Cassidy Hutchinson.Photo: Brandon Bell/Getty
Former White House aideCassidy Hutchinsontold the House committee investigating theJan. 6, 2021, Capitol riotsthat she saw her former boss, then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, burn documents in the final weeks of the Trump administration.
In newly released testimony from Hutchinson originally taken in May, the former aide alleged “there were were maybe three or four times that I am aware of that I saw him throw a few things into the fireplace,” but she “never asked” what they were.
Elsewhere in her interview with the committee, Hutchinson said: “I don’t know if they were the first or original copies of anything. It’s entirely possible that he had put things in his fireplace that he also would have put into a burn bag that there were duplicates of or that there was an electronic copy of.”
Hutchinson made headlines earlier this year with hershocking public testimonyaboutDonald Trump, but she sat for hours of recorded depositions ahead of the televised hearing.
Among the revelations she made to the committee were that Trump-allied attorneys initially represented her — which caused concern for how she would move forward outside the former president’s circle.
“I don’t like to categorize the world, the Trump world in this way, but in a lot of scenarios that I have been privy to, once you are looped in, especially financially with them, there sort of is no turning back,” Hutchinson told the committee.
Donald Trump, Cassidy Hutchinson.Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty; Brandon Bell/Getty
She claimed in her public testimony that she had heard from another staffer that Trumpphysically assaulted a Secret Service officerin an effort to get to the Capitol on Jan. 6.
Speaking under oath, Hutchinson said she heard from Trump’s head of Secret Service, Robert Engel, that the former president yelled at his security team, “I’m the f—— president, take me up to the Capitol now.”
“The president then reached up to grab at the steering wheel,” Hutchinson alleged, recalling what she was told.
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Hutchinson also described other moments of anger for Trump, telling the committee that she once walked in to a room in the White House to see a valet cleaning up after Trump had “thrown his lunch against the wall.”
“There wasketchup dripping down the wall,” she said, and a shattered porcelain plate on the ground. The valet, she testified, told her that Trump had grown angry after Attorney General Bill Barr fact-checked his false claims of election fraud in an interview with the Associated Press.
source: people.com
