Cassidy Hutchinson’s account of Donald Trump’s behavior destroys any defense the president once had.
Updated at 6:28 p.m. ET on June 28, 2022.
Donald Trump knew the protesters marching on the Capitol on January 6 were armed. He knew they could do harm to someone. He wanted to go to the Capitol with them as they marched that afternoon. And he did nothing to stop them as they attacked.
These are the stark and rattling takeaways from today’s hearing of the House committee investigating former President Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election, which centered on first-person accounts from the former Trump aide Cassidy Hutchinson, who was deep inside the president’s inner sanctum in the days leading up to the insurrection and that day.
By the morning of January 6, Trump’s attempts to steal the election had largely failed. Every lawsuit had foundered, every state-level ploy seemed to have stalled, and Vice President Mike Pence had declared that he would not engage in chicanery concocted by the attorney John Eastman and his confederates. There was one last hope: somehow disrupting Congress’s certification of the result.