On escaping “the family”
Cassidy Hutchinson “felt like at points Donald Trump was looking over my shoulder” as she had her first interview by Zoom with the January 6th Committee in February. She told her story in the September 14 transcript just released Thursday.
When the members began asking questions about what happened that day in the presidential limousine (“The Beast”) after Donald Trump’s Ellipse rally, the former aide to Chief of Staff Mark Meadows grew nervous, she told them. She signaled to her attorney — her first ever, supplied at no cost by unidentified persons from “Trump World” — that she needed a break.
She knew that accepting a lawyer from “Team Trump” meant she was “indebted.” But it was done. Former Trump White House ethics counsel, Stefan Passantino, was sitting beside her.
Hutchinson didn’t want to say what she’d heard from Meadows deputy Tony Ornato about the altercation in The Beast. They left the room.
And it’s, like, this little fishbowl room adjacent to Reince Priebus’s office. And once we closed the door, the glass door, I looked at Stefan, and I said, “Stefan, I am fucked.” And he was like, “Don’t freak out. You’re fine.” I said, “No, Stefan, I’m fucked. I just lied.” And he said, “You didn’t lie.”
I said, “No, Stefan. Do you know how many times they just asked me that question? I just lied.” And he said, “They don’t know what you know, Cassidy. They don’t know that you can recall some of these things. So you saying ‘I don’t recall’ is an entirely acceptable response to this.”
He’s like, “They’re prodding. They want there to be something. They don’t know that there is something. We’re not going to give them anything because this is not important. You’re doing great. You’re doing fine. You’re doing exactly what you should be doing.”
And I remember, again, we’re now at a coffee station, and I was like, “Stefan, I am fucked.” And I just remember — excuse my language, but I just remember I kept saying that, because I was so stressed and worried, but I also know in the back of my mind, I was like, this is exactly what I was worried about, which was feeling like I couldn’t be forthcoming when I wanted to be.Now, don’t get me wrong, too. Like, with or without Stefan, I don’t think that I would’ve wanted to provide information that was hurtful to the President. I mean, still to this day, like, I feel bad if he’s ever embarrassed by anything that I said, but I never wanted to lie about anything. I never would’ve covered that story up, because I knew — I knew what I was told.
And I was asked — in my mind, I was thinking, if I’m asked a very pointed question, I have to respond to very pointed questions. And if I can find a loophole to a somewhat pointed question — for example, there was one question: Did Mark ever express concerns about what was going to happen on January 6th? My mind, that loophole was: No, he didn’t express concerns. He didn’t express — it was a lack of concern. So I would rationalize certain things in my head.
But only to a point.
Before her second interview, and before Hutchinson was subpoenaed, Passantino asked her to call.
“We’re gonna get you a really good job in Trump world,” Hutchinson said Passantino told her. “You don’t need to apply other places. We’re gonna get you taken care of. We want to keep you in the family.”
Hutchinson wanted to do the next interview in person. She felt she might feel braver about breaking away from her handler with members sitting across from her. Hutchinson wanted to clarify her earlier testimony. Passantino objected and later mentioned more job leads.
So the question for me became, where do my loyalties lie? And I knew where they were, but I wasn’t equipped with people that allowed me and empowered me to be loyal to the country and to be loyal to the truth.
And whether or not what I had to share was important to the scheme of your investigation, like, I didn’t know. Again, I partially thought that it would be corroborating. I didn’t think that it would be sometimes the first that you guys had heard things or however it ended up playing out.
But, you know, I did feel like it was my obligation and my duty to share it, because I think that if you’re given a position of public power, it’s also your job, your civic responsibility, to allow the people to make decisions for themselves. And if no one’s going to do that, like, somebody has to do it.[…]
And it wasn’t just that I had Stefan sitting next to me; it was almost like I felt like I had Trump looking over my shoulder. Because I knew in some fashion it would get back to him if I said anything that he would find disloyal. And 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.
