Cassidy Hutchinson | |
---|---|
Born | Cassidy Jacqueline Hutchinson December 12, 1996 [1] Pennington, New Jersey, U.S. |
Alma mater | Christopher Newport University (BA) |
Notable works | Enough (2023) |
Cassidy Jacqueline Hutchinson [2] (born 1996) [3] is a former White House aide who served as assistant to Chief of Staff Mark Meadows during the first Trump administration. [4] [5]
Hutchinson testified at the June 28, 2022, public hearings of the United States House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack. [6] [7] She provided testimony on President Donald Trump's conduct and that of his senior aides and political allies before and during the January 6 United States Capitol attack. Hutchinson's testimony received significant national attention, with several media outlets labeling it as "compelling" and "explosive", [8] [9] despite criticism from Trump allies.
Her memoir Enough was published in September 2023.
Raised in Pennington, New Jersey, [10] Hutchinson graduated from Hopewell Valley Central High School in 2015. [2] She studied at Christopher Newport University between 2015 and 2018, [11] graduating in 2019 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science and American studies. [12] [13] Hutchinson describes herself as a "first-generation college student". [11] [14]
While attending Christopher Newport University, Hutchinson interned for Republican Senator Ted Cruz during the summer of 2016 [15] and for Republican US House of Representatives whip Steve Scalise during the summer of 2017. [14] [16] [17] [18] In the summer of 2018, she served as an intern in the White House Office of Legislative Affairs. [14] Later, she became an employee of the office.
In March 2020, when Mark Meadows became Trump's fourth chief of staff, he selected her to serve as one of his aides. She soon became Meadows' principal assistant, continuing through to the end of the Trump presidency, where her title was Special Assistant to the President and Coordinator for Legislative Affairs. [19] She worked in an office next to Meadows' office, just down the hall from the Oval Office. She took notes at meetings and traveled with Meadows, monitoring his phone, and relaying his orders. [20] She was described as a close confidante of Meadows. [5] Identified as a "White House legislative aide", Hutchinson was the subject of a nationally syndicated AP photograph in which she was shown dancing to the Village People song "Y.M.C.A." alongside White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany at the end of Trump's September 21, 2020, campaign rally in Swanton, Ohio. [21]
In her 2023 memoir Enough , Hutchinson alleges that Rudy Giuliani groped her backstage during Donald Trump's speech on January 6, 2021. [22] She also wrote that then-Congressman Matt Gaetz made "repeated passes" at her and asked her to "escort" him to his room at Camp David in 2020. [23] [24]
As Trump's term ended, Trump said that Hutchinson was supposed to work for his post-presidency operation in Florida, but the plan was "abruptly dropped" before she was supposed to begin. [5] [25]
Under subpoena Hutchinson gave four depositions to the committee, totaling more than two dozen hours, testifying on live television on June 28, 2022. [20] Prior to her March 7 deposition, she received multiple messages from Trump allies suggesting she demonstrate loyalty to Trump in her testimony. [26] [27] [28] Days before her testimony, she dismissed her attorney, Stefan Passantino, who had deep connections with Trump associates, replacing him with Jody Hunt, a former longtime Justice Department official and chief of staff for Trump's first attorney general, Jeff Sessions. [29] [15]
During the June 28 sworn testimony, [30] Hutchinson testified that she overheard mention of Oath Keepers and Proud Boys during the planning of the Save America March, when Trump's personal attorney Rudy Giuliani was present. [31] Several leaders of both groups were later indicted on seditious conspiracy charges for their alleged roles in the January 6 United States Capitol attack.
Hutchinson testified that both Meadows and Giuliani sought presidential pardons. [32] She previously told the committee in depositions that congressmen Matt Gaetz, Andy Biggs, Scott Perry and Louie Gohmert had also requested pardons. [33]
She testified that on January 3, 2021, White House counsel Pat Cipollone pulled her aside to express his concern upon hearing Trump planned to march to the Capitol with his supporters on January 6; Hutchinson recalled him saying, "We're going to get charged with every crime imaginable if we make that movement happen." [34]
Hutchinson also revealed in her testimony that Trump threw his lunch plate against a wall in a White House dining room on December 1, 2020, when he learned that Attorney General William Barr had made a public statement that he had not discovered any evidence of election fraud. [35] The wall was splashed with ketchup. [35] On other occasions, he had "flip[ped] the tablecloth to let all the contents of the table go onto the floor and likely break or go everywhere". [35]
Hutchinson testified that Trump and Meadows were told some individuals were carrying weapons, including firearms, and therefore could not clear magnetometers to enter the rally. Trump insisted that he didn't care if his supporters had weapons and tried to order the magnetometers removed, saying "They're not here to hurt me." [36]
Hutchinson testified she was told by then-White House deputy chief of staff Tony Ornato that after Trump got into the presidential SUV following his rally, hoping to drive to the Capitol as his supporters marched there, his lead Secret Service agent Robert Engel told him it was too dangerous and informed him they were returning to the White House. Hutchinson said Ornato told her Trump became irate and attempted to grab the steering wheel of the vehicle, and lunged at Engel's clavicle. [32] She testified Engel was present with Ornato as he related the incident but never contradicted the account. [37] CNN reported three days after Hutchinson's testimony that it had spoken with two Secret Service agents who had heard accounts of the incident from multiple other agents since February 2021, including Trump's driver. Although details differed, agents confirmed there was an angry confrontation, with one agent relating that Trump "tried to lunge over the seat – for what reason, nobody had any idea," but no one asserted Trump