I will let everybody settle in. Welcome back to the afternoon session this saturday everyone. Hopefully you had time to get enough lunch. I know its a quick turnaround but i appreciate everybody bearing with us in getting back for the rest of the discussions. It is an honor to introduce the next panel. I think it is really critical. The discussion they will have is really a testament to the leadership that these women have exhibited. The title of the panel is leading with principal i will welcome them to the stage. Speaking up for the truth. I think that is easier said than done a lot of times particularly when you are in the middle of a battle and you are serving in positions of government. You want to serve. You want to serve the country and all three of these women have done this. Alyssa Farah Griffin now of the view is your will be here now of the view is here moderating the discussion joined by Cassidy Hutchinson the former white house aide to mark meadows. [applause] and Sarah Matthews the former White House Deputy press secretary. Please give all these women around of applause for their courage. Think you guys so much. I honestly get cheered up when i see these two because i have so much respect, love, and admiration for their bravery and courage. When the two of them spoke out against the most powerful man on the planet they were in their 20s. They were younger staffers with big jobs, big titles they earned. They came forward to do the right thing when so many people three times their age saw the same thing and did not say a thing about it. These are two incredibly brave woman that i am honored to be with today. [applause] i would like to note that i do not think kassidy and i would have had the courage to speak out if it was not for this woman here. I know kassidy agrees with me. Thank you for being an inspiration to us. Lets get right into it. I want to focus a little bit on what brought them to where they were in the process of speaking out. I want to reserve time to talk about what a second donald trump term, godfrey bed, would look like god forbid, would look like. All of us have unique insight and i think at the moment it is not getting enough attention. If both of you could just share what ultimately made you want to speak out and what that process looks like for you and the days, the weeks, months that followed after you do Something Like that. Go for it. Bypass was not exact my path was not exactly linear. I work in the white house for the chief of staff until january 20. I did plan to move to maralago with mr. Trump after the Administration Even after january 6. I look back on that now and i have a very different perspective. At time when i was at the time i was still entrenched in that world i felt he needed good people around him. I had been blinded to the fact he was surrounded by enablers, but he is also the perpetrator. I think that speaks to a lot of what we have seen as a continuing problem with donald trump. How he has been able to artificially seduce people into believing his lies. That said, i spent about 1. 5 years trying to tow both worlds. I did not really want to be involved in Donald Trumps world at all anymore. I was very outspoken after january 6 that we were at fault for what happened. I also had financial constraints. I had an attorney that was helping me through the first year depositions. It was not until a few pages of my transcripts were published that for lack of a better term i had a mental breakdown. I was reading these pages. I knew the Public Servant i had wanted to become when i entered Public Service. And i saw how far i had strayed from that person. I saw how i was avoiding telling the truth. I had not been as forthcoming as i had wanted to be. So, i called a member of congress. I refer to him as sam here he sam. He is a current sitting member of congress, a republican that did not serve on the january 6 committee and that night he asked me to go look in the mirror and i was kind of annoyed at him that night. I was crying like i dont want to look at myself right now. He said dont look at your appearance, go look at yourself. That was a really profound impactful moment for me. Next he asked me, could you look at yourself or the rest of your life knowing that you are not honoring the person you want to be . Can you look at that person for the rest of your life . I knew that i could not. A few other people including alyssa helped usher me back to the right side of history. But i was really scared. It was not until i discovered the book called the last president s men by bob woodward featured aaron Alex Butterfield you worked for Richard Nixons chief of staff. And ended up for healing information to the watergate committee. But he did not want to come forward. He still felt loyal to richard nixon. The difference between myself and Alex Butterfield was the moment he was asked to come forward, he did. He honored his oce and his owes at the Public Servant as a former member of the military and an american. I saw who i wanted to be in alex. That gave me the drive and push to move forward in this socalled journey. Alongside a lot of other incredible, primarily women, my team of attorneys that came in early june. I have been asked was it on january 6 you decided to resign . I think that was the Tipping Point for me, but it was kind of a slow burn that started after the election because on Election Night i remember sitting in the west wing and it seemed the result coming in and knowing that georgia was not trending in the way it should be for a republican candidate and i remember telling this roomful of people we lost. Theres no coming back from this. People were saying we might wake up tomorrow and things will be different. Obviously that evening i think it was like 3 00 a. M. Donald trump went out to declare victory and i felt really uncomfortable from that. It was from that day moving forward as he started to cling to conspiracy theories to try to explain away how he could lose to someone he perceived