Explosive Public Testimony During January 6 Panel

In explosive public testimony, a former White House aide on Tuesday told the committee investigating the January 6 insurrection that Donald Trump knowingly directed armed supporters to march to the US Capitol in a last-gasp effort to invalidate the results of the 2020 presidential election that he lost.

Appearing at a hastily scheduled hearing on Capitol Hill, Cassidy Hutchinson, a former aide to Trump’s final chief of staff, Mark Meadows, also painted a devastating portrait of a president spiraling out of control and a White House staff often ambivalent about the violence building around them.

Hutchinson also offered extraordinary new details that the White House – and the former US president – were aware that the rally on January 6 could turn violent days before Trump stepped on stage at a rally on the Ellipse and urged his supporters to “fight like hell” to keep him in power.

“I felt like I was watching a bad car accident about to happen, where you cannot stop it,” Hutchinson, a conservative Republican who worked just steps from the Oval Office, testified at the panel’s sixth and most revealing hearing to date.

Over the course of two hours, Hutchinson offered a shocking view into the West Wing in the moments before, during and after the siege of the US Capitol.

On the morning of January 6, Hutchinson was present for a briefing with Meadows, in which they were informed by Tony Ornato, the White House deputy chief of staff, that members of the crowd amassing in Washington were carrying knives, guns, rifles, bear spray, body armor and spears. Asked if Trump had been briefed, Meadows affirmed that he had.

When they arrived at the Ellipse, Hutchinson said Trump was furious that the crowd was not at capacity and demanded Secret Service loosen security precautions to let in supporters who didn’t want to go through metal detectors because, she recalled overhearing him say, “they’re not here to hurt me”.

Back at the White House, she recalled a disturbing conversation with Ornato, who rode in the presidential limousine with Trump after his remarks. Ornato told her that Trump became “irate” when he was told he would be returning to the White House instead of going to the Capitol. Relaying Ornato’s account, Hutchinson testified that Trump told a Secret Service agent: “I’m the effing president, take me up to the Capitol now.”

When the agent said he could not, Trump lunged for the steering wheel and when that failed, grabbed at the agent’s throat to try to choke him, she said. That agent, Robert Engel, was present when Ornato described the altercation to Hutchinson and did not dispute his account.

For the past year, the House committee investigating the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol has conducted hundreds of interviews. It has fought in federal court for records, and recommended criminal charges against Trump allies who have defied the panel’s subpoenas.

Now, the special Housel panel is going primetime.

At 8 p.m. ET on Thursday, the House January 6 committee is holding the first of several hearings to air its findings from the investigation into the breach of the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob. A second hearing is set for 10 a.m. on Monday, June 13.

Thursday’s hearing will provide a first flavor of how the House committee plans to present its work. The House committee has yet to announce a schedule for further hearings, but there are expected to be about a half dozen in June.

Looming large over the hearings is Trump, who has communicated his desire for counter programming to congressional allies. It is unclear what new information the House committee will present, but the committee has reportedly concluded it has enough evidence to make a criminal referral to the Justice Department recommending charges against the former president.

Previewing Thursday’s hearing, the committee said it would feature “previously unseen material documenting January 6th,” along with witness testimony. The initial witnesses include a documentarian who interviewed members of the Proud Boys — a far-right group whose members were charged Monday with seditious conspiracy — and Caroline Edwards, a respected Capitol Police officer believed to be the first officer injured during the January 6 attack.

The string of hearings will combine to provide the American public with what the House committee described as a summary of its findings about a “coordinated, multi-step effort to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and prevent the transfer of power.”

Here are the members of the committee to watch as the public hearings unfold.

Trump was so enraged that he had been prevented from going to the Capitol on January 6 that he threw his lunch against the wall. It wasn’t the first time she had witnessed such an outburst from the president.

Just weeks before, Trump also threw his lunch against the wall in a fit of rage after the publication of an Associated Press interview with his attorney general, William Barr, in which he said the president’s claims of a stolen election were without merit.

“There was ketchup dripping down the wall, and there was a shattered porcelain plate on the floor,” Hutchinson recalled of that episode.

The committee on Monday abruptly scheduled a hearing for Tuesday, after previously saying it would not hold any more hearings until next month. Opening the hearing, the committee’s chair, Congressman Bennie Thompson, said it was “important that the American people hear that information immediately”.

It is the sixth public hearing held by the committee after a year-long investigation into the Capitol attack. Two more hearings are expected next month.

Hutchinson, a 25-year-old Republican who worked steps from the Oval Office, has provided the committee with some of its most shocking revelations to date. Among her other disclosures, she told the panel that Trump approved of his supporters chanting “Hang Mike Pence” and that several far-right members of Congress who had attempted to stop the congressional certification of Joe Biden’s victory sought pardons after the attack. The disclosures emerged during Hutchinson’s closed-door testimony to the committee, videos of which have been played during the hearings.

On Tuesday, Hutchinson recalled walking Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, to his car on the evening of 2 January, when he told her that Trump was planning to go to Congress to be with his allies on Capitol Hill during the certification. When she reported this to Meadows, she said he replied something to the effect of: “Things might get real, real bad on January 6.”

Hutchinson said: “That evening was the first moment that I remember feeling scared and nervous about what could happen on January 6. I had a deeper concern with what was happening with the planning aspects.”

She also told the committee that she recalled mentions of the far-right groups the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys when Giuliani was around at the White House in the days leading up to January 6.

Among Hutchinson’s many disclosures, she testified that Meadows and Giuliani both sought presidential pardons. She also told the committee that members of Trump’s cabinet discussed invoking the 25th amendment, which allows for the forced removal of a president.

Tuesday’s hearing came as a surprise after Thompson said last week that the panel would not hold another hearing until July. But the committee also made clear that the public sessions were prompting more witnesses to come forward, helping to uncover new evidence about what Thompson said was the “culmination of an attempted coup”.

In its episodic presentation, the committee has made use of recorded depositions with witnesses, blending the tapes with moving public testimony and dramatic speech-making from lawmakers and staff who led the investigation.

At least two more hearings are expected next month to explore the role of far-right and paramilitary groups organized and prepared for the January 6 attack and Trump’s abdication of leadership during the hours-long siege of the Capitol.

At the end of the hearing, Thompson again urged anyone with information to come forward.