New Report Exposes CNN Contributor’s Dishonest Trump Flip-Flop

Alyssa Farah Griffin, who joined CNN after finishing her communications job in the Trump administration, has disavowed many of her pro-Trump positions. As Nate Hochman detailed in National Review and a Twitter thread on Thursday, though “[t]oday, she claims that she worked for Trump to ‘push back’ against his worst instincts … her past tells a different story.”

One of Griffin’s major flip-flops was her response to Jan. 6. Back in February 2021, Griffin said the country needed to “move on,” but just eight months later, she said we “absolutely shouldn’t.”

“I feel like we’re just glossing over January 6 and moving on,” Griffin said, “and we absolutely shouldn’t.”

“What changed?” Hochman asked. “For one thing, Farah was on the cusp of securing a CNN contributor contract, and was auditioning for Meghan McCain’s former spot on The View. Right around the same time, she began to emerge as an increasingly loud critic of the GOP.”

Griffin has also flipped on election fraud, as Hochman pointed out. She previously defended President Donald Trump’s “concerns about across the board mail-in voting w/o reason,” and even acknowledged concerns about Pennsylvania officials “putting their thumb on the scale,” plus “irregularities and fraud” and the potential for a “rigged” Georgia runoff. More recently, however, Griffin called election fraud the “Big Lie” and framed herself as “a Republican who has consistently said, ‘it was not stolen, we lost.’”

As Hochman said, Griffin’s more recent comments don’t line up with what she said about Trump in the past. She once described him as “a remarkable man” and “a strong leader” and said she was “smiling so wide because I was just excited to see him” the first time they met. More recently, Griffin said she didn’t “[drink] the Kool-Aid for five years” and that she “didn’t have any illusions about who the president was.”

“It’s increasingly difficult to find an issue where Farah *hasn’t* changed her position,” Hochman tweeted.

Griffin went from using Beto O’Rourke’s name as an insult to “talking politics backstage at The View” with him. She said Miles Taylor’s anonymous New York Times op-ed confirmed that “Never Trumpers” were “trying to thwart POTUS” but later joined him for an anti-Trump conference call. She went from praising Trump’s “leadership” on Covid to saying he “politicized the hell out of this virus.” She chalked up an accusation that Trump refused to condemn right-wing extremism to a “former disgruntled employee being ineffective at their job” and then said she had counseled him to “wake up every morning and condemn white supremacy.”

“Farah claimed that ‘at no point in my entire life was my goal to be on TV and be a talking head,’” Hochman tweeted. “But it’s hard to see her political transformation as anything other than an audition for the mainstream spotlight. She got the spotlight—but at what cost?”

“I haven’t stopped using my voice since [I resigned] to condemn [Trump’s] lies & unfitness for office” Griffin said in a response Twitter thread. “I remain a conservative who believes in limited federal government & a robust national defense. But when you’ve worked in the highest levels of government, you realize the problems that come to the Oval Office, or the office of the SecDef aren’t always as simple as something you can solve on purely partisan lines.”

Olivia Hajicek is an intern at The Federalist and a junior at Hillsdale College studying history and journalism. She has covered campus and city news as a reporter for The Hillsdale Collegian. You can reach her at [email protected].

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