WASHINGTON — Before Sarah Matthews, a former deputy White House press secretary, even opened her mouth to testify Thursday before the select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol, the House Republican Conference attacked her on Twitter as a “liar” and a “pawn” of Democrats.
The group did not mention the man seated beside her, Matthew Pottinger, a former deputy national security adviser, who was also there to issue a scathing indictment of President Donald Trump’s behavior on the day of the riot. Nor did Trump himself mention Pottinger when he lashed out hours later with a statement calling Matthews a fame-seeker who was “clearly lying.”
The contrast highlighted how, in a series of revelatory hearings that have focused on issues of democracy, the rule of law and the peaceful transfer of power, another, less-discussed theme has emerged: the gender dynamics that have been a potent undercurrent.
In the course of exposing Trump’s elaborate effort to overturn the 2020 election, the House committee has relied on the accounts of several women who came forward to publicly tell their stories. Their statements, and the attacks that ensued, laid bare how women often still pay a higher price than men for speaking up.
FILE – Vice Chair Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., listens as the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol holds a hearing at the Capitol in Washington, June 16, 2022. The Jan. 6 congressional hearings have paused, at least for now, and Washington is taking stock of what was learned about the actions of Donald Trump and associates surrounding the Capitol attack. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File)
Sarah Matthews, former White House deputy press secretary, listens as the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol holds a hearing at the Capitol in Washington, Thursday, July 21, 2022. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)
Sarah Matthews, former White House deputy press secretary, testifies as the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol holds a hearing at the Capitol in Washington, Thursday, July 21, 2022. Some of what the House Jan. 6 committee has revealed over the last six weeks about the Capitol insurrection and former President Donald Trump’s actions in the weeks beforehand has been new. And some of it has just become more vivid, thanks to the panel’s interviews of more than 1,000 witnesses. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)
FILE – Wandrea “Shaye” Moss, a former Georgia election worker, testifies as her mother Ruby Freeman listens at right, as the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol holds a hearing at the Capitol in Washington, June 21, 2022. Some of what the House Jan. 6 committee has revealed over the last six weeks about the Capitol insurrection and former President Donald Trump’s actions in the weeks beforehand has been new. And some of it has just become more vivid, thanks to the panel’s interviews of more than 1,000 witnesses. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin, File)
FILE – Rusty Bowers, Arizona state House Speaker, testifies as the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol holds a hearing at the Capitol in Washington, June 21, 2022. Some of what the House Jan. 6 committee has revealed over the last six weeks about the Capitol insurrection and former President Donald Trump’s actions in the weeks beforehand has been new. And some of it has just become more vivid, thanks to the panel’s interviews of more than 1,000 witnesses. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin, File)
FILE U.S. Capitol Police officer Caroline Edwards testifies as the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol holds its first public hearing to reveal the findings of a year-long investigation, on Capitol Hill in Washington, June 9, 2022. Some of what the House Jan. 6 committee has revealed over the last six weeks about the Capitol insurrection and former President Donald Trump’s actions in the weeks beforehand has been new. And some of it has just become more vivid, thanks to the panel’s interviews of more than 1,000 witnesses. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik, File)
Sarah Matthews, former White House deputy press secretary, arrives as the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol holds a hearing at the Capitol in Washington, Thursday, July 21, 2022. The Jan. 6 congressional hearings have paused, at least for now, and Washington is taking stock of what was learned about the actions of Donald Trump and associates surrounding the Capitol attack. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)
FILE – This exhibit from video released by the House Select Committee, shows Pat Cipollone, former White House counsel, during an interview displayed at a hearing by the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, July 12, 2022, on Capitol Hill in Washington. The Jan. 6 congressional hearings have paused, at least for now, and Washington is taking stock of what was learned about the actions of Donald Trump and associates surrounding the Capitol attack. (House Select Committee via AP)
FILE – Wandrea “Shaye” Moss, a former Georgia election worker, is comforted by her mother, Ruby Freeman, right, as the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol holds a hearing at the Capitol in Washington, June 21, 2022. The mother and daughter who were election workers in Georgia brought the sense of danger into stark relief. They testified they feared even to say their names in public after Trump wrongly accused them of voter fraud. The Jan. 6 congressional hearings have paused, at least for now, and Washington is taking stock of what was learned about the actions of Donald Trump and associates surrounding the Capitol attack. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin, File)