Hutchinson didn’t want to be in this position of using a Trump World attorney but could not afford her own. “Once you are looped in, especially financially with them, there sort of is no turning back.”
She’d told her mother before the first interview, “And they will ruin my life, Mom, if I do anything that they don’t want me to do.”
I don’t have a relationship with my biological father, but I went to his house one night. I drove up to New Jersey, and I went to his house one night and begged him — it’s probably one thing I regret in all of this, I wish I didn’t stoop to that level, because it was a no — but I begged him to help me.
I said I would pay him back, like, “Name your interest rate.” Like, “I just need help.” And I remember saying to him, “You have no idea what they’re going to do to me if I have to get an attorney with Trump world,” because he’s a very big Trump supporter, as is his own right, and I don’t — it’s not me being critical. It’s just a fact. And he just didn’t get it. And I didn’t expect him to. But I just left there feeling defeated.
By April she’d called a Member of Congress she trusted who warned her about being owned by the Trumpers. It worked on her.
So, as I’m driving up to Jersey, it’s like super early in the morning at this point, I start googling “Watergate.” Like there has to be somebody that participated in Watergate that either had a similar job to me and had exposure. Like how did they handle this? Like did they kind of chaff the Nixon White House?
So I’m going through. And I didn’t know that much about Watergate. I had heard John Dean’s name before, but then I come across this man named Alex Butterfield, who had — I was on the Wikipedia page, and it looked like he had a similar role and title to what I had in the White House. So I’m, in driving, sort of trying to read about him.
Then I go onto a new tab. And I’m like, this guy has got to have done something after all this. And! found that he, a couple years ago, worked on this book with Bob Woodward. And this is like the most comprehensive piece of work that he had done since he had testified to the Watergate committee at that time about 40 years ago.
So I ordered two copies of this, had them shipped to my parents’ house, and I sat there that weekend and read it. And I read it three times. I read it once. Then I read it again, underlined. And then I read it a third time, and I went through and tabbed it.
And it was after I read all of this, where he had talked about like how he fought the moral struggle, where he felt like he still had to be loyal to the Nixon White House, but he talked about a lot of the same things that I felt like I was experiencing. And, you know, it wasn’t an identical situation, but it’s — it’s the — the emphasis he placed on the moral questions that he was asking himself resonated with me.
And then, you know, he ended up testifying to the Watergate committee. And I wasn’t by no means trying to compare what I knew to what Butterfield knew at all. But he was somebody that I found and was looking at as somebody who did know things and who was loyal and who had a position that required an incredible amount of trust and confidence, but he ended up doing the right thing.And it was after I read this I was like I — if ‘m going to pass the mirror test for the rest of my life, I need to try to fix some of this.
To go around her Trump attorney, Hutchinson tried to back-channel to the committee that she had more to tell them. Even as he was working to secure her a job. When called for a third interview, Passantino urged her to refuse by “running to the right.” She risked a contempt charge, she told him. Passantino told her Republicans would take care of her, asked her to give it some thought. He would “talk to some people.”
After her May interview, Hutchinson drew the line, she told the committee:
I followed his bad legal advice; I took his bad legal advice. I will own that. But my character and my integrity mean more to me than anything. And to be held in contempt in Congress over an issue that I am passionate about and that I had been steered in what, in my opinion, was the wrong direction for the past 5 months when I was trying to correct course myself, because my lawyer, I knew, wasn’t going to help me – it was clear for a long time that he was not representing my interests in how he knew I wanted to facilitate my relationship with the committee. But I was not going to let this moment completely destroy my reputation, my character, and my integrity for a cause that I was starkly opposed to.
And that’s pretty much the end of me and Stefan. I sent him an email on Thursday, June 9th, saying that I was — I have the email, but essentially I just said, “I am ending our attorney-client relationship but still own our privilege. Please coordinate with my new attorneys, Bill Jordan and Jody Hunt of Alston & Bird.”
The rest of her story is on video, like Butterfield’s. Now Stefan Passantino is fucked.
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