Testifying before the House committee investigating the U.S. Capitol riot, Alyssa Farah Griffin, former communications director for disgraced ex-president Donald Trump accused her erstwhile colleagues of choosing to deliberately lie about the 2020 election in support of their careers.

According to Griffin, most senior staffers at the White House, the Trump campaign, and the Republican National Committee knew that their boss had failed in his reelection bid.

“They were just straight up lying to the public,” she told the committee in an April 15 interview, according to a transcript that the panel released on Thursday.

Griffin named several top Republican professionals as deliberately promoting falsehoods, particularly Kayleigh McEnany, who was serving as the White House Press Secretary at the time but subsequently landed a job as a co-host of “Outnumbered,” a daily political discussion show on Fox.

“Kayleigh is a liar and an opportunist,” Griffin told the committee. “She’s a smart woman. She’s a Harvard law grad. This is not an idiot. She knew we lost the election, but she made a calculation that she wanted to have a certain life post-Trump that required staying in his good graces. And that was more important to her than telling the truth to the American public.”

According to Griffin, McEnany decided that even though she knew Trump had lost, supporting his deception campaign to illegally remain in office would be good for her career:

“I think she saw that as a moment to kind of, like, if I do this one last public-facing stand for Trump, I’m going to be set. This is going to work out for me. And, I mean, it did. She got her FOX News gig. She — it worked out precisely how she’d always planned for it to, but she knew better.”

Griffin singled out several other high-level Republicans for deliberately choosing to perpetuate Trump’s lies.

“I think Ronna McDaniel knows that they lost,” she said, referring to the Republican National Committee Chair who is facing a challenge from two election deniers as she seeks another term at the helm of the party. More than two years after Trump’s defeat, McDaniel still has not admitted that there was no widespread fraud in the 2020 election.

The former Trump communications director said that Kellyanne Conway, who served as a senior counselor to the president, “danced around” Trump’s election lies. She also said that Jason Miller, a senior campaign adviser, knew that Trump had lost as well.

While many of Trump’s top advisers knew and privately admitted that he had failed, Griffin said that there were some “true believers” who actually believed the falsehoods, including Trump’s social media coordinator, Dan Scavino.

She also named Johnny McEntee, who was serving as director of the White House personnel office.

According to Griffin’s testimony, McEntee told Trump White House staffers and his political appointees in the executive branch that they would be “immediately” fired if they were discovered to be looking for a new job.

“It was meant to put fear into staff who weren't being loyal and staying with the president,” Griffin said.

Since leaving the Trump administration, McEntee founded The Right Stuff, a dating app for Republicans which has struggled to attract members.

TYT National Correspondent Matthew Sheffield reports about politics, media, and technology. You can follow him on Twitter or on Mastodon.