#White House attacks ‘fired’ pandemic aide Olivia Troye

The White House on Tuesday unloaded on former coronavirus task force staffer Olivia Troye, saying the recently declared opponent of President Trump was “fired” after “complaining” about her workload.

Speaking from the briefing room podium, White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany and Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg, national security adviser to Vice President Mike Pence, trashed Troye almost a week after she cut an ad for Republican Voters Against Trump.

Troye worked as an aide to the COVID-19 task force and criticized Trump’s handling of the pandemic, saying, “If the president had taken this virus seriously, or if he had actually made an effort to tell how serious it was, he would have slowed the virus spread, he would have saved lives.”

Troye also claimed she heard Trump say in private that the virus was a “good thing” because it would allow him to avoid hand shakes with “disgusting people.”

“I fired her,” said Kellogg, because “her performance had started to drop after six months working on the task force as a backbencher.”

“She was responsible for coordinating meetings, bringing people together and when the performance level dropped off, I went to the vice president of the United States and recommended she leave. I’m the one that escorted her off the compound,” he said of her ouster in August.

Kellogg said he attended task force meetings and “what she has said, I have never heard.”

“I heard the comments made about the people we have lost. Do not think for a minute that that has not bothered us, it does. Because we know on the task force several of those people, scores are those people died without relatives because they couldn’t get in because of COVID. We know that,” Kellogg said.

“That bothers us every single day. Don’t think it doesn’t. And it bothers the president. And the president’s been very confident that we’re going to get to a solution. You want a president, you want a leader that displays confidence.”

Troye quickly rejected Kellogg’s account in a statement denying that she was fired.

“It’s sad that Gen. Kellogg is telling a bald faced lie to protect the president,” Troye said. “I resigned on my own accord [and] was asked to stay. He never escorted me out. He knows this. I wrote a note thanking all the colleagues who had worked so hard with me in spite of POTUS [and] I stand by that.”

Troye said she received a commemorative token from Kellogg bearing his name as a departing gift and that “[t]his gift is not the action of someone who did what Kellogg claims he did.”

At the briefing, McEnany denounced Troye and another member of the pro-Joe Biden group, former Department of Homeland Security Chief of Staff Miles Taylor, who now works at Google and appears on CNN.

“These are not profiles in courage, but these are profiles in cowardice,” McEnany said, citing departure letters from the two former officials.

“Less than two months ago, now-disgruntled former detailee Olivia Troye proudly declared that she was serving in the Trump administration and it had been ‘the honor of her life.’ Troye said, ‘I have witnessed firsthand how dedicated and committed all of you have been to doing the right thing.’ She wrote that just about a month and a half ago,” McEnany said.

“Troye failed to speak up and she struggled to keep up because she was constantly complaining about how exhausted and overwhelmed she was coordinating conference calls and scheduling meetings. Troye’s detail was cut short and now she’s cutting commercials for a fringe club of ‘never Trumpers’ who are desperate for relevancy, and the price of admission to this club is fabricated smears and flat-out lies against President Trump.”

McEnany said Taylor “proudly posed for a photo with the president smiling ear to ear” and “wrote that ‘it was the honor of his lifetime to serve as DHS chief of staff.’”

“Desperate to please his new Silicon Valley friends, Miles made up lies against President Trump to fit in. He can now rest easy at Google having earned his anti-Trump credentials and the approval of his big tech peers,” she said.

Taylor told The Post he’s not opposed to Trump because of his new job.

“My current job — from which I’ve decided to take several months of unpaid leave — has precisely nothing to do with my speaking out against the president, and it has everything to do with what I witnessed firsthand inside a disastrous administration,” Taylor said. “I spent years pushing back internally against the president’s ill-advised and sometimes potentially unlawful behavior, and I’m pleased to see that others are speaking up about it, too.”