WASHINGTON — The Jan. 6 committee investigating Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn democracy to remain in power showed its reach into the highest levels of his White House Tuesday, with the surprise testimony of a top aide to Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows.
With less than 24 hours of notice, the panel convened a previously unannounced public hearing featuring Cassidy Hutchinson, Meadows’ executive assistant with full access to the West Wing and who had been with Meadows the day the mob spurred by the president attacked the Capitol to block the certification of 2020 election winner Joe Biden.
Hutchinson has previously provided hours of videotaped testimony and is a likely source of facts already alluded to by committee members, including Meadows’ burning of documents in a fireplace and Trump’s view that perhaps his supporters were correct and that his own vice president, Mike Pence, deserved to be hanged for not obeying Trump’s demands.
The committee originally laid out a schedule of seven hearings, all in a two-week period in June, but reserved the possibility of additional ones if warranted. Last week, though, Mississippi Democrat Bennie Thompson, the committee’s chair, said the panel needed to sort through a great deal of new evidence and would take a break coinciding with the congressional July 4 recess, with hearings resuming in mid-July.
That plan was changed suddenly on Monday afternoon, with the emailed announcement of another hearing Tuesday to “present recently obtained evidence” and “receive witness testimony,” but with no other information.
Committee staff did not schedule a conference call to preview the hearing for reporters, as it has for the previous ones, and committee members avoided media interviews. It was not until late Monday night that Hutchinson’s name leaked via the news site Punchbowl News, which reported that the secrecy was in part for her own safety.
Over the first four hearings, the committee presented new video of the pro-Trump mob at the Capitol; evidence that Trump had been told by his own staff that he had lost the 2020 election but continued with his lies about “voter fraud” anyway; the pressure Trump applied on Pence to simply declare him the winner during the Jan. 6 certification ceremony; and the attempts to coerce officials in states narrowly won by Biden, especially Georgia, to reverse the election results in favor of Trump.
Last Thursday’s hearing, the fifth since they began on June 9, focused on Trump’s attempt to subvert the Justice Department into falsely backing his claims of a “stolen” election.
Trump, despite losing the election by 7 million votes nationally and 306-232 in the Electoral College, became the first president in more than two centuries of elections to refuse to hand over power peacefully. His incitement of the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol — his last-ditch attempt to remain in office — killed five, including one police officer, injured another 140 officers and led to four police suicides.
Nevertheless, Trump remains the dominant figure in the Republican Party and is openly speaking about running for the presidency again in 2024.
In statements on his personal social media platform, Trump has continued to lie about the election and the Jan. 6 committee’s work, calling it a “hoax” similar to previous investigations into his 2016 campaign’s acceptance of Russian assistance and his attempted extortion of Ukraine into helping his 2020 campaign.