Matthews testifies Trump tweet gave ‘green light’ to rioters

Sarah Matthews, the former deputy White House press secretary under President Trump who resigned hours after the Capitol riot, testified on Thursday that Trump’s tweet saying then-Vice President Mike Pence “didn’t have the courage” to reject the Electoral College vote on Jan. 6, 2021, gave “the green light” to rioters.

“It was obvious that the situation at the Capitol was violent and escalating quickly, and so I thought that the tweet about the vice president was the last thing that was needed in that moment, and I remember thinking that this was gonna be bad for him to tweet this because it was essentially him giving the green light to these people,” Matthews said at Thursday’s public hearing.

“Telling them that what they were doing at the steps of the Capitol and entering the Capitol was OK, that they were justified in their anger. And he shouldn’t have been doing that, he should’ve been telling these people to go home and to leave and to condemn the violence that we’re seeing,” she added.

Just before 2:30 p.m. on Jan. 6, Trump published a tweet criticizing Pence for not abiding by his request and rejecting the Electoral College vote for a number of states.

“Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify. USA demands the truth!” Trump wrote on Twitter.

Thursday’s hearing, the eighth the select committee has held this summer, focused on Trump’s inaction during the 187 minutes between him leaving the Ellipse following his speech and when he sent out a tweet urging his supporters to leave the Capitol.

Before Trump told his supporters to stop the violence, however, he sent out the tweet criticizing Pence.

Matthews on Thursday said she immediately thought the tweet about Pence “was the last thing that was needed at that moment,” arguing that it told the rioters “they were justified in their anger.”

The former deputy press secretary noted the strong effect Trump’s words have on his supporters, adding “so I think that in that moment for him to tweet out the message about Mike Pence it was him pouring gasoline on the fire and making it much worse.”

Matthew Pottinger, who served as deputy national security adviser to Trump and testified in-person alongside Matthews on Thursday, said he was “quite disturbed” by the tweet and “worried to see that the president was attacking Vice President Pence for doing his constitutional duty.”

Pottinger said he decided to resign from his post after reading Trump’s tweet criticizing Pence.

“The tweet looked to me like the opposite of what we really needed at that moment, which was a deescalation, and that’s why I had said earlier that it looked like fuel being poured on the fire,” Pottinger said.

“That was the moment that I decided that I was going to resign, that that would be my last day at the White House. I simply didn’t want to be associated with the events that were unfolding on the Capitol,” he added.

Former Trump White House counsel Pat Cipollone sounded a similar note, telling the committee in previous closed-door testimony that his reaction to the tweet was “that’s a terrible tweet,” adding “I disagreed with the sentiment and I thought it was wrong,” according to a clip presented Thursday.

And former White House deputy press secretary Judd Deere told the committee in prior testimony that Trump’s message on Twitter was “extremely unhelpful.”

“It wasn’t the message that we needed at that time. … The scenes at the U.S. Capitol were only getting worse at that point. This was not going to help that,” he said, adding that he was “certainly” concerned it could make matters worse.

The committee also played clips of testimony from former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson saying she was frustrated, disappointed and disgusted by the tweet, which she called “unpatriotic.”

-Updated at 9:43 p.m.