Deposition Transcript #1 — Cassidy Hutchinson Part 1

From the deposition transcripts that the Select Committee just released, more is known about what Cassidy Hutchinson knew about what led up to the day of the insurrection. In part one of her testimony on September 14, 2022, she comes clean with the committee after having a moment of clarity in which she admitted to herself that she had become someone she didn’t like after accepting help from Trump for legal representation after receiving a subpoena from the Select Committee. She was scared to death. She was under so much pressure from Trump and his men that she felt like he was always looking over her shoulder. She got the message loud and clear that she better stay in line and since she was unemployed and had no way of paying for an attorney to advise her, she felt like she had no choice but to accept a lawyer from Trump. She wouldn’t have to pay anything and they’d take care of everything. His name was Stefan Passantino. He wouldn’t tell her how he was getting paid and he didn’t have her sign an engagement letter which is standard practice. He told her that their strategy was that they were going to downplay her role in everything — she was just a lowly secretary and didn’t know what was going on. He knew all about the White House’s involvement in the march to the Capitol on January 6 and that Mark Meadows was involved in choosing speakers for the Stop the Steal rally before the march. He told Cassidy not to say anything about what she knew. To make that easier for her, he forbade her from looking at calendars to refresh her memory and he sprung things on her at the last minute so she’d get rattled and not recall things. That helped her to “not remember” when asked. He passed a message on to her from her former boss, Mark Meadows, saying we know you’re loyal and want to keep you in the family. Others told her that too. He told her to say “I don’t recall” when answering questions by the Select Committee. He assured her that not recalling was not the same as lying. She wanted to believe that so she went ahead and said she didn’t recall an awful lot. He instructed her not to tell the committee anything about Trump’s deputy chief of staff, Tony Ornato telling her that Trump choked a member of the Secret Service after he told him he wouldn’t take him to the Capitol. He promised her a job in Trump world. She was really trapped. She went along with what he told her to do until she couldn’t live with herself anymore. She was ashamed of herself and broke down. She couldn’t pass the mirror test so she researched Watergate and found out what people did to redeem themselves. She decided to become a whistleblower. She came clean and cut Stefan loose. She got another pro bono lawyer that wasn’t beholden to the Trump crime family. She went back to the Select Committee with a confession and a new flash drive with documents they had asked for in case the one she gave Stefan to give to them had been changed in anyway. She told the committee that Trump read all the transcripts of the people who testified because he paid for their lawyers.

When Trump yelled out, “We should have made more calls!” on December 11, Cassidy says she thinks he was referring to the Supreme Court and Ken Paxton, the attorney general of Texas.

Kevin McCarthy called Cassidy before the insurrection to ask her what Mark Meadows was was up to. He said Trump knows he lost so why is he playing around with the idea that he didn’t lose? Meadows must be giving him bad advice. He wanted her to tell him to to stop feeding him bad ideas. He called her again to ask her if they were planning on taking people up to the Capitol when they were certifying the vote and she assured him there was no plan for that.

Cassidy overheard Trump ask Mark Meadows and Marjorie Taylor Greene while they were all on Air Force One on January 4 if they thought they’d really be able to pull it off on January 6 and they assured him they would.