ByJean Godden in the Post Alley Newsletter
Weeks before that testimony, Hutchinson, former aide to Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows, looked critically at herself in the mirror and took stock. What she saw was disturbing. Unwilling to see herself taking the easy way out – accepting a Trump-paid lawyer who coached her to respond saying “I don’t recall” — she sought help. First she turned to a friend and former colleague, Alyssa Farah, who introduced her to January 6 committee vice chair Liz Cheney, R-Wyoming. It was Cheney who helped Hutchinson locate her own lawyers.
The lawyers, Jody Hunt and Bill Jordan of Alston & Bird, gave Hutchinson the courage to tell her story. Her riveting testimony has done more than any other account to place Donald Trump in legal jeopardy. She told about her 20 months working inside a chaotic White House, overhearing the acrimony and venom of the 45th president.
Prompted by questioning from Cheney, Hutchinson walked the committee through January 6 events, beginning when Trump had insisted that security magnetometers at the Ellipse speech, meant to detect guns, be taken down because “they’re [the protesters] not there to harm me.” She related how Trump, told by the Secret Service that he wouldn’t be driven to the Capitol, had lunged for the steering wheel of his car. She told of Trump saying Vice President Mike Pence “deserved to be hanged.” She told about Trump hurling his plate at the wall after hearing that Attorney General William Barr said Trump had lost the election. But mostly she explained how the U. S. Capitol was breached and trashed for the sake of a lie that Trump himself admitted to Mark Matthews he didn’t believe. (Trump said, “I don’t want people to believe we lost, Mark.”)
Hutchinson’s memoir, written with collaborator Mark Salter, shares her life story growing up in a working-class family, where her father was a self-employed landscape architect who loved watching Trump on “The Apprentice.” Raised in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, Cassidy –“Cass” to her friends — attended a small college in Virginia, majoring in political science. She graduated with a thirst for working in politics. When she was a sophomore in 2017, Hutchinson had attended a Trump rally seated six rows from the stage with “people I felt I could relate to.” (Continued)