White House Communications Director Alyssa Farah said in an interview following the riot that broke out at the U.S. Capitol Building on Wednesday that she left the Trump administration after the president’s loss in November because she was not comfortable with where “this was heading.”
Farah, who made the remarks in an interview with Politico, made similar remarks on Twitter the day before the interview, saying that the election was “not stolen” but that Trump lost.
Farah said that she made the decision in early December because the Trump campaign advised her that they would acknowledge that Trump lost and that “they were going to pursue avenues to reconcile that.”
“And I’m of the mind that it’s foundational to our democracy that if you think there was fraud or irregularities, the president absolutely should pursue legal recourse to determine if there was,” Farah said. “But we’re now at a point where we’ve seen something like 60 cases, and conservative judges ruling against them. And there just has not been compelling evidence of anything to show that the election went any way different than it did.”
“We need to come to grips with the fact Republicans lost the election,” she continued. “I made the decision to step down in December because I saw where this was heading, and I wasn’t comfortable being a part of sharing this message to the public that the election results might go a different way. I didn’t see that to be where the facts lay.”
Farah said that what happened on Wednesday with the rally and subsequent riot was a “boiling point” for her because they were “misleading the public.”
“And what happened was unacceptable. It was unpatriotic. It was un-American,” she said. “And I certainly fault the protesters—frankly, we should call them terrorists, but I fundamentally fault our elected leadership who allowed these people to believe that their election was stolen from them. The president and certain advisers around him are directly responsible.”
Farah said that the events that happened on Wednesday were “a very shaky point for” the U.S. and said that Trump “crossed a line” in what he was saying, specifically “telling people an election was stolen is crossing a line because it’s just not where the facts land.”
Farah said that early on after the election that Trump knew that he lost but then something changed, perhaps the people who were giving him information.
Farah said that she is worried that the Republican Party will either double down on everything MAGA from the last four years or that it will return to a “more establishment” very of the party and said that was it needed is to keep the best parts of what Trump brought to the party added with other areas that are lacking.
“And if we’re really going to look at ourselves and look internally, we need to think about wedding the best of what Trump offered with just fundamentally what our values are,” she said. “The most important thing is that when you do something destructive to our democracy, you lose the right to control the political direction of the party. A woman died because of lies that were spread by the president and those around him. She was a veteran. Political disagreements will persist, but they need to be resolved civilly and peacefully. It’s time to put this political moment behind us.”