Speaker 1: Donald Trump knew that he lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden and admitted as much
to a White House aide in November of 2020. This actually could have implications having to do with
whether he's going to get charged as a result of the January 6th hearings or in that investigation
that's going on currently in Georgia, because it goes to the former president's intent, which is an
important element if you're trying to show that he was willingly deceiving the American people.
The aide is Alissa Faith Griffin, who worked as the White House director of strategic
communications. She went on CNN's State of the Union with Dana Bash and said the following.
Speaker 3: One of the questions that we've been asking since these hearings started
is whether or not the committee can prove intent, whether the president intentionally
tried to overturn the election knowing that he actually lost. He told you in November of 2020
that he lost when you were working in the White House, he admitted, he blurted out,
watching Joe Biden on TV, Can you believe I lost to this guy? And he actually admitted in
a press conference when he was speaking to the about coronavirus in the press briefing room,
he actually flipped and kind of admitted that Joe Biden won. I think intent is going to be hard.
I'm not of the mind that this is going to take down Donald Trump in a legal sort of way. But I
do think it's going to inform the public about a man who lost and couldn't do what we've done for
the entirety of our history, which is, you know, allow a peaceful transition of power and allow
who the voters elected to step into to office. Speaker 1: Can you believe I lost the election
to this guy is allegedly the quote and as loss Faith Griffin and Dana Bash points out,
you have a much stronger case of criminal intent. If Trump is privately accepting the fact that
he lost the election fairly and squarely, while at the same time going out in public and saying
that it was rigged and it was stolen from him and all of these things. But there's a couple
of reasons why I don't think that this quote in this account make it a slam dunk case by any means
that Trump had any sort of criminal intent. For one, you're relying on the word of a former aide,
which, although I'm sure she's credible and you could probably get her to cooperate with an
investigation and testify and all these different things. It's not on video. It's not like we have
the audio recording of Donald Trump saying this. And as far as we know, it's not corroborated by
other sources. So that's one. She referenced him admitting he lost in another instance during that
coronavirus press briefing. But it could have been one of those slip of the tongue type of things.
Like sometimes he would give this half hearted concession where he'd say something like a new
administration will soon be taking over, which is just sort of accepting the fact that someone else
is going to be taking over the role as president without accepting that he just lost the election
fairly. So it's a little bit different there. Number two, and I think this is more important.
I'm of the belief that as the election results were pouring in and Biden was declared the winner
a couple of days after the 2020 election. Trump. Knew that he lost and he knew that
he simply didn't get the votes that he needed to win. I don't think that initially he was actually
a believer in the voter fraud stuff that he was talking about. But then as the weeks and months
went on, my sense at least is that he actually did start to believe it. We suspect, without being the
ones to diagnose him or anything like that, that Donald Trump has narcissistic personality disorder
or something similar to it. So he was just unable to reconcile the facts that he lost because he
thinks so highly of himself. Right. It's this cognitive dissonance that he couldn't get beyond.
And so the way that he decided to deal with it was slowly but surely convincing himself that he
actually won the election and surrounding himself with people like Mike Lindell and Sidney Powell
and Rudy Giuliani and Michael Flynn, who were telling him that, oh, no, no, no, you won.
And he was eventually willing to suspend reality, suspend disbelief, and just put aside his better
judgment and accept it, because that went into the narrative that he was trying to arrive at at
the entire time, which is that actually he did win the election. That's my sense of it all. And if it
really is the case that Donald Trump operates in that way, it's going to be hard to show criminal
intent, because ultimately he really did believe the things that he was talking about. And that
makes it all the more difficult. So I do believe that what Elizabeth Griffin said is true. I also
suspect that that was early on in the process. And by now he's changed his mind and he really
does think that he won. We're going to be back with you after the break. Stay tuned, everyone.