Multiple White House staffers resign following Trump supporters’ Capitol attack
“That legacy is gone,” one staffer said.
Four White House staffers have resigned from their positions in the aftermath of Trump supporters’ deadly insurrection yesterday (Jan. 6). The most recent is Trump’s Former White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney, who announced his resignation as the U.S. special envoy to Northern Ireland on Thursday morning (Jan. 7).
“I called [Secretary of State] Mike Pompeo last night to let him know I was resigning from that. I can’t do it; I can’t stay,” Mulvaney told CNBC. “… We didn’t sign up for what you saw last night.”
Mulvaney said that he wouldn’t be surprised if more of his colleagues “resign over the course of the next 24 to 48 hours.”
“Clearly [Trump] is not the same as he was eight months ago, and certainly the people advising him are not the same as they were eight months ago,” he said. “And that leads to a dangerous sort of combination as you saw yesterday.”
“The folks who spent time away from our families [and] put our careers on the line to go work for Donald Trump… we did have those successes to look back at, but now it will always be, ‘Oh yeah, you worked for the guy who tried to overtake the government,’” he continued. “That legacy is gone as of yesterday and that’s extraordinarily disappointing to those of us who work for him.”
On Wednesday, White House Deputy Press Secretary Sarah Matthews also resigned.
“As someone who worked in the halls of Congress I was deeply disturbed by what I saw today,” she told ABC News. “I’ll be stepping down from my role, effective immediately. Our nation needs a peaceful transfer of power.”
Two of Melania Trump’s staffers, including her Chief of Staff Stephanie Grisham, also announced they’d be leaving their positions.
Trump had encouraged his supporters to march to the Capitol, in what turned into a chaotic insurrection that left four people dead. In a tweeted video, Trump told the rioters to go home, but did not condemn their violence and continued to claim that he had won the election.
Congress was finally able to resume and affirmed Joe Biden as the winner of the presidential election early Thursday morning.