By Maggie Haberman | New York Times
She was 22 years old, a rising college senior who went to work as a summer intern in the Trump White House in 2018. She soon landed in the office of the chief of staff, an omnipresent aide with ambitions of a career in government, like so many others in Washington.
But on Tuesday, Cassidy Hutchinson, now 26, distinguished herself as the most powerful witness yet in the House select committee’s investigation into the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol — and as one of the most forceful and compelling aides to testify about former President Donald J. Trump’s bizarre and violent behavior during his four years in the White House.
For two stunning hours on live television, Hutchinson described an unhinged former president who, she said, was warned that his supporters were carrying weapons and expressed no concern because they were not a threat to him. She said that Trump tried to grab the steering wheel of the presidential limousine and lunged for his Secret Service agent because he wanted to go to the Capitol, and added that at one point he hurled his plate of lunch at a wall in the White House.
“I grabbed a towel and started wiping the ketchup off of the wall to help the valet out,” Hutchinson testified.
(Later in the day, Secret Service officials who requested anonymity said that the two men in the presidential limousine with Mr. Trump were prepared to state under oath that neither was assaulted by the former president and that he did not reach for the wheel.)
On Twitter, Hutchinson was compared to John Dean, the former White House counsel to President Richard M. Nixon, whose public hearing testimony proved pivotal in describing his role in the Watergate cover-up. In a brief interview on Tuesday, Dean said Ms. Hutchinson had met the “standard” of being a significant witness and that she did so quickly.
Dean pointed to Alexander Butterfield, the former Nixon aide who ultimately testified to the existence of a secret recording system in the White House. “With Butterfield, we just learned there was the taping system, and it took us decades to really understand it,” Dean said. “She was able to fill in the information from her observations instantly.”
Appearing nervous initially but growing more comfortable as she went on, Hutchinson described efforts by Mark Meadows, Trump’s last White House chief of staff, to aid Trump’s desire to stay in office. She described her revulsion at Trump’s attacks on former Vice President Mike Pence, including his Twitter post condemning Pence while the Capitol riot was taking place.
“It was un-American,” Hutchinson said of the post. “We were watching the Capitol building get defaced over a lie.”
She described how Meadows seemed almost frozen by the violence that was unfolding at the Capitol and how he told the White House counsel, Pat A. Cipollone, that Trump was uninterested in trying to calm his supports. “He doesn’t want to do anything, Pat,” Hutchinson recounted Meadows as saying.
For decades, from Trump’s earliest days in business in New York to the final moments of his presidency, various aides have tried to minimize his behavior. But other than Michael D. Cohen, Trump’s former personal lawyer, few have gone under oath to describe his temper and erratic personality to the extent that Hutchinson did.
Trump swiftly condemned Hutchinson on Tuesday on Truth Social, his social media network, as “a total phony” and “a leaker,” and asserted that he hardly knew her. But the committee, anticipating what has become Trump’s standard reaction of disavowing any familiarity with his critics, established through photographs of Hutchinson with top White House aides shown at the hearing that she was, as Representative Liz Cheney, the vice chairwoman of the committee, put it, “in a position to know a great deal about the happenings in the Trump White House.”
“She worked in the West Wing, several steps down from the Oval Office,” Cheney said. “Ms. Hutchinson spoke daily with members of Congress, with high-ranking officials in the administration, with senior White House staff, including Mr. Meadows, White House Counsel’s Office lawyers, and with Mr. Tony Ornato, who served as the White House deputy chief of staff.”
Hutchinson, who grew up in New Jersey and graduated in 2019 from Christopher Newport University in Newport News, Va., began her career in Washington as an intern on Capitol Hill for Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, and Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the second-ranking House Republican.
Hutchinson was at the White House, in the office of legislative affairs, when Meadows became chief of staff in March 2020. Meadows already knew Hutchinson because she had often escorted him on and off White House grounds when he visited as a member of the House and a leader of the conservative Freedom Caucus.
Meadows ultimately plucked Hutchinson from that office to serve on his team. She became one of his top aides and would often attend meetings when he could not.
“She was a close confidant of his,” said Sarah Matthews, a former deputy White House press secretary.
Known at the White House and in Republican circles on Capitol Hill as garrulous, smart and at ease with powerful people, Hutchinson was the rare example of someone close to both Meadows and Representative Kevin McCarthy, the House minority leader, who deeply dislike each other. Other members of Congress would call her to reach Meadows.
Hutchinson was supposed to go work for Trump during his post-presidency in Florida, but the plan was abruptly dropped before she was to join. In the past several months, she has testified under subpoena four times before the committee, behind closed doors.
Throughout her public testimony on Tuesday, she focused largely on what she saw or was told but did offer up her personal feelings about Jan. 6. She said she grew increasingly frustrated that Meadows did not seem to care that the protest was growing out of control. She described the day as watching a “bad car accident that was about to happen, where you can’t stop it, but you want to be able to do something.”
“I just remember — I remember thinking in that moment — Mark needs to snap out of this, and I don’t know how to snap him out of this, but he needs to care,” she said.
Until recently, Hutchinson was represented by a former deputy White House counsel, who had been recommended to her by two aides to Mr. Trump. She then switched lawyers, to Jody Hunt. She became interested in testifying publicly, and her discussions with the committee about testifying in public became more productive, according to a person briefed on the discussions who insisted on anonymity.
After Hutchinson’s public testimony, Dean warned that she needed to be prepared for what comes next.
“Maybe when you’re young, you don’t know you should be frightened,” he said. “She’s at the beginning of a process that can turn ugly. There will be efforts to discredit her and they will get printed and she will read things about herself that aren’t true or incidents will be slanted in ways she never dreamed because she’s going after Trump and Meadows, the two most powerful people in that White House.
“It’s sad,” he said, “but that’s the way the system plays.”
