We met Cassidy Hutchinson last June at a Jan. 6 committee hearing, where she publicly blew the lid off Team Trump. As I wrote back then, she “somehow survived that crime scene with her head on straight, tapping her memory under oath for the benefit of our sickened citizenry.”
But now, thanks to the committee’s release of witness transcripts, we have the back story of how Hutchinson won her self-described “moral struggle” and severed her ties to the Trump flunky-lawyer who was coaching her to bullshit the committee – in essence, how she cleansed her conscience for the greater good.
In her own words (page 66 of the Sept. 14 transcript) “The question for me became, where do my loyalties lie?” The Trump lawyer wanted her to play dumb, to tell the committee under oath that she knew nuthin’ – when, in truth, as an assistant to chief of staff Mark Meadows, she knew plenty. As she said in the transcript, she wanted “to be loyal to the country and to be loyal to the truth.” But, saddled with the Trump lawyer’s “bad legal advice,” she did not feel “empowered” to be loyal to the country or the truth. So she fired the lawyer.
Granted, the voluminous Jan. 6 report, released shortly before Christmas, is festooned with dramatic evidence of Trump’s fascist flirtations – his plot to gum up the machinery with fake elector slates, his determination to sic violent goons on the U.S. Capitol – all of which are weightier than one aide’s anguished fears of going to jail.
And, yes, I know that you’re all in a holiday mode; I know that parsing a 138-page document would be the ultimate party downer. But hey, no problem! I’ve read the whole thing so that you don’t have to. I’m ready and willing to give you the Cliff Notes version of what it’s like for a 25-year-old aide to get sucked into the MAGA maelstrom and fight her way free. It’s a sick saga unto itself, an open window into the crime family’s machinations and manipulations.
When she learned last year that the Jan. 6 committee was interested in putting her under oath, she agreed to heed a lawyer from “Trump world” (her words) because his advice was free of charge. But Stefan Passantino’s advice was to clam up. She remembered him telling her, “We want to get you in, get you out. We want to downplay your role. You were a secretary…You really have nothing to do with any of this…We’re completely happy to be taking care of you now…The less you remember, the better.” And to sweeten the deal, Trump world would set her up in a nice new job.
One particular gem of advice: “If you know something, you don’t know it.”
Did I mention that Passantino was the Trump White House’s chief ethics official?
He wanted her to not know stuff. The problem was, she knew a lot – about how the White House kept shrugging off advance warnings of Capitol violence, how Trump wanted to lead the Capitol march, how he wanted to maximize his rally crowd by letting in his weaponized fans, and so much more. Early last spring, in her initial meetings with the Jan. 6 committee, she kept saying “I don’t recall,” but that strategy discomfited her because…well…she really did recall pretty much everything.
Even worse, she admitted in her September transcript, she felt back in the early spring that “Donald Trump was looking over my shoulder. Because I knew in some fashion it would get back to him, if I said anything that he would find disployal. Snd the prospect of that genuinely scared me. You know, I’d seen this world ruin people’s lives or try to ruin people’s careers. I’d seen how vicious they can be…the level they’ll go to try to tear somebody else down.”
Nevertheless, Passantino’s advice was maddeningly consistent. When she voiced her qualms, he replied (in her recollection): “Just trust me on this. I’m your lawyer. I know what’s best for you. The less you remember, the better. Don’t read anything to try to jog your memory.”
But she came to believe that “I don’t recall” was tantamount to lying – not necessarily perjury, but something that felt horribly out of character. And things got more tense with Passantino when the committee kept asking her to return for more questioning. His advice, at that point, was that she defy the inquisitors by “running to the right” – in other words, stonewall the committee, risk a contempt citation, and let Fox News hail her as a victim. Passantino told her that a flurry of “bad press” would compel the committee to back off.
At that point, shortly before her famous public appearance, she told Passantino to take a hike. As she told the committee in September, “I took his bad legal advice (for many months). I will own that. But my character and my integrity mean more to me than anything.”
Passantino has now taken a leave of absence from his law firm, citing the “distraction” of the Hutchinson transcript. In a public statement, he insisted that he’d “honorably” and “ethically” represented her. Decide for yourself whether his claim sounds credible. And decide for yourself whether Hutchinson was right to fire him – having realized that clamming up for Trump would destroy her character. If only more Trump world denizens would conclude the same.
As a Trump world client, she kept telling herself: “I’m fucked.”
True that, Cassidy. That’s how the rest of us felt for four long years.