as weak as joe biden i became increasingly comfortable with staying at the white house but i felt a duty to finish the term and a seethrough peaceful transition. I promised my boss at the time, the White House Press secretary kayleigh mcenany, that i would stay on until the end. Then january 6 came and we all know what happened that day. Donald trump sat back and watched and enjoyed it. I was working as a spokesperson for him. I think that made my decision to resign may be a little different than other people that were also working at the white house. Because, my job would have been defending that. Walking into the white house gates the next day and acting like everything i saw was fine trying to tell reporters that and it defend his lack of action , i just could not do that. So i ended up resigning that night. After that i actually went back to republican politics. I went back to work on capitol hill where i got my start. That felt like a safe landing zone for me. Then, a couple months went by. Eventually, i got connected to liz cheney through alyssa. Liz asked alyssa if she thought i might be willing to cooperate with the january 6 committee. Obviously, i wasnt sympathetic to the cause and believed there needed to be an investigation. Then, when they asked me to publicly testify, i was more than happy to. And shed some light on what i saw in the lead up after the election and on january itself, that donald trump did not care what was happening at the capital the capitol and sat back and did nothing. I think something we all spend a lot of time thinking about and none of us have here answer to, but some perspective on, is we are lifelong conservatives and republicans and we all probably agreed with about 7 of Donald Trumps policies. I think we were open eyed to his character but came to the decision that he is commander of you need people there of good condors that take the oath they swear to the consecration constitution seriously. What we wonder is why other people have not come forward that saw what we saw and heard what we heard and why that was not enough of a motivating factor . My working theory looking back at my time in the white house is part of it is you are going one million miles per minute and another part is you start to exist in an echo chamber of people telling you this is all right. We will get through this. You are watching a media environment. Its right wing its fox news. It is validating what you are doing, hearing, and saying and you almost are to lose yourself in it. I think that speaks a lot to what we are seeing from a lot of elected republicans in congress. All of us know we know no they know better. Tim scott knows better. It is hard to wrap your head around the mental joe knapp sticks mental gymnastics takes to get where he has or somebody like elise stefanik. The question i want to ask you guys is, what is your perspective on why liz cheney came forward and thought more people would follow and it was like the three of us and no one else . Why havent more people came forward . I think sadly people are more concerned with their own positions of power than was doing with doing what is right for the country. [applause] it is so sad. Because, these people were elected to not serve donald trump. They are there to conserve preserve their constituents and they seem to have that confused. So they are doing his bidding. They are so concerned with painting a target on their own back. Donald trump, when people speak against him, what does he do . He tries to find a primary opponent for those people in their race so he gets them out and gets someone he approves of in. I thing a lot of these politicians are using that as a calculus to not speak out and that is really disappointing because i think a lot of people probably think, i cannot imagine donald trump is that bad if there are not a lot of other republican speaking out. Well they arent saying anything. There are only a couple people the same disgruntled or what have you or want the limelight or something. They come up with some excuse to explain away People Like Us coming forward. But, i think that people would believe the threat of donald trump if there were more willing people, elected officials that come out and say what i know they say privately publicly. [applause] brilliant. You took the words out of my mouth. I want to touch on one thing alyssa said earlier about the singular worldview, something to that effect. When we existed in that environment, at least in my experience, it can be an extremely isolating place. On one side, you do have fox news telling you what they believe is true, and they have received lawsuits so thats not necessarily the case that it is truth. But aside from that, the isolation is such a powerful tool that donald trump has done anything successfully in his life he has successfully weaponized isolation and joined that with his message to make it the only message that matters. If you disagree with him, we are beyond the tribal politics at this point. If you disagree with anything he says, it does not matter if you are a democrat or republican, you are automatically the enemy to him and he will go after you and go after you fiercely. Sometimes, i do struggle with people that dont come forward even though it is the right thing to do. In our situation we have all been subjected to horrible attacks and threats on our life. It is not easy to be in this position. But just because it is not easy does not mean it is not worth coming forward. [applause] in the next election cycle, we wont solve this problem in this election cycle in totality. There is a lot of work that needs to be done to help bring people back to reality, to bring people back to not believing these in spirit as he theories and of the propagation of lies donald trump has done. What we need to do is practice compassion for people that did fall into that seduction and were artificially duped. We need to help educate those people. We dont shame people out of their belief system. We have