The congressional committee that has investigated the attack on the Capitol still had aces up its sleeve. After publishing its monumental 814-page report last Thursday, the result of 18 months of investigation into what happened in Washington on January 6, 2021, its nine members have been sharing raw transcripts of interviews with some of the witnesses with the press. more important. These shipments include revelations like the one buried among the hundreds of pages that occupy the four conversations held with the young assistant Cassidy Hutchinson. She told Liz Cheney, vice chair of the commission, that she had seen during December and the beginning of January her superior, White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, burn documents “in a fireplace” at the residence. presidential.
The exchange comes on page 41 of the first of the documents provided Tuesday. Cheney is questioning Hutchinson, who starred in one of the committee’s most notorious televised hearings on June 28, about the 187 minutes that passed between the arrival at the White House of Donald Trump, who had summoned thousands of his supporters to Washington to a rally that ended in a violent attack on Congress while Joe Biden’s electoral triumph was being certified, and the moment in which the still Republican president finally asked the mob to go home. It is then that the representative from Wyoming, a Republican who has become a black beast of Trumpism and who in January will cease to be a congresswoman, announces “a change of subject.”
—”Did you ever see Meadows throw documents into the fireplace?”, he asks the witness.
“Yes, ma’am,” says this one.
-“How often?”.
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—”It’s hard to say, once or twice a week. (…) On a dozen occasions, maybe a little more, in that period between December and mid-January, which is when we lit the fireplace. (…) He liked to feed her with logs all day long”.
—”Did you explain why he did it?”
—”I never asked him,” Hutchinson replied in the interview, the first of a series of four, held on May 17. The assistant also declared herself unable to know if those documents were “originals or copies.”
These accusations, which were partially disclosed before the summer in separate reports from Political Y The New York Times, They also allude to Republican Congressman Scott Perry (Pennsylvania). The former White House employee recalls that the burning of papers occurred on several occasions after Meadows met with him, who was decisively involved in Trump’s efforts to invalidate the election results that made Biden president. Despite the fact that the judges have dismissed the theory of electoral fraud on more than 60 occasions, Trump and his followers insist on it more than two years later.
Last week it also emerged that Hutchinson denounced before the committee that she felt pressured by her former boss and her environment so that she would not testify.
In the latest package of transcripts, she is also seen recounting several conversations in the White House in which the conspiracies of the diffuse QAnon movement were given a license. For example, a December 2020 meeting with Meadows, then-President Trump, and Republican members of Congress, including Georgia Republican Party Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, one of the most vociferous propagators of American far-right hoaxes. “I remember him mentioning QAnon several times, in the presence of the president, and in private with Mark,” Hutchinson testified. “I remember Mark also had some conversations about more specific things relating to QAnon, as well as voter fraud theories.”
With the arrival of the new Congress, whose members take office on January 3, the commission of the attack on the Capitol has its days numbered, but in Washington it is taken for granted that they will rush to the end to continue sharing information that was left in the blank on the report made public last week. Meanwhile, half a dozen publishers are racing against the clock to publish in book format the 814 pages that collect the fruit of 18 months of research, including more than a thousand interviews, such as those of Hutchinson, as well as the review of nearly a million articles. documents.
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