Jan. 6 hearing Trump wanted armed mob to march to Capitol, sought to join, aide says

Former president Donald Trump has had some bad days recently, but perhaps none worse than Tuesday, when former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson delivered the most alarming testimony yet about his behavior during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

Her testimony before the House select committee’s Jan. 6 investigation probably left the former president more vulnerable legally, though ultimately that will be for the Department of Justice to decide. Equally important, it threatens to further weaken him politically, despite the hold he has retained on much of the Republican Party’s base. More Republicans will be asking themselves if this is the person they want as their nominee in 2024. Taken as a whole, it was devastating in the extreme.

Trump’s presidency and its aftermath — his actions in office and his perpetuation of the lie that the 2020 election was rife with fraud and therefore stolen — have left many Americans without the ability to be shocked or surprised, whether through fatigue or mere disinterest. In measured and careful language, Hutchinson punctured that indifference.

Read the full analysis here.

The surprise testimony of former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson to the Jan. 6 committee offered damaging anecdotes about former president Donald Trump — including some allegations that legal experts said could factor into the Justice Department’s sprawling criminal investigation of the events before, during and after the Capitol riot.

David Laufman, a former senior Justice Department lawyer now in private practice, said Hutchinson’s testimony “contained credible nuggets of information that would support” prosecutors viewing Trump as an investigative target in a seditious conspiracy investigation. Former federal prosecutor Renato Mariotti said he thought Hutchinson’s information would more likely support an investigation into whether Trump could be charged with incitement to violence.

There was no immediate corroboration for Hutchinson’s descriptions of conversations involving Trump or senior aides and advisers. Trump, in a statement, denied her version of events.

For months, Attorney General Merrick Garland has refused to say whether Jan. 6 prosecutors are eyeing Trump’s conduct as he and close allies tried to overturn President Biden’s election victory. But in recent days, federal agents have served search warrants and subpoenas, and conducted interviews around the country, that show the investigation is moving closer to Trump’s inner circle.

Hutchinson’s account, Laufman said, could take them a step further.

Former president Donald Trump’s supporters online sought to undercut stunning testimony Tuesday to the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, seeking to belittle Cassidy Hutchinson’s claims that she was told Trump had lunged for the steering wheel of his vehicle and attempted to throttle a member of his security detail when they refused to take him to the Capitol as rioters were besieging the building.

In sworn testimony, Hutchinson said she heard of the physical altercation from Tony Ornato, a Secret Service agent who served as the White House deputy chief of staff for operations. She said he told the story in front of Bobby Engel, the head of Trump’s security detail, who Trump reportedly lunged at during the altercation. Neither man has testified.

“I’m the f-ing president,” she said Ornato quoted the president shouting as they drove him to the White House and away from the Capitol.

Trump supporters quickly snapped back online that they’d found an obvious sign she was lying: The presidential limousine, known as “the Beast,” is so heavily fortified that they argued it’d be “physically impossible” for Trump to cross from the back cabin to the driver’s seat.

But Trump was not riding in the limousine that day; videos show he actually rode in a Secret Service SUV, where the seats are closer together.

And even if he had ridden in the Beast, the rear and front seats have a glass window the president can lower whenever he’d like — a detail noted even in the same infographic that Trump supporters shared as proof that Hutchinson’s story couldn’t be right.

Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony before the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack at the Capitol began with an articulation of her Republican bona fides.

“Today’s witness, Ms. Cassidy Hutchinson, is another Republican and another former member of President Trump’s White House staff,” Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) explained at the beginning of the hearing. “Certain of us in the House of Representatives recall Ms. Hutchinson once worked for House Republican Whip Steve Scalise, but she is also a familiar face on Capitol Hill because she held a prominent role in the White House Legislative Affairs Office and later was the principal aide to President Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows.”

The unsubtle point? This is not some left-wing anti-Trump activist. It is, instead, someone who was hired by Donald Trump’s administration after having made a name for herself working for other prominent members of his party. She is, as Cheney put it, “another Republican” — one of a string of members of his party who are testifying under oath against him.

As Trump and his political boosters — opining unburdened by a legal obligation to tell the truth — disparage Hutchinson and the other witnesses as fake or impure, consider who the House committee has interviewed in person during its first five hearings.