This exhibit from video released by the House Select Committee, shows a deposition by former White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, displayed at a hearing by the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, Thursday, July 21, 2022, on Capitol Hill in Washington. (House Select Committee via AP)
Sarah Matthews, former White House deputy press secretary, testifies as the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol holds a hearing at the Capitol in Washington, Thursday, July 21, 2022. Matt Pottinger, former deputy national security adviser, listens at left. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
Sarah Matthews, former White House deputy press secretary, testifies as the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol holds a hearing at the Capitol in Washington, Thursday, July 21, 2022. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
Sarah Matthews, former White House deputy press secretary, testifies as the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol holds a hearing at the Capitol in Washington, Thursday, July 21, 2022. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)
Matt Pottinger, former deputy national security adviser, testifies as the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol holds a hearing at the Capitol in Washington, Thursday, July 21, 2022. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)
Matt Pottinger, former deputy national security adviser, testifies as the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol holds a hearing at the Capitol in Washington, Thursday, July 21, 2022. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)
Matt Pottinger, former deputy national security adviser, testifies as the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol holds a hearing at the Capitol in Washington, Thursday, July 21, 2022. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)
Sarah Matthews, former White House deputy press secretary, is sworn in to testify as the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol holds a hearing at the Capitol in Washington, Thursday, July 21, 2022. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)
Matt Pottinger, former deputy national security adviser, is sworn in to testify as the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol holds a hearing at the Capitol in Washington, Thursday, July 21, 2022. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)
Stephen Ayres, who pleaded guilty last in June 2022 to disorderly and disruptive conduct in a restricted building, testifies as the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol holds a hearing at the Capitol in Washington, Tuesday, July 12, 2022. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
Jason Van Tatenhove, an ally of Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes, listens as the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol holds a hearing at the Capitol in Washington, Tuesday, July 12, 2022. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
This exhibit from video released by the House Select Committee, shows Jody Williams, former owner of TheDonald.win, during an deposition displayed at a hearing by the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, Tuesday, July 12, 2022, on Capitol Hill in Washington. (House Select Committee via AP)
This exhibit from video released by the House Select Committee, shows a deposition with Kellye SoRelle, Oath Keepers general counsel, displayed at a hearing by the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, Tuesday, July 12, 2022, on Capitol Hill in Washington. (House Select Committee via AP)
This exhibit from video released by the House Select Committee, shows Stephen Miller, former Trump senior adviser, during an interview displayed at a hearing by the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, Tuesday, July 12, 2022, on Capitol Hill in Washington. (House Select Committee via AP)
This exhibit from video released by the House Select Committee, shows Ivanka Trump, former White House senior adviser, during an interview displayed at a hearing by the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, Tuesday, July 12, 2022, on Capitol Hill in Washington. (House Select Committee via AP)
This exhibit from video released by the House Select Committee, shows Sidney Powell during a deposition displayed at a hearing by the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, Tuesday, July 12, 2022, on Capitol Hill in Washington. (House Select Committee via AP)
Stephen Ayres, who pleaded guilty last in June 2022 to disorderly and disruptive conduct in a restricted building, shakes hands with Washington Metropolitan Police Department officer Daniel Hodges as the hearing with House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol ends at the Capitol in Washington, Tuesday, July 12, 2022. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
Jason Van Tatenhove, a former ally of Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes, testifies as the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol holds a hearing at the Capitol in Washington, Tuesday, July 12, 2022. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
Stephen Ayres, who pleaded guilty last in June 2022 to disorderly and disruptive conduct in a restricted building, testifies as the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol holds a hearing at the Capitol in Washington, Tuesday, July 12, 2022. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
