As the Jan. 6 hearings have progressed, a cadre of young, female, former Trump aides have created an informal support network to support it.
As Cassidy Hutchinson sat alone at a long wooden table inside a Capitol Hill hearing room, her one-time Trump White House colleague Alyssa Farah Griffin, watched from the CNN green room.
Griffin felt nervous. And for good reason. Hutchinson’s testimony before the Jan. 6 committee had been kept largely secret up till a day or so before. When it was revealed, it was under the billing that it would provide bombshells about what had transpired inside the Trump White House on that day.
As Hutchinson began laying out those eye-popping revelations, Griffin texted another former colleague, Sarah Matthews, slated to soon testify before the same committee. And she reached out to Olivia Troye, a former Trump national security official who was sitting in the hearing room as Hutchinson testified.
The women felt mutually stunned as they watched. They were also concerned for Hutchinson, understanding that as soon as she left that hearing room, she’d face intense scrutiny from the media, nasty messages and encounters online and, at times, in person, and the loneliness of being a Republican in Washington who speaks out against former President Donald Trump. After all, they each experienced that themselves.
When the proceedings were done they each reached out to Hutchinson, too.
“I was so nervous watching her,” said Griffin. “But she immediately had such a commanding presence — I was beyond proud to see my friend stand up before the world and tell the truth when so many others were too cowardly to do.”
The Jan. 6 committee hearings have been among the most dramatic and significant congressional investigations into the conduct of a White House in our nation’s history. They reflect months of research, painstaking work by investigators, and testimony from dozens of Trump officials, law enforcement officers and election experts. But a key component has been a small club of women who have provided critical testimony and created a support structure for one another to combat the intense backlash it’s produced.
The small group includes a current and former member of Congress, aides long exiled from Trumpland and those who only recently decided it was time to make a break. In phone calls and text messages, they have shared tips on how to report social media harassment, passed along advice on safety and security measures — such as the benefits of wearing a baseball hat while walking through an airport — and calmed the nerves of each other’s family members.
“It is a lonely space to come forward and part of it for me was to make sure that they knew that even though it feels lonely – they bully, they intimidate, they want to make you feel like there’s no one left in the world, that’s kind of the point – for me it was important for them to know I wasn’t going to waver on them and there would be others,” said Troye.
The “small, lonely girls club,” as one woman described it, is composed largely of former Trump aides who became disillusioned with his presidency. Griffin, his onetime communications director, resigned in December 2020 and has been critical of Trump since. Troye broke earlier, amid the first impeachment process when it was revealed that Trump had pressured Ukrainian officials for dirt on Hunter Biden. Hutchinson’s fissure came after Trump left office, when she was subpoenaed by the committee for her direct knowledge of what happened in the White House Jan. 6. Matthews, who served as the deputy press secretary under Kayleigh McEnany, broke with the Trump White House that day as Trump failed to calm the riots on Capitol Hill.
Having found themselves largely in the same political space — persona non grata in the professional infrastructure through which they made their careers — they formed a quasi- support network of their own.
There is no central line of communication. But over phone and text, they have regularly kept in touch throughout the course of the Jan. 6 committee hearings. In interviews, they have stressed they aren’t digging for information or trying to influence the committee’s proceedings. Instead, they’re reminding each other constantly that, at one of the most intense moments of their young lives — Hutchinson is 26, Matthews is 27, Griffin is 33, and Troye and Grisham are 45 — they are not alone.
After Hutchinson’s testimony, several of the women said they formed what they called an informal kind of “rapid response” unit — defending her on TV and on Twitter from attacks from the right, who see the women as traitors to Trump, and the left, who question how they could have ever served a president whose shortcomings were so readily apparent to them in real time.
“It’s a very unique group that experienced such a specific, critical moment in history together and I think we feel bonded by it and are incredibly protective of one another,” said Griffin.
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A small group of women, mostly former Trump aides, have created a support structure for one another to combat the intense backlash from their Jan. 6 testimonies. https://t.co/lSz01XiGIW
— POLITICO (@politico) July 13, 2022
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