Former Trump White House aide Alyssa Farah Griffen defied orders to keep Fauci, Birx off TV
Another ex-Trump official accuses her of helping create the 'Fauci media monster'
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}Alyssa Farah Griffen admitted in congressional testimony that during her time as a White House aide she would "work around" orders from President Trump and others who wanted to limit television and media appearances of Drs. Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx.
Farah, who once served as communications director for the House Freedom Caucus, the Department of Defense, and eventually, White House Strategic Communications Director under President Trump, testified to the House Select Committee to Investigate January 6th she would "work around" orders from senior advisors Kellyanne Conway, Hope Hicks, and even Trump himself to take doctors Fauci and Birx off-air as part of the White House’s response to the coronavirus pandemic.
Farah, who now co-hosts The View, claimed that she had to end-run signals from Trump's 2020 re-election campaign, which she claimed wanted to talk about COVID-19 less since it wasn’t "driving home a message" for Trump’s reelection.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}"And so I had to kind of work around that," Farah said. "One of my solutions was I would put the doctors on regional television because no one would notice, and I would just literally put, like, Dr. Birx in this studio that we had and she would do like 4 hours of regional TV interviews in places that were having big outbreaks.
Alyssa Farah Griffin says she can't get a word in on "The View." (Screenshot/ABC/TheView)
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"And at one point Kellyanne Conway told me, ‘Do not put the’ — she and Hope cornered me in the Oval in front of the President and said, ‘Alyssa, keeps putting the doctors on TV. It’s driving down the numbers. It’s scaring people over COVID. You need to tell her not to have the doctors on.’ And so the President told me point-blank to not have them on TV anymore.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}"So I got with Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx, who I’m very close with and remain close with, and said we’re going to work around this, give me a little bit more time. And I went with the regional media strategy. And I would just start interspersing them back on national media, and I’d get yelled at by Kellyanne and others," Farah said
The transcript of Farah's testimony was released this week among a tranche of transcripts from interviews conducted by the House Jan. 6 committee.
A former senior Trump official commented on Farah's testimony to Fox News Digital: "It's remarkable she appears to be boasting she was somewhat responsible for creating the Fauci media monster – a disaster.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}A former senior Trump commented on Farah's testimony to Fox News Digital: "It's remarkable she appears to be boasting she was somewhat responsible for creating the Fauci media monster – a disaster." (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)
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"What she leaves out is that the White House media strategy had become a confusing mess – substituting advisors as the leader responsible for making difficult decisions that would significantly impact the trajectory of the nation," the person said, adding that "only a duly elected president has been charged with that responsibility because a president has to incorporate a myriad of factors into decisions that will affect the wellbeing of a nation. Medical advice is only one aspect to that."
Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, is a central figure in a GOP lawsuit against the Biden administration allege that the government colluded with Big Tech to control communication about COVID-19, including the theory that the virus leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China. (Ting Shen/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
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{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}Since 2020, Fauci has participated in over 300 television interviews and other media events. Recently, he has been a central figure in a lawsuit from GOP attorneys general Jeff Landry and Eric Schmitt against the Biden administration, in which the duo allege that the government colluded with Big Tech to control communication about COVID-19, including the theory that the virus leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China.
"Defendant Dr. Anthony Fauci, a senior federal government official, coordinating with others, orchestrated a campaign to discredit the lab-leak hypothesis in early 2020," Landry and Schmitt said in their brief. "As director of [the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases], Dr. Fauci had funded risky 'gain-of-function' research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology through intermediaries such as EcoHealth Alliance, headed by Dr. Peter Daszak."
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}The nation's top doctor is set to retire on December 31.