Sidney Powell, who was charged last year in connection to the fraudulent claims made about the 2020 election.
Mark Robinson on the 2020 election
Robinson is no stranger to election denial, posting that the 2020 election, in which he was elected, was “rife with overt fraud” and expressing the belief that Joe Biden didn’t win the election during his 2022 speech at CPAC, according to the Daily Beast.
In 2023, he spoke alongside several notable election deniers at the “Faith Over Fear“ rally held by right-wing activist Lucretia Hughes and attended by people like Kandiss Taylor, who failed to secure the nomination for Georgia governor and campaigned to destroy the iconic “Georgia Guidestones” which were later blown up.
Robinson and Thomas on the Jan. 6 Capitol riot
While Thomas admits to being at the Jan. 6 “Stop the Steal” rally that devolved into the capitol riot, she said she left early due to the weather and had no hand in the organization of the rally, according to reports from The Washington Post.
Robinson has been accused of downplaying the capitol riot, describing the riot, where a woman was killed and multiple died in the immediate aftermath, as “a small debacle in Washington D.C” and calling those arrested, which include high-ranking members of extremist groups such as the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, as a result of the attack “political prisoners.”
