Ed. Note: Following is the final installment of the Cassidy Hutchinson saga, the telling and reading of the story interrupted by ongoing tragedies here and abroad. But her account remains instructive in understanding the stakes involved to Americans as we approach the upcoming presidential cycle. Donald Trump, as underscored by Hutchinson’s experiences, cannot be trusted to again become president, as he “was and continues to pose the greatest threat to our democracy,” says Hutchinson. And the MAGA tactics on display in Republicans’ challenge to choose a new Speaker, bear that out. They’re the same ones used against Hutchinson as described in this account based on her memoir, Enough — bullying, lies, and threats of reprisal were the currency of doing business in Trump World, and will return to the White House and world stage if he wins.
This posting also includes a close-up look at Hutchinson’s Trump cult father, exposing the irrationality and mania that grips those who have gone all-in with MAGA lies and promises, even to the point of pushing family away. This 10-15 minute read based on her 384-page book can shine a time-effective light on her story and the lessons it offers.
—The Resistant Grandmother (trg)
She is welcomed on the sets of “Morning Joe,” “The Beat with Ari Melber” and other programs as something of a conquering hero. Not for fighting a war in a foreign country, but for bravery on the political battlefield here at home.
As she makes the rounds publicizing "Enough,” her memoir, we’re reminded of how on that June 28, 2022 day of her testimony she stood out – alone, demure but confident, needing as much as willing to break free from the former president she once “adored.”
That contrast becomes evident in light of current politics. More than a year after her testimony, Hutchinson is all the more remarkable in that she is so dissimilar from fellow Republicans who remain firmly in Donald Trump’s grip, while the tactics used to bring her down live on within her party.
Mike America Great Again
A case in point, the Republican Congress. A small but vocal cluster within the Republican Caucus tied most to Trump has ensured one of the two legislative branch bodies remains tied to him, electing Mike Johnson as Speaker. On Jan. 6, 2020, then-Congressman Johnson voted not to certify state vote tallies after hiding with other lawmakers from the mob triggered by Trump. Trump celebrated Johnson’s promotion to Speaker by immediately baptizing him “MAGA MIKE” on a social media post.
It’s the same party DNA we see used against Hutchinson as she tries to tell the truth of Donald Trump’s White House. Pressure tactics and threats of reprisals were employed on her, minus the ongoing press coverage to expose it, but plus Rep. Liz Cheney who is no longer a voice for democracy in the House of Representatives, having been driven out.
It’s no wonder the story of a frightened but determined young woman who once belonged in Trump’s orbit is so compelling. Others in Trump’s sphere also testified – like Bill Barr, Pat Cipollone, Ivanka Trump, and Eric Herschmann. But Hutchinson’s testimony was that of a young woman, without wealth, position, or reputation behind her. As MSNBC host Rachel Maddow assessed, she was “alone in the world,” and what she did would make or break the rest of her life.
The final installment of my four-part series describes what’s happened to Hutchinson since that go/no go moment. It’s a chronicle similar to what happened to David after he took on Goliath. In this updated version, Goliath still roams free, but wounded by his own deeds and the bravery of a person who pulled free from his grip.
“Donald Trump was and continues to be the greatest threat to our democracy," she said recently to Ari Melber. Her book’s number one position on the New York Times non-fiction bestseller list suggests her voice continues to be heard.
Beginning and end
In a way, Hutchinson’s freedom story begins not with her June 28, 2022 appearance before the Select House Committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection, but on Inauguration Day, Jan. 20, 2021, as Joe Biden, whom Donald Trump had lied was an illegitimate president, took the oath of office.
Not all were in attendance at the West Front of the Capitol. Some of the new president’s people were already moving into a pre-vaccine Covid-ravaged White House. Their protective masks and plexi shields made them look like an invading Martian force to the outgoing Trump team.
On that day, the Trump White House was typically neither prepared nor inclined to welcome the Biden people, due to its ongoing chaos; “Stop theSteal!” fiction; and dysfunction, if not criminality, still transpiring within the West Wing.
For example, Hutchinson’s boss, Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, was not present to greet incoming Chief of Staff Ron Klain or even arrange to hand over the keys to his office. (Hutchinson had to find a member of the custodial staff to let him in.) The about-to-be-former Chief of Staff was in the White House Counsel’s office explaining how folders of top-secret documents related to the Mueller investigation had ended up in the hands of two alt-right media personalities, at his direction.
