Cassidy Hutchinson left DC amid ‘security concerns’ after January 6 hearings
The former Donald Trump White House aide who became a pivotal January 6 witness remembers wanting to make a last-minute run for it before delivering her crucial testimony about the US Capitol attack that the defeated president’s supporters staged.
But Cassidy Hutchinson kept her nerve, and the cost of breaking ranks with Trump and his fanatical supporters was steep.
“Security protocols and … concerns” forced her out of her Washington DC apartment and into hiding after testifying, she said in an interview that aired on Sunday at 9am ET.
“My life changed – the way that I was living my life – for a while,” Hutchinson told CBS News Sunday Morning. “I could not go back to my apartment. I ended up moving down to Atlanta for several months.”
Hutchinson, who was working for Mark Meadows, Trump’s chief of staff, when January 6 occurred, also told CBS that she continues to consider herself a Republican. But she said she is not supporting Trump’s efforts to win the Republican nomination and return to the Oval Office in 2024 as he grapples with more than 90 criminal charges, many stemming from his attempts to overturn his electoral loss to Joe Biden weeks before the Capitol attack.
“I would … like to make clear – I would not back the former president of the United States,” Hutchinson remarked to CBS News Sunday Morning’s Tracy Smith during the interview. “He is dangerous for the country. He is willing – and has showed time and time again willingness – to proliferate lies, and to vulnerable American people, so he could stay in power.
“To me, that is the most un-American thing that you can do.”
Hutchinson – under subpoena – gave some of the most dramatic testimony about the Capitol attack during live congressional hearings in the summer of 2022. One key moment she described was how Trump accosted a Secret Service agent and lunged for the steering wheel of the car he was in when he was told he would not be driven to the Capitol.
The Capitol attack carried out by supporters whom Trump had told to “fight like hell” was a desperate but failed maneuver meant to prevent Congress from certifying Biden’s victory over him. The riot has been linked to nine deaths. More than 1,100 people have been charged in connection with the attack, and the majority of them have either pleaded guilty or been convicted by judges or juries.
Hutchinson explained on Sunday how it was a grueling decision to testify at the January 6 hearings conducted by a special House committee.
“I almost ran out of – there’s a little hold room outside the committee room – that we were about to walk in, and I almost darted,” Hutchinson told the program. “I heard the door click open, and I turned around and I looked at my attorney and said, ‘I can’t do this.’ And I started to walk, and he gently pushed my shoulders. And he said, ‘You can do this.’ And then we walked out.”
Hutchinson also said: “I felt torn … because I knew what I knew, and I wanted to come forward with what I knew. But at the same time, I didn’t want to feel like I was betraying … my colleagues.”
She recounted how she gained courage to speak up about her knowledge after researching the story of former Richard Nixon White House aide Alexander Butterfield. Butterfield testified at the Watergate scandal congressional hearings that helped bring about Nixon’s resignation in 1974.
Hutchinson’s interview was meant to promote her memoir, Enough, which was published by CBS’s sister company Simon & Schuster and is scheduled for release on Tuesday.
Enough has already attracted worldwide headlines after the Guardian reported that in it Hutchinson wrote about how she was groped by Rudy Giuliani – the Trump lawyer and former New York City mayor – on the day of the Capitol attack. The book mainly tracks the 27-year-old’s journey from Trump believer to disenchantment with him, echoing some of the comments Hutchinson made to CBS in Sunday’s interview.
Giuliani and Trump have pleaded not guilty to charges that they illegally sought to overturn Biden’s 2020 presidential election victory in the state of Georgia. The pair are among 19 people charged in the case brought against state prosecutors based out of Atlanta.
Those charges are contained in one of four criminal indictments filed against Trump this year. The others charge him for his retention of classified documents after leaving the White House, hush-money payments to the adult film actor Stormy Daniels and other efforts to nullify his 2020 defeat that culminated in the January 6 attack.
Trump has denied all wrongdoing and enjoys commanding polling leads over other candidates pursuing the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.