In a statement after Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony, her lawyers Jody Hunt and William Jordan said Hutchinson was proud of her government service and believed it was her duty to testify before the Jan. 6 committee.

“Ms. Hutchinson is justifiably proud of her service to the country as a Special Assistant to the President. While she did not seek out the attention accompanying her testimony today, she believes that it was her duty and responsibility to provide the Committee with her truthful and candid observations of the events surrounding January 6. Ms. Hutchinson believes that January 6 was a horrific day for the country, and it is vital to the future of our democracy that it not be repeated,” the lawyers said.

The congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection held a surprise hearing Tuesday that featured a key witness: Cassidy Hutchinson, who was a top aide to former president Donald Trump’s last chief of staff, Mark Meadows.

The jaw-dropping moments were almost too many to count, but here are a handful of the standouts:

• Trump knew his supporters had weapons — and encouraged them to march on the Capitol. And he tried to go, too.
• Trump tried to wrestle his Secret Security agent to go to the Capitol.
• Trump threw dishes — regularly.
• Trump didn’t want to call off the rioters.

Read the full analysis here.

Cassidy Hutchinson, an aide to former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, gave stunning testimony Tuesday to the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

After President Donald Trump’s speech at the Ellipse that day, he lunged at a Secret Service agent who refused to take him to the Capitol, she testified. She was told of the incident by Anthony Ornato, a senior Secret Service official, minutes after it happened in the presence of the agent Trump allegedly attacked, who appeared to be shaken up, she testified.

The Twitter account for Republican members of the House Judiciary Committee immediately dismissed Hutchinson’s testimony as hearsay.

But if the agent in question, Robert Engel, were called to testify and confirmed the story, it could no longer be called hearsay.

So can a Secret Service agent be subpoenaed?

Well, there’s precedent. In 1998, three agents protecting President Bill Clinton were compelled to testify before a grand jury about the president’s affair with a young intern as he was being investigated by independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr.

The Clinton administration fought the move for months — a fight that made it all the way to the Supreme Court. Just four minutes before the scheduled testimony, then-Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist declined to stop it.

Moments later, behind closed doors on July 18, 1998, a Starr deputy questioned then-agents Gary J. Byrne and John Muskett, plus retired agent Robert Ferguson. Days later, Clinton’s security lead, Larry Cockell, was also compelled to testify. Though the testimony was not public, it was ultimately published as part of the Starr report.

Tony Ornato, the former head of President Donald Trump’s security detail who had served as White House deputy chief of staff in 2020, played a key role in some of the startling testimony Tuesday from former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson.

According to Hutchinson, it was Ornato who informed Mark Meadows, then Trump’s chief of staff, on the morning of Jan. 6, 2021, that several Trump supporters gathering at the Ellipse for the president’s speech had been seen by law enforcement and Secret Service agents carrying guns, including AR-15s and Glocks.

Meadows, according to Hutchinson, seemed unworried about protesters illegally carrying weapons at a public rally, and simply asked if Ornato had alerted the president. Ornato said he had, according to Hutchinson. Meanwhile, Trump was described by Hutchinson as similarly unworried about his supporters carrying firearms; he was mostly angry that magnetometers used to screen rallygoers were blocking some of his armed supporters from getting inside the rally grounds. And that would hurt Trump’s larger aim: creating a photo op of a very large crowd gathered to hear him speak.

Ornato’s role as a political adviser to the president inside the West Wing had been very controversial, breaking decades of traditions at the Secret Service, a civil service agency which prided itself on its political independence and focus on security. However, at Trump’s insistence, Ornato took an unprecedented temporary detail as an Oval Office employee, while still formally employed by the Secret Service.

The Secret Service allowed Ornato to cross over into the political role of helping the president organize events and get reelected, a role Hutchinson described as one of the most important in the White House. Many agents and staff have described Ornato as a “yes man” to Trump, who sought to help the president launch campaign rallies in red states amid rising and lethal surges of the coronavirus there, and to create a photo op of strength outside the White House that led to the forcible removal of people peacefully protesting George Floyd’s killing from a park outside the White House.