Having been hauled on the carpet in their waning days by White House Counsel Pat Cipollone, Meadows had been warned against treating classified information so cavalierly, and White House lawyers demanded he retrieve the folders. Meadows directed that members of his Secret Service detail go to Georgetown, find the people he gave the materials to, and return them. Coming back from their task, they handed bags full of some of the materials to Hutchinson for Meadows, but not all; they couldn’t find the rest.
The Great Declassification Race
Presumably to make the now missing documents “legal,” 15 minutes before Joe Biden took the oath of office, Meadows rushed to the DOJ, sirens blaring, to declassify the documents – and reduce legal exposure for Trump, the White House Counsel’s office, and him.
Excuses
Despite the chronic chaos, Hutchinson found leaving the White House to be a bittersweet moment for several reasons. Not just because she wasn’t extending her tenure by going to Mar-a-Lago, but because she could not continue to serve the president. Like a permissive parent with an out-of-control child, Hutchinson believed Trump was a victim of bad people around him. She could save his post-presidency by establishing order and protocol, keeping him out of trouble when others could not.
The Scarlet “L”
The week before the Inauguration, Hutchinson and others were slated for the Florida assignment. But three days before the Inauguration, Meadows told her the deal was off. Trump suspected her to be a “leaker” because the names of those following him to Mar-a-Lago had made its way into the New York Times. Trump twisted something that other presidents would see as neutral and inconsequential into something dismissal-worthy and believed Hutchinson, without evidence, the leaker.
In Part 3, TRG wondered if Hutchinson’s principled actions on two important days in Trump’s final months may have gotten back to the president and doomed the young staffer. On Dec. 18 she helped bring Meadows back to the White House to break up an insurrectionist meeting with Michael Flynn, Sidney Powell, and Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne in the Oval Office.
And on Jan. 6 she supported Secret Service and Congressional leadership’s insistence he not show up, Mussolini style, at the Capitol. Thus, Trump’s ongoing quest to ferret out “disloyalty” could have shape-shifted into the unsubstantiated accusation of “leaking” to get her out of his hair – “leaking” as code for “disloyalty,” a mortal sin in Trump World.
Within hours of leaving, Hutchinson and a few other staffers gathered to say goodbye and share where they were going. A friend assessed Hutchinson’s “no Mar-a-Lago” news was not bad at all, calling it “not a blessing in disguise, but a real blessing.” It was best to get out from under the toxic president was a common staffer trope. But Hutchinson needed more time and space to see it that way.
Hating herself
A few days later, Hutchinson turned up for bourbon and a heart-to-heart at the apartment of a friend from her days of working with the Legislature. He asked why nobody did anything to stop Trump from planning and attempting to carry out his plot to overturn the election. Looking stressed and haggard, she began to “feel shame for being part of a team that enabled Trump” to stoke violence and come close to pulling off a coup. “I detested myself”and could not look her friend in the eye. Her friend suggested she take a long vacation. “If anyone deserves it, you do, Cassidy.”
Florida bound – different coast
The next day, she made reservations at an airbnb on the Gulf Coast of Florida and drove there. Her three-week sojourn – spent running, eating healthily, and thinking while taking in colorful sunsets – gave her a “sense of contentment and glimmer of hope” she would “recover the balance she lost.”
Supported for a time by a paycheck as a Virginia-based White House transition team staffer, Hutchinson’s still insecure financial situation reflected the precarious nature of a person who did not have a wealthy family or trust fund as backstop.
That may be why the formation on July 1, 2021 of the new House Select Committee to investigate the Jan. 6 insurrection triggered opposing reactions in the former staffer: a “first stirring of hope” the former president would face accountability for his actions coupled with the growing certainty she would be subpoenaed and need a lawyer. An early January 2022 subpoena to Hutchinson and other White House staffers then validated that fear (Ch.19).
With no family lawyer and law firm waiting to spring into action on mom and dad’s tab, Hutchinson turned to former Congressional and White House associates whose jobs had put them in touch with a multitude of area lawyers. Their contacts added up to a “slim rolodex” of law firms, Hutchinson said.
One by one she called the attorneys, but none would take her case pro bono, discount their fees, or set up an income-based, low interest payment plan.
Stringing her along, one Baltimore firm said repeatedly, “We’ll get you taken care of,” but required she visit them personally the next day to talk further. