WASHINGTON (AP) — The House Jan. 6 committee held a surprise hearing Tuesday delivering alarming new testimony about Donald Trump’s angry, defiant and vulgar actions as he ignored repeated warnings against summoning the mob to the Capitol and then refused to intervene to stop the deadly violence as rioters laid siege.
(Click below to watch a replay of the hearing)
Witness Cassidy Hutchinson, a lesser-known White House aide, rebuffed Trump’s team warnings against testifying and provided first-hand knowledge of what she saw and heard in the run-up to the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection, a proximity to power that gives stunning new details in the panel’s year-long investigation.
With calm, detailed recollections, Hutchinson testified about a defiant Trump who knew there were guns and other weapons in the rally crowd at the White House, sent his supporters to the Capitol anyway and tried unsuccessfully to physically pry the steering wheel from his presidential limousine driver so he could join them.
Before joining the White House, Hutchinson had worked in some of the most conservative Republican offices on Capitol Hill. She was hired as special assistant to the president and promoted up to Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows.
Here are highlights from the sixth hearing.
ANGRY, DEFIANT, VULGAR TRUMP
Trump was angry and defiant on the morning of Jan. 6, as he assessed the size of the crowd for his rally in front of the White House, upset that not everyone who had answered his summons to come to Washington could get in to see him because of the security lines.
Told that guns, knives and other weapons were being confiscated from the security screenings, Trump didn’t care. “They’re not here to hurt me,” the president said. He wanted to take away the magnetometer stations to allow more people inside the grounds, regardless of their weaponry.
“Take the effing mags away,” an agitated Trump barked at security moments before taking the stage, Hutchinson recalled.
WHITE HOUSE LAWYERS WORRY OF CRIMES
Trump’s lawyers at the White House were trying to tamp down the president’s speech to the crowd he had summoned for his “Stop the Steal” rally on Jan. 6, and they were trying to stop his plans to go to the Capitol that day when Congress would be certifying the election results for Joe Biden’s victory.
Hutchinson testified that lawyer Eric Herschmann said it “would be foolish” to include some of the language the defeated president wanted to add to his speech — comments like fighting for Trump, or him telling the crowd “I’ll be there with you.” Herschmann warned such language shouldn’t be included for legal concerns and because of the optics it would portray.
That language ultimately stayed in the script as Trump rallied the crowd to “fight like hell” and promised he would join them at the Capitol.
Days before Jan. 6, White House counsel Pat Cipollone suggested there were “serious legal concerns” if Trump went to the Capitol with the crowd, Hutchinson recalled.
“We need to make sure this doesn’t happen,” she recalled Cipollone saying in the run-up to the rally.
The morning of Jan. 6, Cipollone restated his concerns that if Trump did go to the Capitol to intervene in the certification of the election, “We’re going to get charged with every crime imaginable.”
Hutchinson then described what happened after the rally as Trump climbed into the presidential limousine, the “beast,” as it is called, as relayed to her later by Trump’s deputy chief of staff for operations.
Trump, inside the vehicle, tried to pry the steering wheel away from the driver, demanding to be taken to the Capitol.
PROXIMITY TO POWER, AND KETCHUP
The hearing opened with a calm, even-spoken Hutchinson explaining her job responsibilities advising Meadows, often handling his cell phones, as the committee showed an architectural rendering of the layout of the West Wing.
Hutchinson’s office was situated between the Oval Office on one side and Meadow’s office on the other. Hers was also next to that of the vice president’s staff.
She had an upfront view of conversations across the offices and beyond.
Hutchinson described fielding a desperate phone call as she stood backstage at Trump’s rally that day from House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy, who was upset that Trump had sent the crowd to the Capitol when she had promised they would not go.
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She also told of helping the White House staff mop up ketchup off the walls of the Oval Office dining room after Trump, learning that his attorney general, William Barr, told The Associated Press there was no fraud on a scale to tip the presidential election, apparently hurled a plate of food at the wall.
In one gripping scene Hutchinson recalled walking Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani out of the White House when he asked if she was “excited about the 6th.”
“We’re going to the Capitol, it’s going to be great, the president’s going to be there, he’s going to look powerful,” she recalled Giuliani saying.
When she returned inside and told Meadows of that conversation, he told her a lot was going on.
“Things might get real, real bad,” Meadows told her, she recalled.
