Cassidy Hutchinson’s detailed account portrays a leader out of control who organized the assault on the Capitol to try to retain office by all means
Just when it seemed like it couldn’t get any worse, the devastating evidence provided this week to the January 6 Commission by Cassidy Hutchinson, aide to Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, has ended up ruining the image of the former president during the hours in which that a mob stormed the Capitol in Washington.
The university intern, who arrived at the White House in the summer of 2018, with great political ambitions and painstaking diligence, had become an indispensable assistant in an Administration plagued by intrigue. After her stint in the wildest Republican congressional offices, including Steve Scalise and Senator Ted Cruz, Hutchinson liaised with the Capitol and, a short distance from the Oval Office, was present at every Meadows meeting. .
An exceptional witness, the 26-year-old young woman exposed before the commission the detailed chronicle of the hours that shook the Americans on January 6, 2021. The story of an alienated president who, upon being warned that his followers carried caliber weapons alarmingly, he only expressed concern that the camera angle showed a packed house on the television broadcast of his speech.
An out of control president who tried to grab the steering wheel of the presidential car and threw himself in a rage at the neck of a secret service agent because he was not allowed to go to the march for security reasons. A president who, after haughtily throwing lunch against the wall of the Oval Office dining room, deserted for hours from the responsibility of his position while watching the images of violence on television, with absolute disinterest in the victims of the assault.
secret preparations
Hutchinson’s testimony, which Trump service members are trying to dismantle, is important because it directly links Trump and the White House to the preparations for the attack on Capitol Hill, and establishes that everyone knew in advance the level of potential violence it could unleash. According to this testimony, Hutchinson first learned of the secret preparations for the assault on January 2, when he was escorting a hot-headed Rudy Giuliani to his vehicle after a meeting with Meadows and others at the White House. The president’s lawyer acolyte announced that they were going to march on Capitol Hill and “succeed.” The aide told Meadows about it, and Meadows replied that “a lot of things were going on, which could get very bad on January 6.”
Intelligence reports at the White House warned two days earlier, on January 4, of violence to come. National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien briefed Meadows, the Secret Service and Cabinet Deputy Anthony Ornato, who is in charge of the president’s security.
Hutchinson explained that on January 5, Trump ordered Meadows to contact two complicated supporters, Roger Stone and former general Michael Flynn, recently pardoned. Both were already in Washington and Stone, specialized in dirty operations, ostentatiously allowed himself to be photographed with members of the Oath Keepers, as if they were his personal guard.
Meadows was to meet with Giuliani, John Eastman—the putative legal architect of the coup—and others at the Willard Hotel, where they had established, for lack of a better name, the ‘war room.’ Hutchinson suggested it might be inappropriate to go, and in the end Meadows decided on a call, rather than go in person.
Following the aide’s story, at 8:00 a.m. on January 6, the intelligence reports warned of the presence of heavy weapons and bulletproof vests among the crowd that arrived at the Plaza de la Elipse, where Trump and his entourage would give a speech before of the March. At 10:00, Hutchinson and Ornato talked to Meadows about the guns, but the chief of staff brushed it off, just wanting to make sure the president had been briefed as well.
But Trump was furious for other reasons. Behind the platform of the Ellipse, he complained because the people, ‘his people’, did not fill the square to listen to his speech. The crowd was being searched at security points, where their weapons were seized. The president demanded that the metal detectors be dismantled and free access be granted to his faithful.
The tantrum in the car
The president was not about to allow his final act to be jeopardized: not only to prevent the official certification ceremony of Joe Biden as the new president of the United States, but to march to the Capitol with his supporters and give a speech in the House to reaffirm his thesis that the country was experiencing unacceptable electoral fraud after he lost the elections.
But at 1:10 p.m., after his harangue at La Ellipse, the secret service had already ruled out the president’s departure and back at the White House Trump lost control and tried to attack his bodyguards in the vehicle. He would still have to wait three long hours of desperate attempts at persuasion by allies and family members for him to finally, and after a statement by Joe Biden, deign to do something. In a video at 4:17 p.m., the president finally asked the violent to go home.
The next day, amid resignations and talks to invoke the 25th Amendment and remove him from office, Trump allowed himself to be talked into making a video in which he again refused to condemn the violent and admit that the election was over. In the days that followed, some involved called for a presidential pardon, including Meadows, who, through a conservative organization he heads, received $1 million from Trump’s political committee. Ornato, a secret service loyalist promoted to top White House executive, has denied the attack on the former president in the vehicle.
Cassidy Hutchinson, for her part, received a message tacitly warning her not to cooperate with the Commission from an associate of Mark Meadows. The text was displayed at the end of the Commission’s public hearing to publicly acknowledge that many witnesses continue to receive intimidation.
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