CNU grad’s path to the podium
Cassidy Hutchinson rose quickly to an influential post. After Jan. 6, everything changed.
WASHINGTON — The day before Cassidy Hutchinson was deposed for a fourth time by the Jan. 6 committee, the former Trump White House aide received a phone message that would dramatically change the plans of the panel and write a new chapter in American politics.
On that day in June, the caller told Hutchinson, as Liz Cheney, the committee’s vice chair, later disclosed: A person “let me know you have your deposition tomorrow. He wants me to let you know he’s thinking about you. He knows you’re loyal. And you’re going to do the right thing when you go in for your deposition.”
At Hutchinson’s deposition the next day, committee members investigating the attack on the Capitol were so alarmed by what they considered a clear case of witness tampering — not to mention Hutchinson’s shocking account of President Donald Trump’s behavior on Jan. 6, 2021 — that they decided in a meeting June 24, a Friday, to hold an emergency public hearing with Hutchinson as the surprise witness the following Tuesday.
The speed, people close to the committee said, was for two crucial reasons: Hutchinson was under intense pressure from Trump World, and panel members believed that getting her story out in public would make her less vulnerable, attract powerful allies and be its own kind of protection. The committee also had to move fast, the people said, to avoid leaks of some of the most explosive testimony ever heard on Capitol Hill.
In the two weeks since, Hutchinson’s account of an unhinged president who urged his armed supporters to
march to the Capitol, lashed out at his Secret Service detail and hurled his lunch against a wall has turned her into a figure of both admiration and scorn — lauded by Trump critics as a 21st-century John Dean and attacked by Trump as a “total phony.”
Hutchinson’s testimony also pushed the committee to redouble its efforts to interview Pat Cipollone, Trump’s White House counsel, who appeared in private before the panel Friday. His videotaped testimony is expected to be shown at the committee’s next public hearing, on Tuesday.
Now unemployed and sequestered with family and a security detail, Hutchinson has developed an unlikely bond with Cheney, a Wyoming Republican and onetime aide to former Secretary of State Colin Powell during the George W. Bush administration — a crisis environment of another era when she learned to work among competing male egos. More recently, as someone ostracized by her party and stripped of her leadership post for her denunciations of Trump, Cheney admires the younger woman’s willingness to risk her alliances and professional standing by recounting what she saw in the final days of the Trump White House, friends say.
“I have been incredibly moved by young women that I have met and that have come forward to testify in the Jan. 6 committee,” Cheney said in concluding a recent speech at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, California.
When she mentioned Hutchinson’s name, the audience erupted in applause.
Influence Beyond Her Years
The path that led a young Trump loyalist to become a star witness against the former president was not exactly prefigured by Hutchinson’s biography.
She grew up in Pennington, New Jersey, a square-mile village dating to the 1600s whose most famous previous resident was Peter Benchley, author of “Jaws.” Her father owned a tree-trimming service.
No one in her family had gone to college, but in 2015, Hutchinson left home for Christopher Newport University in Newport News.
Hutchinson selected political science as her major. She took two classes taught by the department chair at the time, Michelle Barnello.
“We have a fairly conservative student body, and while I think of Cassidy as someone who was committed to Republican principles, she didn’t stand out as a hardliner,” Barnello said.
She remembered Hutchinson, now 26, as convivial but also determined, and that she often sat in the front row of the classroom with her lacrosse-playing boyfriend.
In 2017, a year after spending a summer interning for Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, Hutchinson and her boyfriend each became summer interns for Republican House members — in her case, for Rep. Steve Scalise, then the majority whip, who in June of that year was shot while playing softball with Republican colleagues. The following spring, Hutchinson was accepted for a White House internship, a celebrated achievement at CNU. The campus website and the political science department’s Facebook page posted stories about their high-achieving junior.
By luck of the draw, Hutchinson’s internship was in the White House Office of Legislative Affairs — where, unlike the coffee-fetching and tour-guiding requirements of a Capitol Hill internship, enrollees are expected to take notes at highlevel meetings and to interact with senior staff members and House members. Former Trump White House officials said Hutchinson distinguished herself from the other interns as a hard worker with a good attitude. On graduation, she landed a permanent job as the junior-most staff assistant on the House side of the Trump presidency’s legislative affairs operation, at a salary of $43,600.
“She kind of came in and took the place by storm,” said a former White House official, who like others who spoke highly of Hutchinson asked for anonymity to avoid the public wrath of Trump and his allies. “Just an incredibly smart and driven person. She was the sort of person who worked so hard, I often had to tell her to slow down so that she wouldn’t burn out.”
