Ex-Aide Says Trump Discussed 'Executing People' More Than Bill Barr Claims To Recall
Former White House communications director Alyssa Farah Griffin, who previously alleged that Donald Trump once considered having a staffer “executed,” said Friday that former Attorney General Bill Barr has “danced” around the fact that this wasn’t a one-time incident.
“Kaitlan Collins … at CNN interviewed Bill Barr and asked about an anecdote I had shared about a meeting he and I were both in, in the Oval Office, where Trump straight-up said a staffer who leaked a story should be executed,” Griffin said on Mediaite’s “Press Club” podcast.
“And Bill Barr kind of danced [around] it and said, ‘I don’t recall that specific instance,’ but there were others where he talked about executing people,” she continued. “How [do] you rationalize that that is a person fit in sound judgment to be president of the United States?”
Griffin stepped down days before the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol riot and publicly demanded Trump resign after it. She’s since become a co-host on “The View,” where she said in December that Trump discussed executing a staffer in front of “a dozen other” people.
Barr, asked about the moment in in April, told Collins: “I remember him being very mad. … I actually don’t remember him saying ‘executing,’ but I wouldn’t dispute it.”
Griffin was communications director under Trump for only four months in 2020, but had also served his administration as press secretary for then-Vice President Mike Pence, and before that, for the Defense Department.
Griffin, who recently slammed Barr for using “lawyer-speak” in his answer about Trump, has since concluded that Republicans like Barr — who’ve decried the former president’s conduct as “crazy” and “reckless” but continue to support him in 2024 — are still afraid to defy him publicly.
“They’re reading the tea leaves,” she said Friday. “They know there’s a very real chance he’s going to be president again. And there’s not a lot of glory or victory in being right. But being on the wrong side of Trump, I think that’s ultimately what it comes down to.”
See more of her discussion below.
