Ginni Thomas’ West Wing contacts raise new questions for another Trump ally:

The select committee has evidence that when a top Pence aide challenged Eastman’s plan on Jan. 4, 2021, Eastman initially told him he believed two Supreme Court justices would back him up. One of them was Ginni Thomas’ husband, Justice Clarence Thomas.

Eastman’s assertion, described by Pence’s counsel Greg Jacob to the select committee earlier this year, appeared to be a guess based on analysis of Thomas’ long legal career. Eastman had reason to know Thomas’ views well: He clerked for the George H.W. Bush appointee in the 1990s before becoming a mainstay in deeply conservative legal circles.

But the revelation that Thomas’ wife kept in contact with Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows in the weeks after Trump’s defeat — pressing him to keep trying to overturn the election — adds a new wrinkle to the timeline. Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) told POLITICO that the new details raise important questions about whether Eastman had a specific reason to believe Justice Thomas would support his radical gambit, or if he was simply voicing a hunch.

Eastman’s attorney Charles Burnham did not respond to questions about whether Eastman maintained ties to the Thomases or communicated with either of them in the aftermath of Trump’s 2020 defeat. There’s no known evidence that Eastman was directly in touch with either of the Thomases during his campaign to pressure Pence to subvert the results.

But the conservative legal scholar has taken pains to avoid revealing his interactions in that timeframe.

Eastman has sued the Jan. 6 select committee to prevent them from enforcing a subpoena for his records and testimony. He’s also sued his former employer, Chapman University, to prevent the school from turning over thousands of pages of his emails to the select committee. And when Eastman appeared before the committee last year, he embraced a blanket strategy to resist their questions: pleading the Fifth.

During that deposition, investigators specifically asked Eastman to articulate whether he believed the Supreme Court would have supported his gambit. He replied with a single word: “Fifth.”

Other than Trump, Eastman has proven to be the most significant figure in the select committee’s investigation, one the panel’s top lawyer — House General Counsel Douglas Letter — called the “central player in the development of a legal strategy to justify a coup.”

The panel is engaged in extensive, hard-fought litigation to obtain Eastman’s Chapman University emails, and it is awaiting a federal judge’s decision about whether Eastman can continue to shield them behind claims of attorney-client privilege. While the panel says it has put some of its legal fights on the back burner, Letter has remained fixed on winning the battle against Eastman. And the select committee used the fight to publicly unload some of its key evidence, including excerpts of interview transcripts with Eastman and Jacob, Pence’s counsel.

The committee says Eastman has failed to show he had a legitimate attorney-client relationship with Trump, and that even if he did, the House’s need for the documents requires waiving the privilege. House lawyers argued…