In her testimony to the House January 6th Select Committee, former Trump White House comms staffer and current View co-host Alyssa Farah Griffin told investigators that suspected sex trafficker Matt Gaetz was probably the one person responsible for Trump’s tweets that former Republican Congressman and current MSNBC host Joe Scarborough had murdered his intern in 2001.

“This is anecdotal, but it will kind of capture it for you. I remember, not relevant to January 6th, but I’d heard Jim Jordan was in the West Wing and Matt Gaetz was with him, and I still had a good relationship with Jim at that point, so I decided to go and say hi to him. And I’m waiting outside of the Outer Oval with Gaetz and Jordan, and Kayleigh McEnany was with me. And Jim and I are just shooting shooting the crap. He was an old boss of mine. And Gaetz has this folder,” Griffin said.

“And I said, you know, what is that? And he pulls it out. It’s conspiracy theories about Joe Scarborough murdering his intern. And I said, Please do not bring that into the West Wing or to the Oval Office. We were literally outside of the Outer Oval. And just as I’m saying that I said, You cannot put that in front of the President, he he gets ushered in. And sure enough, within by the next morning, the former President is tweeting wild conspiracy theories about a cable news host, you know, allegedly murdering his intern,” she continued about the likely genesis of a particularly disgraceful and horrific Trump conspiracy theory tweet storm.

Trump had earlier brought it up in passing in a 2017 tweet, but it would appear that Gaetz stirred him to go hard on it in May 2020, right in the middle of the earlier stages of the pandemic, when thousands of Americans were getting sick and dying, this was where his mind was at.