Trump’s angry and erratic behavior on Jan. 6 takes center stage in testimony from former White House aide
Former President Donald Trump — informed that his supporters had weapons — pushed to relax security checks at the rally he held before the deadly Jan. 6 Capitol attack, saying the crowd was “not here to hurt me,” a former White House aide testified in an explosive House hearing Tuesday.
The former aide, Cassidy Hutchinson, also said she was told Trump later tried to force his security detail to take him to the Capitol, attempting to grab the steering wheel of his limousine.
“I’m the [expletive] president. Take me up to the Capitol now,” Trump said, according to Hutchinson’s testimony to the House panel probing the 2021 Capitol assault. She said she was informed of the exchange by Tony Ornato, the former White House chief of operations.
This exhibit from video released by the House Select Committee, shows a photo of former President Donald Trump talking to his chief of staff Mark Meadows before Trump spoke at the rally on the Ellipse on Jan 6, displayed at a hearing by the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, Tuesday, June 28, 2022, on Capitol Hill in Washington.
Hutchinson also revealed Rudy Giuliani and Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows requested pardons from the former president for their roles in planning and helping to execute the storming of the Capitol.
The extraordinary testimony, which also included a separate tale of Trump shattering a porcelain dish at the White House and sending ketchup dripping down a wall in December 2020, presented a picture of a temperamental president who bubbled with rage throughout Jan. 6, 2021.
Trump was told supporters who massed on the National Mall on Jan. 6 were armed, Hutchinson testified — but he still opposed the use of magnetometer checks ahead of his falsehood-filled speech.
“He wanted more people to come in,” Hutchinson testified. “These conversations happened two to three minutes before he took the stage.”
Cassidy Hutchinson, former aide to Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, is sworn in to testify as the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol continues to reveal its findings of a year-long investigation, at the Capitol in Washington, Tuesday, June 28, 2022. (Jacquelyn Martin/)
In the speech, Trump, sowing lies of a stolen election, urged his supporters to march on the Capitol and “take back our country.”
Hutchinson, who served as an aide to Meadows, delivered testimony at the Cannon House Office Building on Tuesday afternoon in a hastily called hearing.
The hearing has also featured previously recorded video testimony from Hutchinson, 25, who sat for four videotaped depositions, according to the committee. In the testimony, she said Trump had urged his staff to “take the [expletive] mags away,” referring to the magnetometers.
“He was angry that we weren’t letting people through the mags with weapons — what the Secret Service deemed as weapons, and are weapons,” Hutchinson said in a taped interview. “I overheard the president say something to the effect of ‘I don’t [expletive] care that they have weapons.’”
FILE - In this Feb. 19, 2019 file photo, President Donald Trump speaks during a signing ceremony for "Space Policy Directive 4" in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington. (Evan Vucci/)
Trump still delivered his incendiary speech, baselessly asserting he had won the 2020 presidential election “in a landslide” and urging his supporters to “fight like hell.”
Lawmakers gathered at the Capitol that day for the counting of electoral votes, but a mob of Trump supporters busted into the Capitol, overwhelming cops and commencing a violent insurrection.
Trump responded to Hutchinson’s testimony by issuing a string of statements describing her as a “third rate social climber” and a “total phony.” He rejected her accounts of his behavior on Jan. 6, 2021.
“I hardly know who this person, Cassidy Hutchinson, is, other than I heard very negative things about her,” Trump said on Truth Social, a social media platform that has not banished him.
“Her Fake story that I tried to grab the steering wheel of the White House Limousine in order to steer it to the Capitol Building is ‘sick’ and fraudulent,” Trump said in another statement, adding that her “story of me throwing food is also false.”
And he questioned her claim that she had helped clean up the allegedly splattered condiment, asking in the post, “why would SHE have to clean it up, I hardly knew who she was?”
Cassidy Hutchinson, former aide to Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, testifies as the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol holds a hearing at the Capitol in Washington, Tuesday, June 28, 2022. (J. Scott Applewhite/)
Hutchinson said Trump threw his lunch and shattered his dish in response to an Associated Press article in which William Barr, then the attorney general, undercut the president’s claims of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election.
President Biden won the election by 74 electoral votes and more than 7 million in the popular vote, but Trump has never given up his baseless claims that he won.
Rep. Bennie Thompson, chairman of the House panel probing the Jan. 6 attack, said he felt Hutchinson was a “truthful witness, somebody whose — we felt — message needed to be out.”
Hutchinson’s appearance on Tuesday was a surprise addition to the committee’s schedule. The panel began holding public hearings earlier this month.
Jan. 6 committee sets surprise hearing for Tuesday after getting ‘deluge’ of fresh evidence
John Dean, the White House counsel under President Richard Nixon who delivered devastating testimony in the Watergate scandal, predicted bombshells ahead of the hearing.
“BETTER BE A BIG DEAL: There was only one surprise witness during the Senate Watergate Committee hearings,” Dean tweeted. “On July 16, 1973 an unannounced witness appeared: Alex Butterfield, who testified to Nixon’s secret taping system — forever changing history!”
In March, a federal judge in California ruled that Trump’s effort to reverse his 2020 election loss likely amounted to a crime, and said the former president’s push to get Vice President Mike Pence to meddle with the vote certification could have “permanently ended the peaceful transition of power.”
FILE - Violent insurrectionists loyal to President Donald Trump storm the Capitol, Jan. 6, 2021, in Washington. (John Minchillo/)
Asha Rangappa, a Yale lecturer and former FBI special agent, said after the hearing that she believed the testimony had increased Trump’s criminal exposure by providing “evidence of foreknowledge and even an intent for violence to be used” on Jan. 6 in Trump’s pressure campaign on Pence.
Rangappa said the testimony had added “additional criminal violations to the mix.”
Rep. Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat and a member of the panel, said Hutchinson’s account confirmed that Trump was “a president who was willing to do anything to overthrow the presidential election of 2020 and clearly had violence within his sights on that day.”
“This crowd was obviously armed and dangerous,” Raskin told reporters. “This witness simply blew away any pretense that the president and all the president’s men didn’t know what was actually going on in that crowd.”
With News Wire Services
