Cassidy Hutchinson, the former aide to Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, whose explosive testimony marked a signal moment in the January 6 Committee hearings, says she’s coming out of hiding to oppose the former president, whom she calls “dangerous to democracy.”
In an interview that aired Sunday morning, CBS’s Tracy Smith asked Hutchinson whether she was driven away from public life by threats and harassment following her June 2022 testimony. “You were in hiding? You are in hiding?” Smith asked. “Were-slash-are-slash-coming-out of hiding,” Hutchinson replied.
“My life changed – the way that I was living my life – for a while,” Hutchinson said. “I could not go back to my apartment. I ended up moving down to Atlanta for several months.”
“I go out in limited capacities,” she added. “Part of it is for security.”
In the interview, Hutchinson described her feelings before her testimony before the January 6 Committee, in which she alleged that Donald Trump knew about the potential for his supporters to turn violent on January 6.
“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 Smith. “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 defended a crucial part of the testimony she gave the committee, in which she said she heard secondhand a story about Trump lunging to the front of his limo on January 6 and attempting to steer it to the Capitol. “I know what I recall,” she said. “I stand by what I testified to.”
The Sunday interview offers a preview of Hutchinson’s forthcoming book, Enough, to be released on Tuesday by Simon and Schuster. Already, some details are making waves. The former aide recalls Meadows torching so many documents in the fireplace of his home that his wife complained to her about the cost of dry-cleaning the “bonfire” smell from her husband’s work attire, as The New York Times first reported on Saturday.
The book also contains new details about the turmoil that engulfed the White House following the Capitol siege. Hutchinson reportedly writes that she encountered My Pillow founder and arch-conspiracist Mike Lindell wandering around the White House unattended on January 15, declaring, “We can still win.” Hutchinson also reportedly saw Florida Representative Matt Gaetz arrive at the White House without an appointment to ask Meadows for a presidential pardon, according to the Times.
Perhaps the most shocking detail yet revealed last week, when The Guardian reported that Hutchinson’s new book alleges that Rudy Giuliani groped her on January 6. “I feel his frozen fingers trail up my thigh,” Hutchinson writes. “He tilts his chin up. The whites of his eyes look jaundiced. My eyes dart to [Trump adviser] John Eastman, who flashes a leering grin.”
Along with Trump, both Giuliani and Eastman were indicted in Georgia last month in Fani Willis’s investigation into the Trump campaign’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election. CBS reported that Hutchinson had testified in the Georgia grand jury investigation and Jack Smith’s federal investigation into the former president’s election overturning efforts.
“In my mind at the time,” she told the Times, “I felt like January 6 largely happened because we didn’t do enough to stop it.”
Jack McCordick
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