Former aide: Trump told protesters they had guns on Jan 6

Cassidy Hutchinson, Donald Trump’s top adviser in the White House, told a House committee investigating the violent uprising on January 6, 2021, that Trump supporters told him in the morning that he had a gun, but he told the people . in” and a walk to the Capitol.

Trump demanded to accompany them, he said, and at one point aggressively took the wheel of the presidential limousine after security officials told him he was not safe. Hutchinson, who was an adviser to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, said Representative Meadows told him that.

He said he wasn’t sure what he was going to do on Capitol Hill when a violent mob of his supporters stormed in. There were rumors that he was “entering the room at one point,” Hutchinson said.

Hutchinson cited Trump instructing his staff, in profane language, to collect metal-detecting magnetometers that he felt would slow supporters gathered in Washington. Speaking to the committee, he recalled the former president saying, “I don’t care if they have guns.”

“They didn’t come here to hurt me. Get the damn wizards. Release my people. “They can go from here to the Capitol,” Hutchinson said.

As Trump spoke to thousands of supporters behind the White House on Ellipse, and more gathered in the Washington Monument area, Hutchinson said he received an angry phone call from minority leader Kevin McCarthy, who had just heard the president say he was coming. Capitol. “Don’t come here,” McCarthy said before hanging up.

In the days leading up to the attack, Hutchinson said he was “scared and nervous about what could happen” ahead of the riots, after speaking with Trump’s attorney Rudy Julian, Meadows and others.

Meadows told Hutchinson that “things can go very wrong,” he said. Julian told her it was going to be a “wonderful day” and “we’re going to the Capitol”. He described Meadows as “concerned” because security officials told him people at Trump’s rally had guns, including people in armor and automatic weapons.

A month earlier, Hutchinson said he heard the noise at the White House when an Associated Press article was published in which then-Attorney General William Barry said the Justice Department had been unable to find evidence of voter fraud that could affect the results. elections.

He said he entered the room and noticed ketchup dripping on the wall and broken china. It turns out that the president threw his lunch at the wall in disgust at the article and asked him to avoid it.

The 25-year-old, who was a special assistant and adviser to Trump’s former chief of staff, Mark Meadows, has already briefed congressional investigators and stayed behind closed doors for four interviews. But the committee convened a hearing this week to hear his public testimony.

Mississippi Representative Benny Thompson, chairman of the committee, said in recent days that the panel had been briefed on what Trump and his aides were saying during the critical hours of Jan. 6 and that it was crucial that the American people hear that information. immediately. .

Committee vice chair Liz Cheney of Wyoming said the hearing shed light on Trump’s behavior at the time, the “actions and statements” of top advisers, as well as what they knew about the possibility of violence in the preceding days. . He told the panel in previous interviews that Meadows had been warned of a possible disturbance.

His appearance was shrouded in mystery. The committee announced a surprise hearing just 24 hours in advance, while Hutchison’s appearance was confirmed to the Associated Press only by a person familiar with the matter.

While it’s unclear what new evidence Tuesday may provide, Hutchinson’s testimony will likely tell the first story of Trump’s lobbying campaign and how the former president responded after the violence erupted, more clearly than other witnesses called by Mr. Trump. Before.

In brief excerpts of testimony revealed in court documents, Hutchinson told the committee he was in a White House meeting room where electoral challenges were discussed and debated, including with several Republican lawmakers. In one case, Hutchinson described seeing Meadows burning documents after a meeting with Representative Scott Perry in his office, a restaurant, Politico reported in May.

It also revealed that the White House attorney’s office had warned of schemes to register fake voters in undecided states, including meetings attended by Meadows and Trump’s attorney, Rudy Julian. The president’s lawyers warned that the plan was “not legally feasible,” Cassidy said.

During the three separate depositions, Hutchinson also testified about his boss’s unexpected trip to Georgia a few weeks after the election to oversee an audit of missing ballot envelope signatures and ask questions about the process.

He also described how Jeffrey Clark, a senior Justice Department official who supported Trump’s false election fraud allegations and whose name the president was considering as attorney general, was a “frequent presence” at the White House.

The conspiracy to remove then-Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen was uncovered on January 3, 2021, during an Oval Office meeting, when other Justice Department officials warned Trump that he would resign if he implemented a plan to replace Rosen. With Clark.

He did not explain to the House panel why he had scheduled a surprise hearing at 1 pm, when lawmakers were leaving Washington for a two-week recess. The committee said last week that there would be no further hearings until July.

The exact topic of Tuesday’s hearing is still unclear, but the panel said on Monday that it would be “presenting newly obtained evidence and taking witness statements”. A panelist declined to provide details and Hutchinson’s attorney did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment.

A person familiar with the committee’s plans to call Hutchinson was unable to discuss the matter publicly and spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity.

The nine-member committee’s investigation continued during a hearing that began three weeks ago to attack Trump supporters. Among the evidence, the committee recently obtained footage of Trump and his entourage, taken before and after January 6 by British filmmaker Alex Holder.

Holder said last week that he responded to a request by Congress to transfer all the footage he had taken in the final weeks of Trump’s 2020 re-election campaign, including exclusive interviews with Trump, his children and then-Vice President Mike Pence.

Mississippi spokesman Benny Thompson, the panel’s Democratic chairman, told reporters last week that the committee owned the footage and needed more time to spend hours on video.

The panel has held five hearings so far, largely reflecting Trump’s lobbying campaign on various institutions of power in the weeks leading up to a joint session of Congress, when hundreds of Republican supporters violently shoved police and stormed the building. And it prevented Democrat Joe Biden from certifying victory in the presidential election.

The committee used the hearings to pressure Trump and his allies over Pence, the states that confirmed Biden’s victory and the Justice Department. The panel used live interviews, video testimonies from their surveyed personal witnesses, and footage from the attack to describe in detail what they learned.

Lawmakers said last week that the July 2 hearing would focus on the domestic extremists who stormed the Capitol that day and what Trump was doing during the violence.