The House Jan. 6 committee is holding a hearing Tuesday to present “recently obtained evidence” and hear witness testimony from Cassidy Hutchinson, a top aide to former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows.
The unexpected hearing was announced Monday, just days after the committee had said it would be taking a two-week hiatus and have the final two hearings in July.
“Up until this point, we’ve shown the inner workings of what was essentially a political coup,” committee chair Rep. Bennie Thompson said in his opening statement.
“According to committee court filings reviewed by CBS News, she was in the room for key meetings in those chaotic days before January 6th,” CBS News’ Scott MacFarlane reports.
The committee has already played video snippets from Hutchinson’s previous testimony, including when she told them that Republican Reps. Matt Gaetz and Mo Brooks had advocated for “blanket” pardons for members of Congress involved in a Dec. 21 meeting as “preemptive pardons.”
“Mr. Gaetz was personally pushing for a pardon, and he was doing so since early December,” Hutchinson said. “I’m not sure why.”
In a partial transcript of an February interview with the panel, Hutchinson said Anthony Ornato, a senior Secret Service official who was detailed to the White House and served as deputy chief of operations, brought Meadows intelligence reports that “indicated that there could be violence on the 6th,” but she was not sure what he did with the information internally.
In the March interview with the committee, Hutchinson told investigators she heard the White House counsel’s office say the plan to have alternate electors meet and cast votes for Trump in states he lost was not legally sound.
Pat Cipollone, the White House counsel, warned about the legality of the fake-electors scheme in a meeting with Meadows, Giuliani and his “associates” in a meeting that took place around early- to mid-December, she said. Hutchinson was also inclined to say that Pat Philbin, deputy counsel to the president, was also warning Meadows about this, but she wasn’t sure.
She said the White House counsel’s office also raised issues with the lawfulness of the alternate electors plan in meetings with members of Congress, also in early- to mid-December. She recalled Perry and Reps. Matt Gaetz and Louie Gohmert being at the meetings and “pushing back a little bit.”
In addition to saying the plan to have alternate electors meet and vote for Trump was not legally sound, the White House counsel’s office also said the strategy pushed by John Eastman, a conservative lawyer, to have former Vice President Mike Pence count the fake electoral votes was not legally sound, Hutchinson said.
She told investigators that nonetheless, members of the Freedom Caucus and incoming Republican lawmakers participated in a meeting, either in-person or on the phone, during which they discussed Pence’s role on Jan. 6 and still felt “that he had the authority to … send votes back to the states or the electors back to the states, more along the lines of the Eastman theory.”
According to the partial transcript from her March interview, Hutchinson said Meadows was “frequently” in touch with Jeffrey Clark, a Justice Department lawyer who supported efforts to challenge the election results.
She recalled Clark attending meetings with Giuliani and visited the White House for meetings with Trump.
The last committee hearing focused on Clark, an environmental lawyer who Trump wanted to install at the helm at the Justice Department in the weeks after Election Day.
Installing Clark and the pressure campaign on the Justice Department amounted to “essentially a political coup,” Thompson said Thursday.
Previous public hearings focused on Trump and inner circle’s pressure campaign against Pence, state lawmakers and local elections officials.