During the first impeachment of Trump in 2019, Hutchinson was among the handful of legislative affairs staff members tasked with shoring up support among disgruntled House Republicans for the embattled president. In the end, not one of them defected, a triumph that reflected well on every White House staff member involved, including Hutchinson.
Some colleagues found it presumptuous that the young assistant so quickly came to refer to House members by their first names. But others could see that it worked: Hutchinson, they said, developed exceptionally strong contacts with representatives during her first year on the job.
“Trust me, nobody ever sat down and said, ‘Hey, Cassidy, you’re being too chummy with the members,’ ” recalled another colleague who asked for anonymity out of fear of inciting Trump. “You can be one of those assistants who’s rarely on the Hill. Or you could be like Cassidy, who took every advantage to help her get a better job in the future.”
Which quickly occurred. Hutchinson’s backstage work during the impeachment hearings put her in frequent contact with the influential chair of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, Rep. Mark Meadows. When he became Trump’s chief of staff in March 2020, he promptly poached Hutchinson from the legislative affairs office as his special assistant.
Her influence was soon apparent. Republican aides on Capitol Hill learned that Hutchinson was the way to get to Meadows, and that if they texted him, she might be the one responding. She was in frequent contact on Meadows’ behalf with leading House Republicans such as Reps. Kevin McCarthy, Jim Jordan and Elise Stefanik. One former colleague recalled that there were times when Meadows got staff members taken off Air Force One to make room for Hutchinson.
Some staff members begrudged her rise. “I think she became a victim of her own access and success,” said Hutchinson’s friend Alyssa Farah Griffin, a former Trump White House communications director. “I’m sure that more senior people resented her for it.”
A New Lawyer
Early this year, a federal marshal knocked on Hutchinson’s door and served her with a subpoena to appear before the Jan. 6 committee. Unemployed and unable to pay for legal fees, she hired as her lawyer Stefan Passantino, a former Trump White House ethics lawyer. Trump’s Save America PAC paid for Passantino’s representation of Hutchinson, as it did for some other witnesses called before the panel.
Passantino had extensive financial ties to Trump’s orbit. Federal Election Commission reports show that his legal compliance firm received more than $1 million from Trump-related political action committees in the 2021-22 election cycle, and that in the previous cycle, Marjorie Taylor Greene, a staunch Trump loyalist and a House candidate at the time, paid him more than $93,000 for his services.
Hutchinson’s first deposition to the committee was Feb. 23, when it was not yet apparent to her that Passantino’s interests as a Trump affiliate might diverge from hers, two people close to the situation said. What was clear were her disclosures that morning and in two subsequent depositions to committee members, who found them startling as well as clear evidence of her proximity to power.
According to portions of her first three depositions made public, Hutchinson said she had heard Anthony Ornato, deputy White House chief of staff, warn Meadows that intelligence reports were forecasting violence several days before Jan. 6. She also testified that by late November 2020, House Republicans were already pushing a plan for Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the election results.
But Hutchinson took pains to avoid speculating about the president. “I can’t speak to if Mr. Trump — yeah, I’ll leave it there,” she said at one point.
Over the next months, Hutchinson warmed to the idea of helping the committee’s investigation, according to a friend, but she did not detect the same willingness in Passantino.
“She realized she couldn’t call her attorney to say, ‘Hey, I’ve got more information,’ ” said the friend, who requested anonymity. “He was there to insulate the big guy.”
Passantino declined to comment.
At that point, Hutchinson got in touch with Griffin, who had been cooperating with the committee herself. Griffin passed Hutchinson’s concerns on to Barbara Comstock, a former Republican member of Congress and an outspoken critic of Trump’s. In an interview, Comstock said she could have predicted Hutchinson’s predicament, recalling how she had once talked a young man out of joining the Trump administration. “I said, ‘You’re going to end up paying legal bills,’ ” Comstock recalled.
Comstock offered to start a legal-defense fund so that Hutchinson would not have to rely on a lawyer paid for by Trump affiliates. But this proved unnecessary. Jody Hunt, former head of the Justice Department’s civil division under Jeff Sessions — Trump’s former attorney general and another pariah in Trump’s world — offered to represent her pro bono. Hunt accompanied Hutchinson to her fourth deposition in late June, when she felt more comfortable talking about Trump’s actions on Jan. 6. Everyone agreed it was time to speed up her public testimony.
Two realities have now taken hold for Hutchinson. One is that she will continue to offer information to the Jan. 6 committee, with Hunt as her counsel and Cheney as the committee’s designated interlocutor to her.
The other is that an uncertain future awaits her.
A former colleague in the White House legislative affairs office who remains on friendly terms with Hutchinson said that from the moment she got her subpoena, her goal in cooperating with the committee was to find the quickest way to put the entire ordeal behind her.
But, the friend said, this is only the beginning for her.