Still plenty of leftover thoughts about and reactions to Tuesday’s Jan. 6 House select committee hearings. Cassidy Hutchinson, a former aide of Donald Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows, made several blockbuster claims in her testimony, most notably that the former president was aware the crowd that gathered in the nation’s capital that day was armed and could turn violent, but he wasn’t concerned because he knew he would not be harmed. He also wanted to go to the Capitol and became furious when the Secret Service would not take him there.
There was lots more, but those appeared to be the two highlights. The New York Times’ Carl Hulse had a solid roundup with “Six takeaways from Cassidy Hutchinson’s explosive testimony.”
The question now is: Where is all this leading?
Depending on which side of the political divide you sit, you may see these hearings as absolute proof that Trump incited a mob in an attempted coup or that these hearings are much ado about nothing — the latter is how the right is spinning it, anyway. (In fact, The Associated Press’ David Bauder writes, “During two daytime hearings last week, Fox averaged 727,000 viewers, the Nielsen company said. That compares to the 3.09 million who watched the hearings on MSNBC and the 2.21 million tuned in to CNN.”)
But the real question is what Attorney General Merrick Garland and the Justice Department think of what we’re seeing.
In other words, is Trump going to be charged at the end of all this?
The headline on Devlin Barrett’s piece for The Washington Post: “Hutchinson provided ‘nuggets’ for Justice’s criminal probe, experts say.” David Laufman, a former senior Justice Department lawyer, told Barrett that Hutchinson’s testimony “contained credible nuggets of information that would support” a prosecution of Trump. Laufman added, “This witness provided credible testimony under oath, attributing foreknowledge of the impending violence to the president. Whether at the end of the day the department can conclude it can prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Trump joined a conspiracy remains to be seen, because there may well be an extraordinarily high bar for prosecutors and department leadership to satisfy that standard.”
There has been no shortage of opinions in the day since Hutchinson’s powerful testimony.
One of the aftershocks involves something that Hutchinson testified to — that on Jan. 6, Trump wanted to go to the Capitol and, when the Secret Service told him no, Trump tried to grab the wheel of the car and then lunged at a Secret Service agent. Within a few hours of that testimony, several news outlets reported that a “person familiar” with the events that day said there were some in the Secret Service who were willing to testify that those incidents did not happen.
A spokesperson for the Secret Service told Politico, “(W)e were not asked to reappear before the Committee in response to yesterday’s new information and we plan on formally responding on the record. We have and will continue to make any member of the Secret Service available.”
Washington Post columnist Greg Sargent wrote that Trump apologists are jumping on this. Sargent wrote, “They are claiming Hutchinson’s appearance was a flop, based on the fact that a single anecdote about Trump — one barely related to the central allegations against him — is now being questioned by a handful of bit players in this saga who aren’t even offering this pushback publicly, let alone under oath. In addition to providing an object lesson in how pro-Trump propaganda functions, this buffoonery reveals just how weak Trump’s defenses have become. The pushback is shriveling into meaningless trivialities even as the enormity of this scandal grows overwhelming.”
Aside from the truly dangerous attempts to fight the peaceful transfer of power and not recognize a fairly held election that is key to our democracy, there were notable images from Hutchinson’s testimony that highlighted Trump’s fly-off-the-handle anger, including throwing a plate against a wall.
In an analysis piece for The New York Times, Peter Baker wrote, “A president who liked to describe himself as a ‘very stable genius’ was anything but that as Ms. Hutchinson observed in those final, frenzied days of his time in office. Hers was not a description that surprised many of those who worked for Mr. Trump and had seen him up close in the preceding four years, or for that matter, many who had known him in the decades that preceded his life in politics. But hearing her recount it all under oath, on live television, brought home how much Mr. Trump and his White House spiraled in its perilous last chapter.”
Baker quoted former Trump White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham as saying, “His temper was scary. And swift. He’d snap and almost lose control.”
Do you have any ketchup?
Hutchinson testified about the time Trump threw a lunch plate and left a trail of ketchup running down the wall. This happened on Dec. 1, 2020, as, apparently, Trump was furious that then-Attorney General William Barr told The Associated Press that there was no evidence of widespread voter fraud that could change the outcome of the 2020 election.
The Associated Press’ David Bauder has a good recap of that Dec. 2020 AP scoop and the fallout over it. Bauder writes, “The story had been written by AP Justice Department reporter Michael Balsamo, who had been told a day earlier that Barr wanted him to come in for lunch. In videotaped testimony to the committee, Barr said that he ‘felt it was time to say something’ about the voter fraud claims. Recognizing the importance of the statement when Barr said the department had uncovered no evidence of voter fraud, Balsamo asked him to repeat it, and he did. He quickly filed his story from an office in the Justice Department when lunch was over.”
Hmm, wonder if Trump waited until his lunch was over before he threw his plate against the wall?
A timeline