The 1/6 Committee made a special point in their executive summary to note that Kayleigh McEnany seemed to be testifying from talking points and was evasive.
According to the 1/6 Committee report’s executive summary:
Kayleigh McEnany was President Trump’s Press Secretary on January 6th. Her
deposition was taken early in the investigation. McEnany seemed to acknowledge that President Trump: (1) should have instructed his violent supporters to leave the Capitol earlier than he ultimately did on January 6th;
(2) should have respected the rulings of the courts; and (3) was wrong to publicly allege that Dominion voting machines stole the election. But
a segment of McEnany’s testimony seemed evasive, as if she was testifying from preprepared talking points. In multiple instances, McEnany’s testimony did not seem nearly as forthright as that of her press office staff, who testified about what McEnany said.
For example, McEnany disputed suggestions that President Trump was resistant to condemning the violence and urging the crowd at the Capitol to act peacefully when they crafted his tweet at 2:38 p.m. on January 6th.
Yet one of her deputies, Sarah Matthews, told the Select Committee that McEnany informed her otherwise: that McEnany and other advisors in the dining room with President Trump persuaded him to send the tweet, but that
“… she said that he did not want to put that in and that they went through different phrasing of that, of the mention of peace, in order to get him to agree to include it, and that it was Ivanka Trump who came up with ‘stay peaceful’ and that he agreed to that phrasing to include in the tweet, but he was initially resistant to mentioning peace of any sort.” When the Select Committee asked “Did Ms. McEnany describe in any way how resistant the President was to including something about being peaceful,”
Matthews answered: “Just that he didn’t want to include it, but they got him to agree on the phrasing ‘stay peaceful.’”
The Committee invites the public to compare McEnany’s testimony with the
testimony of Pat Cipollone, Sarah Matthews, Judd Deere, and others.
For More Stories Like This Get Our Newsletter:
House Republicans are going to struggle to harm the credibility of the 1/6 Committee report because the committee has so many witnesses and was able to confirm its findings.
People like McEnany thought that they could go before the committee and be evasive, which is a form of lying, but the committee knew so much and was well prepared that they were able to call her out in the executive summary.
The criminal referrals are bad news for everyone associated with the Trump White House, and if the summary is any indication, those who tried to be deceptive to the committee are also going to have a black mark by their names in the historical record.
Jason is the managing editor. He is also a White House Press Pool and a Congressional correspondent for PoliticusUSA. Jason has a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science. His graduate work focused on public policy, with a specialization in social reform movements.
Awards and Professional Memberships
Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association