FILE- Cassidy Hutchinson, former aide to Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, testifies about how former President Donald Trump reacted in his vehicle after being told he was not able to go to the Capitol from the Ellipse on Jan. 6, as the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol continues to reveal its findings of a year-long investigation, at the Capitol in Washington, Tuesday, June 28, 2022. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin, File)
FILE – Brad Raffensperger, Georgia Secretary of State, testifies as the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol continues to reveal its findings of a year-long investigation, at the Capitol in Washington, Tuesday, June 21, 2022. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin, File)
FILE – In this image from video released by the House Select Committee, Rudy Giuliani speaks with the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, that was displayed at the hearing Tuesday, June 21, 2022, on Capitol Hill in Washington. (House Select Committee via AP, File)
Pat Cipollone, the former White House counsel under President Donald Trump, walks to a conference room for a break from an interview room in the Ford House Office Building while answering questions from investigators with the Jan. 6 Select Committee, on Capitol Hill in Washington, Friday, July 8, 2022. (AP Photo/Gemunu Amarasinghe)
Ruby Freeman, right, comforts her daughter after bringing her a ginger mint, as Wandrea “Shaye” Moss, left, a former Georgia election worker, testifies to the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, as it continues to reveal its findings of a year-long investigation, at the Capitol in Washington, Tuesday, June 21, 2022. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
This exhibit from video released by the House Select Committee, shows an interview with Cassidy Hutchinson, former aide to Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, displayed at a hearing by the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, Tuesday, June 28, 2022, on Capitol Hill in Washington. (House Select Committee via AP)
Cassidy Hutchinson, former aide to Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, testifies as the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol holds a hearing at the Capitol in Washington, Tuesday, June 28, 2022. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
Jeffrey Rosen, former acting Attorney General, testifies as the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol continues to reveal its findings of a year-long investigation, at the Capitol in Washington, Thursday, June 23, 2022. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
Steven Engel, former Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel, is sworn in to testify as the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol continues to reveal its findings of a year-long investigation, at the Capitol in Washington, Thursday, June 23, 2022. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
Richard Donoghue, former acting Deputy Attorney General, is sworn in to testify as the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol continues to reveal its findings of a year-long investigation, at the Capitol in Washington, Thursday, June 23, 2022. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., vice chair of the panel — who herself has suffered heavy consequences for her insistence on publicly condemning Trump’s conduct — has been explicit about the role of gender in the proceedings. She has positioned herself as the champion of the women who have agreed to testify in person, comparing them favorably with the many men who have refused to do so.
At the committee’s prime-time hearing Thursday, Cheney wore a white jacket, the color of the women’s suffrage movement. She invoked Margaret Thatcher, the first female prime minister of Britain, and the fight by American women to secure the right to vote as she described the women who had publicly appeared during the panel’s investigation as “an inspiration to American women and American girls.”
She was referring to Matthews as well as Cassidy Hutchinson, another White House aide who appeared at one of the committee’s hearings; Caroline Edwards, a Capitol Police officer who testified about how she was assaulted by the rioters, sustained a concussion and continued to fight them off; and Wandrea Moss and her mother, Ruby Freeman, election workers from Georgia who told the panel about how they endured harassment and death threats after Trump named them in a false conspiracy theory about voter fraud.
The result has been that as the committee unfurls the story of the Jan. 6 attack — playing footage of a mostly male crowd laying waste to the Capitol in Trump’s name, with the president looking on supportively from the West Wing — many of the witnesses who have emerged most prominently have been women, with Cheney as their defender.
It is a notable strategy by Cheney, a tough and hawkish conservative who throughout her career has worked to avoid being viewed through the lens of gender.
It comes as the Republican Party has labored to diversify and expand its appeal among female voters, a group that polls showed was a weak spot for Trump in 2020 and has only drifted from him since. A recent New York Times/Siena College poll found that 6 in 10 women believed Trump’s actions after the 2020 election threatened democracy, while men were almost evenly split, with 48% holding that view and 45% saying he was just exercising his rights.
Cheney was the highest-ranking Republican woman on Capitol Hill last year when she broke with her party after the riot and called out Trump and his election lies, voting to impeach him for incitement of insurrection. Within months, she had been ousted as the No. 3 Republican in the House, and she is now at risk of losing her seat in Wyoming as she faces a challenging primary election next month against a Trump-endorsed opponent.
