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Of course the sentence could have been clearer. It's sloppy conversational English relying on the reader to fill in part of the sentence which accidentally ended up having a more straightforward meaning that the writer did not intend, something akin to a garden-path sentence. If there was no context your interpretation would have been the more intuitive one. But there is context, and it's very unlikely that a Twitter employee would claim the rioters were all false flaggers rather than Trump voters, or argue it that particular way if he did. And I think that not only does my reading of it match what he meant, it matches how the other Twitter employees in the conversation interpreted it, how the reporters posting the conversation interpreted it, and how the people responding to you in this thread are interpreting it. So while it's a bit interesting that your reading of it is also possible based on the text it doesn't seem particularly significant.
Your interpretation still has the same problem for me. To quote your rephrasing:
This rephrasing still implies that the rioters are not people who voted for him.
I think I've honed in further on our point of disagreement. You think that I'm implying this person intended to exclude the rioters. I can see why you thought that (ironically enough, it's the same issue between me and this staffer - how something is read vs. intentions). I'll edit my post to make this clearer, thanks.
No, it says he is not referring to that set of people. Let us say that someone writes an article saying "email is an insecure medium, since it is transmitted in plain text". Someone writes a headline about it saying "Computer researcher says Yahoo Mail is insecure". Even though Yahoo Mail is a subset of email, he was not referring to it, he was referring to a broader category that it happens to be a subset of.
I'm not sure what our disagreement is over. I would agree that the intention is not to be specifically about Yahoo Mail (analogously, the staffer might not have thought Trump was referring only to the rioting supporters), but a plain-text reading could be interpreted my way.
If it's the significance of my interpretation, then I would agree with your previous point that my interpretation is probably not that important. I just found it odd, that's all.
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