When the House Select Committee on January 6, 2021 begins their public hearings next Thursday evening, June 9, one of the names you’ll probably hear quite often is Cassidy Hutchinson, who served as a top aide to former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows.
Hutchinson is being billed as “the next John Dean,” a reference to the former Nixon administration White House counsel who blew the whistle on Watergate and the cover-up that eventually led to Richard Nixon’s resignation on August 4, 1974.
Dean, you may recall, famously told the Watergate committee that he had informed Nixon:
“I began by telling the president that there was a cancer growing on the presidency and that if the cancer was not removed the president himself would be killed by it.”
What Cassidy Hutchinson knows could well prove to be just as explosive as what Dean said nearly 50 years ago, the Washington Post reports:
Cassidy Hutchinson, a top aide to then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, has sat for multiple depositions with investigators — more than 20 hours — and is expected to play a starring role in the hearings, according to people familiar with the matter. Hutchinson, people familiar with the committee said, has provided extensive information about Meadows’s activities in trying to overturn the election.
Meadows, through his lawyer, declined to provide comment.
The Washington Post reported late last month that Hutchinson had told the committee that Meadows remarked to others that Trump indicated support for hanging his vice president after rioters who stormed the Capitol on that day started chanting, “Hang Mike Pence!”
How important is Hutchinson’s testimony? So much so that Norm Eisen, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who also served as counsel to House Democrats for Trump’s first impeachment trial, notes:
“Cassidy Hutchinson might turn out to be the next John Dean.”
Hutchinson also took extensive notes of what happened inside the White House on the day the Capitol was stormed by thousands of pro-Trump supporters, and those documents could prove incredibly damaging to Meadows and Trump, both of whom are facing indictment by the Justice Department for their role in Jan. 6:
Hutchinson has recalled for the committee various episodes in the chaotic scramble to sustain Trump’s election-fraud falsehood.A former mid-level aide,she kept detailed schedules of movements in the West Wingand had extensive conversations with Meadows.
Court filings show Hutchinson detailinga meeting in the lead-up to Jan. 6 between Meadows and House Republican lawmakers in which they discussed delaying the Joint Session of Congress — or altogether preventing the counting of electoral votes — so that state legislatures could select different electors.
The Jan. 6 committee will hold six public hearings, with the first and last ones being in primetime, which is certain to make for riveting television and sleepless nights for the Donald and many of his former advisers.