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WASHINGTON (AP) — The House panel investigating the Capitol insurrection will hear testimony Tuesday from Cassidy Hutchinson, a top aide in Donald Trump’s White House who is a vital witness in the sweeping investigation into the Jan. 6, 2021 attack, a person familiar with the matter told The Associated Press.
The 25-year-old, who was a special assistant and aide to former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows, has already provided a trove of information to congressional investigators and sat for multiple interviews behind closed doors.
Her appearance has been cloaked in extraordinary secrecy and has raised expectations for new revelations in the nearly yearlong investigation. The committee announced the surprise hearing with only 24 hours’ notice, and Hutchison’s appearance was only confirmed to The Associated Press by a person familiar with the matter.
While it is unclear what new evidence she might provide Tuesday, Hutchinson’s testimony could tell a first-hand story of Trump’s pressure campaign, and how the former president responded after the violence began, more vividly than any other witness the committee has called in thus far.
In brief excerpts of testimony revealed in court filings, Hutchinson told the committee she was in the room for White House meetings where challenges to the election were debated and discussed, including with several Republican lawmakers. In one instance, Hutchinson described seeing Meadows incinerate documents after a meeting in his office with Rep. Scott Perry, R-Pa., Politico reported in May.
She also revealed that the White House counsel’s office cautioned against plans to enlist fake electors in swing states, including in meetings involving Meadows and Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani.
During her three separate depositions, Hutchinson also testified about her boss’ surprise trip to Georgia weeks after the election to oversee the audit of absentee ballot envelope signatures and ask questions about the process.
She also detailed how Jeffrey Clark — a top Justice Department official who championed Trump’s false claims of election fraud and whom the president contemplated naming as attorney general — was a “frequent presence” at the White House.
The plot to remove the then-acting attorney general, Jeffrey Rosen, unraveled during a Jan. 3, 2021, meeting in the Oval Office when other senior Justice Department officials warned Trump that they would resign if he followed through with his plan to replace Rosen with Clark.
The House panel has not explained why it abruptly scheduled the 1 p.m. hearing as lawmakers are away from Washington on a two-week recess. The committee had said last week that there would be no more hearings until July.
The precise subject of Tuesday’s hearing remained unclear, but the panel’s announcement Monday said it would be “to present recently obtained evidence and receive witness testimony.” A spokesman for the panel declined to elaborate and Hutchinson’s lawyer did not immediately respond to emails seeking comment.
The person familiar with the committee’s plans to call Hutchinson could not discuss the matter publicly and spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity.
The nine-member committee’s investigation has continued during the hearings, which started three weeks ago into the attack by Trump supporters. Among the evidence, the committee recently obtained footage of Trump and his inner circle taken both before and after Jan. 6 from British filmmaker Alex Holder.
Holder said last week that he had complied with a congressional subpoena to turn over all the footage he shot in the final weeks of Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign, including exclusive interviews with Trump, his children and then-Vice President Mike Pence.
Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, the panel’s Democratic chairman, told reporters last week that the committee was in possession of the footage and needed more time to go through the hours of video.
The panel has held five hearings so far, mostly laying out Trump’s pressure campaign on various institutions of power in the weeks leading up to the Jan. 6 joint session of Congress, when hundreds of the Republican’s supporters violently pushed past police, broke into the building and interrupted the certification of Democrat Joe Biden’s presidential election victory.
The committee has used the hearings to detail the pressure from Trump and his allies on Pence, on the states that were certifying Biden’s win, and on the Justice Department. The panel has used live interviews, video testimony of its private witness interviews and footage of the attack to detail what it has learned.
Lawmakers said last week that the two July hearings would focus on domestic extremists who breached the Capitol that day and on what Trump was doing as the violence unfolded.
Punchbowl News first reported that Hutchinson would be testifying.
John Dean, the former White House counsel to President Richard Nixon, also set the expectations high for Tuesday’s hearing. He tweeted: “The January 6 Committee is dealing with a very high historical standard in springing a surprise hearing and witness tomorrow.” Dean, who was the first administration official to testify that Nixon was directly involved in the Watergate coverup, pointed to the surprise testimony from Alex Butterfield, who testified to Nixon’s secret taping system, as “forever changing history.”
“If it is not really important information it’s going to hurt the credibility of this committee! Cancel now if you can’t match!” Dean continued.