Liz Cheney, the Republican vice-chair of the House January 6 committee, did “all she could” to protect the rightwing supreme court justice Clarence Thomas and his wife, the political activist Ginni Thomas, by blocking an in-depth investigation of Ginni’s involvement in Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election, a new book says.

In Stench: The Making of the Thomas Court and the Unmaking of America, the reporter and Democratic operative David Brock writes that “two Capitol Hill sources with personal knowledge” revealed a “dramatic truth, which might shock even some jaded Washington veterans not easily surprised by callow examples of power protecting power.

“Liz Cheney herself, the star of the hearings, doing her turn as independent-minded maverick Republican, did all she could behind the scenes to protect Ginni and Clarence Thomas and thwart the move to investigate further the implications of the Ginni Thomas texts to [Mark] Meadows”, Trump’s final White House chief of staff.