It was difficult not to hear some parallels when Cheney described on Thursday how Hutchinson, the 26-year-old former White House aide who became a critical public witness, knowingly exposed herself to harsh criticism from former colleagues. Cheney said that Hutchinson “knew all along that she would be attacked by President Trump and by the 50-, 60- and 70-year-old men who hide themselves behind executive privilege.”
“But like our witnesses today, she has courage and she did it anyway,” she added.
After Hutchinson’s testimony, Trump dismissed her in an interview with Newsmax as “this girl” who was making up stories. “She’s got serious problems,” he said. “Mental problems.”
Amanda Carpenter, a former adviser to Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., said it was notable to see a conservative woman drawing attention to the gender dynamic.
“I know how hard it is for these women under these circumstances,” Carpenter said. “I imagine it means a lot to the women being targeted. It means a lot to me just watching it.”
The Twitter attack by the House Republican Conference on Matthews, who works as a House Republican aide, was quickly deleted. But Trump’s targeting of her and Hutchinson was in line with how the former president has often publicly treated women who challenge him, criticizing them in personal terms intended to call into question their credibility, sanity and self-worth.
Trump’s allies like to describe him as an equal-opportunity counterpuncher who would attack anyone who crossed him. But over the years, he has singled out female antagonists with particular viciousness, including television personalities Mika Brzezinski and Megyn Kelly, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan and Mary Barra, CEO of General Motors. His allies, many of them seeking his approval, have mimicked his behavior.
In the case of Hutchinson, a person close to her said, stories have been shopped to Trump-friendly media outlets smearing her personally.
Garrett Ziegler, a junior aide in Trump’s White House, went on a misogynistic rant during a livestream this past week after sitting for an interview with the Jan. 6 committee in which he repeatedly refused to answer questions. In the rant, he used sexist slurs against his former female colleagues who have cooperated with the inquiry.
“Pat Cipollone, Bill Barr, Marc Short, they’re saying the same thing, yet you attack the young women,” said former Rep. Barbara Comstock of Virginia, a Republican whom Trump in the past branded as a “RINO loser,” for Republican in name only.
Comstock was referring to the former White House counsel, the former attorney general and the former chief of staff to Vice President Mike Pence — all of whom gave closed-door testimony to the committee that painted Trump in an unflattering light.
“This is a pattern,” said Comstock, who is close to Cheney. “The president does this, and this is intentional.”
Some of the male witnesses have also suffered professional consequences and public rebukes for their candor. Rusty Bowers, the Arizona House speaker and a Republican, was censured by his state’s Republican Party after his emotional testimony before the Jan. 6 committee. Bowers, who is running for reelection, told NBC News that it would take “a miracle” for him to survive politically.
And Barr, who as attorney general directly told Trump that his claims of election fraud had no merit, echoed the sentiment about the realities of cooperation.
“I get a lot of vitriol from the right,” Barr said.
Yet while male witnesses have received some criticism from the right — in Cipollone’s case, Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., tweeted that he should “grow a spine & go on record” — the attacks have not been at the same volume or intensity, or of the same degree of personal nastiness, as those against Hutchinson in particular.
Trump’s allies insist they have substantive concerns about what Hutchinson has told the committee. They have raised specific challenges on matters of fact in her testimony, homing in on a discrepancy between her account and that of Eric Herschmann, a former White House lawyer. Each has claimed authorship of a handwritten note displayed at one of the hearings that provided instructions for what the president could have told rioters Jan. 6.
There has also been an effort to undermine the veracity of some of the most explosive parts of Hutchinson’s testimony. Secret Service officials, who spoke to reporters on the condition of anonymity, disputed a scene that Hutchinson said she had been told about in which Trump was said to have grabbed a Secret Service agent and lunged for the steering wheel of the SUV he was riding in as he demanded to be driven to the Capitol on Jan. 6.
But the swiftness of the Twitter attack on Matthews was notable given that it came from her own colleagues. The Twitter account for the House Republican Conference that singled her out is run by two former Trump campaign aides.
Under the stewardship of Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York, who replaced Cheney as the No. 3 House Republican, the Twitter account has taken on an aggressive tone throughout the hearings — intended to please the proverbial “audience of one.”
