Who is Cassidy Hutchinson and what has she told the Jan. 6 committee?The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection has kept a tight lid on its plans for televised hearings slated to take place this month, but that hasn’t stopped speculation about who might be called to testify.
Among the names that have been floated as a potential witness in the highly anticipated hearings is that of Cassidy Hutchinson, an aide to former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, who has already been cited as the source of multiple revelations uncovered by the select committee’s probe.
Hutchinson, who served as a special assistant to the president for legislative affairs, was subpoenaed in November 2021, along with several other former Trump administration officials who, the panel believed, had relevant information regarding the former president’s activities on Jan. 6 and the role he and his aides played in efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
According to her subpoena, Hutchinson was not only at the White House on Jan. 6 but she’d been with Trump during his speech at the “Stop the Steal” rally on the Ellipse, where he urged his supporters to “fight like hell” before promising to march with them to the Capitol.
She also emailed Georgia officials directly following Meadows’s trip to attend that state’s election audit, according to the subpoena, and was present for other key meetings and conversations at the White House leading up to Jan. 6.
Unlike her former boss, whose refusal to cooperate with House investigators has earned him a Justice Department referral for criminal contempt charges, Hutchinson has appeared before the committee on three separate occasions since the beginning of this year. In fact, following her most recent deposition last month, a source reportedly told CNN that Hutchinson believes she’s being forced to testify due to Meadows’s refusal to comply with his own subpoena. The same source said Hutchinson will likely make another appearance before the committee, possibly during the upcoming public hearings, according to CNN.
A spokesperson for the Jan. 6 committee declined to comment on whether Hutchinson will be called as a witness at the hearings, the first of which is set for June 9. Hutchinson’s attorney did not respond to a request for comment from Yahoo News.
While much remains unknown about what Hutchinson has told the select committee so far, a handful of key details have emerged from her closed-door depositions that seem likely to feature prominently in the case House investigators hope to present to the American public this summer.
Here’s a look at some of the key revelations that have already been attributed to Hutchinson, and how they might factor into the public hearings.
Meadows and others pressed ahead with plans to overturn Trump’s election loss, court filing says, even after White House counsel had deemed them not “legally sound.”
The select committee’s legal battle against Meadows, who has sued to block the panel’s subpoenas, may offer clues on how Hutchinson’s testimony could be used in the hearings.
In an April court filing, the select committee cited sections of Hutchinson’s testimony as proof of the former chief’s involvement in the effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election and that he had pursued unlawful plans to make that happen.
According to the filing, Hutchinson told the committee that the White House Counsel’s Office repeatedly objected on legal grounds to a plan to push Republican officials in battleground states that had voted for Biden to send alternate, pro-Trump slates of electors to Congress when lawmakers met on Jan. 6 to certify the Electoral College vote count.
Hutchinson told the committee that the counsel’s office had concluded that the alternate electors plan was not legally sound potentially as early as November 2021, and that this conclusion was raised during multiple meetings at the White House involving Meadows, other Trump associates like Trump’s former personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, and members of Congress including Reps. Scott Perry, R-Pa., Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., and Louie Gohmert, R-Texas.
“Despite that advice, the plan moved forward,” the committee’s filing states.
https://news.yahoo.com/who-is-cassidy-hutchinson-and-what-has-she-told-the-jan-6-committee-214435600.html
