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Former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson described to the House Jan. 6 committee a wide-ranging pressure campaign from Donald Trump’s allies aimed at influencing her cooperation with Congress and stifling potentially damaging testimony about him.
In extraordinary closed-door testimony made public Thursday, Hutchinson recounted how those in the former president’s circle dangled job opportunities and financial assistance as she was cooperating with the committee investigating the Capitol riot and how her own lawyer — a former ethics counsel in the Trump White House — advised her against being fully forthcoming with lawmakers and told her “the less you remember, the better.”
The nine-member committee released two never-before-seen transcripts of Hutchinson’s testimony as it tries to wrap up its investigation and make its work public. The committee, which will dissolve when Republicans take over the House on Jan. 3, was also expected to release its final report Thursday.
The transcripts provide previously unknown details about what Hutchinson called the “moral struggle” — torn between the desire to speak the truth and to remain loyal to Trump — that she says she endured on the way to becoming one of the most memorable witnesses of the committee’s investigation.
In a televised hearing in June, Hutchinson went public about Trump’s actions on Jan. 6, 2021. She described his directive that magnetometers be removed from a rally of his supporters that day and detailed his angry — and ultimately rebuffed — demands to be taken by the Secret Service to the Capitol to join the crowd trying to disrupt the congressional certification of Democrat Joe Biden’s election as president.
“In my mind this whole time I felt this moral struggle,” she said, according to the transcripts. She described a first interview with the committee in which she concealed testimony about Trump that, months later, she would deliver to a rapt hearing room.
Looking back now, she added, “It feels ridiculous, because in my heart I knew where my loyalties lied, and my loyalties lied with the truth. And I never wanted to diverge from that. You know, I never wanted or thought that I would be the witness that I have become, because I thought that more people would be willing to speak out too.”
But to hear her tell it, that testimony was never a sure thing.
Like other aides whose proximity to Trump entangled them in investigations, Hutchinson scrambled to find a lawyer after receiving a subpoena from the committee last year.