attacked Engel. A separate Secret Service official told CNN that Engel denied that Trump grabbed at the steering wheel or lunged toward an agent on his detail, and that Ornato denied telling Hutchinson such. [38] Politico reported the same day that Engel told the committee during an early 2022 deposition that he had kept his full account of the incident from his Secret Service colleagues for at least fourteen months. [39] On July 14, 2022, CNN published an account about the corroboration by a Metropolitan Police officer in the motorcade of the "heated exchange" Trump had with his Secret Service detail when they refused to take him to the Capitol following his rally on January 6. [40] In March 2024, details of Hutchinson's relaying of Ornato's account were contradicted by the release of testimony from the driver of the vehicle. The unnamed driver testified that Trump did not reach for, lunge at, or grab the steering wheel, and that Trump did not scream or seem irate. The driver did corroborate that Trump sought to go the Capitol and had "irritation" in his voice. [41] [42]
As the events of the day unfolded, Hutchinson recalled Cipollone telling Meadows words to the effect of, "Mark, we need to do something more. [32] They're literally calling for the vice president to be f'ing hung. And Mark had responded something to the effect of, you heard him, Pat. He thinks Mike deserves it. He doesn't think they're doing anything wrong, to which Pat said something, this is f'ing crazy, we need to be doing something more." [43]
An interview transcript released on December 22, 2022, revealed that Hutchinson gave additional testimony on September 14 and September 15, 2022. [44] [45] During part of this testimony, Hutchinson stated that she was pressured by Trump allies not to talk to the committee. [46] [47] She also claimed that with former White House aide Alyssa Farah Griffin acting as her backchannel, she was able to conduct the interview without Passantino's knowledge, and that Passantino in fact wanted her to skirt around the committee questions. Hutchinson testified to the committee that Passantino told her, "We just want to focus on protecting the president" and "We all know you're loyal" and he would help her get "a really good job in Trump world" because "We want to keep you in the family." She also testified Meadows told her Trump knew he had lost the election. [46] [47] [48]
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On January 6, 2021, the United States Capitol Building in Washington, D.C., was attacked by a mob of supporters of, at the time, the 45th U.S. President Donald Trump in an attempted self-coup d'état, two months after his defeat in the 2020 presidential election. They sought to keep him in power by preventing a joint session of Congress from counting the Electoral College votes to formalize the victory of President-elect Joe Biden. The attack was ultimately unsuccessful in preventing the certification of the election results. According to the bipartisan House select committee that investigated the incident, the attack was the culmination of a seven-part plan by Trump to overturn the election. Within 36 hours, six people died: one was shot by Capitol Police, another died of a drug overdose, three died of natural causes, and a police officer died of natural causes a day after being assaulted by rioters. Many people were injured, including 174 police officers. Four officers who responded to the attack died by suicide within seven months. Damage caused by attackers exceeded $2.7 million.
The following article is a broad timeline of the course of events surrounding the attack on the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021, by rioters supporting United States President Donald Trump's attempts to overturn his defeat in the 2020 presidential election. Pro-Trump rioters stormed the United States Capitol after assembling on the Ellipse of the Capitol complex for a rally headlined as the "Save America March".
The United States House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol was a select committee of the U.S. House of Representatives established to investigate the U.S. Capitol attack.
Anthony M. Ornato is the former assistant director of the United States Secret Service Office of Training. He was the service's 34th special agent in charge who headed the security detail of president Donald Trump until being detailed to the White House where the president named him White House Deputy Chief of Staff for operations in December 2019. After his tenure as a government SES detailee in the Trump administration, he returned to the Secret Service where he worked as the assistant director in the office of training until August 29, 2022.
Sarah Anne Matthews is an American political aide who served as the deputy press secretary for the Donald Trump administration from June 2020 to January 2021. She resigned from her position as deputy press secretary following the attack on the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021. Matthews was an outspoken critic of Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign.
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The United States Justice Department investigation into attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election began in early 2021 with investigations and prosecutions of hundreds of individuals who participated in the January 6, 2021 attack on the United States Capitol. By early 2022, the investigation had expanded to examine Donald Trump's inner circle, with the Justice Department impaneling several federal grand juries to investigate the attempts to overturn the election. Later in 2022, a special counsel was appointed. On August 1, 2023, Trump was indicted. The indictment also describes six alleged co-conspirators.
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Enough is a memoir by Cassidy Hutchinson that centers on her time as assistant to Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff during the Trump presidency, and her experiences after the January 6 United States Capitol attack. It also details the events that led to her participation in the sixth public hearing of the Select Committee on the January 6 Attack on June 28, 2022. Enough was published by Simon & Schuster, and released in September 2023.
She was 22 years old, a rising college senior who went to work as a summer intern in the Trump White House in 2018.
(AP Photo/Alex Brandon)