to welcome them back. That is something that in my journey i have been extremely fortunate with. I was very warmly welcomed into a room full of wonderful people like you. Thats not the case for everyone. I think of ruby freeman and shaye moss innocent election workers in georgia. I think about rusty bowers trapped in his home as donald Trump Supporters and Rudy Giuliani sent to his home while his daughter is passing away inside. This is a problem that has persisted. We are at a level of Political Violence we have not seen in modern time. We need to retract from that. We need to restore some normalcy. We start in the next election by doing everything that we possibly can to make sure donald trump never gets near the oval office again and to make sure that every member of congress that has been an enabler of Donald Trumps agenda is also held accountable and voted out of office. [applause] very well said. Just underscore something to read you alluded to something important. I always try to catch myself to make sure im not being hyperbolic talking about donald trump. I dont want to fall into the trap of trump derangement syndrome. But i want to tell you that a somebody that knew him very well and spend a lot of time with him is that the worst things you have heard are only scratching the surface. This is an unprecedented moment we are in. Granted, we are some of the more vocal former trump staffers, but he has been denounced by all of his most seem most senior staff. We have never seen that in modern American History. Multiple white house chief of staff, multiple secretaries of defense, his former National Security advisor, his former communications director. People that saw him in the most decisionmaking environments say he is unfit and threatens democracy and people need to wake up to that. Something i think we are all very passionate and energized about going into the election season, knowing we are eight months out from that and he could be presented president again, what would a second term look like . Foundational he, and liz cheney has made this point before, we are not even out of the woods if he leaves. The idea that his supporters will take it lying down and it will not be another contested election where you have a speaker of the house potentially who is not going to certify Election Results depending on the makeup of congress. And if he does win, what that could look like. Can you both speak to some of what you think would happen in a second term based on what we know from what he has said . I like to touch on what he has said very vocally about schedule f appointments, something that was actually discussed at the end of his first term too. I focus a lot on schedule off because i think it is something that sometimes, at least in my view, we get stuck in the beltway talk. The average american person might not know what a schedule f Government Employee is. But essentially donald trump wants to take schedule as employees, career Civil Servants , and be able to fire them and replace them with trump loyalists. We have seen that donald trump and his supporters and enablers and different groups have already started compiling databases of people that are sufficiently loyal to fill the spots for him. In a second trump term there will not be people that are willing to stick up for the truth. There will be people that are willing to execute Donald Trumps plan and it Donald Trumps plan only. That is fundamentally unamerican. Thats fundamentally undemocratic. That is, in my view, one of the biggest threats to the Constitutional Republic we are facing. Going off of that too we see now even in his court case is where he is arguing that he should have president ial immunity. His law years literally arguing he would be allowed to assassinate someone and get away with it because he was acting as president. I think we should take him at his word when he says things like this. Because, its very easy to get desensitized by all the crazy stuff that comes out of his mouth. I think a lot of americans have. I think we are able to tune that out because he just continues to say these kinds of crazy things. When he is talking about wanting to weaponize the government and put in loyalists to carry out his agenda, and he has even called for doing away with parts of the constitution, this is someone that has no regard for our constitution, no respect for our institutions him and he does not care about the rule of law. He thinks he is above the law. Thats really scary to think of a second donald trump term because this is something i have tried to make the case for two people who i know that still support donald trump or are considering voting for him. That, the donald trump you met that came onto the political scene in 2016 and the donald trump of 2024 are different people. In 2016 he ran on an optimistic message. Make America Great again. The Campaign Message now in 2024 is all about retribution. Its all about himself. Its not about you and improving your everyday life and making policy changes in that way. It is literally about him wanting to consolidate power in the government to weaponize the power, to enact revenge on his political enemies. Building off that, he is a man that prioritizes authoritarian rule over rule of law. We cant let somebody like that near the nuclear codes. We cant let somebody like that occupy the oval office. We cant let somebody like that get reelected to the white house. I know that if one day hopefully i am fortunate enough to have children of my own i dont want to have to explain to my children that we were all bystanders as the greatest democracy in the history of the world is crumbling. And we are just watching it happen before our eyes. I think when donald trump says and he acts like he jokes but he says he would be a dictator only on day one. You arent a dictator for one day. If donald trump is reelected, that is the greatest step towards facets fascism we have taken in the country and that it will not and i do not know if we wo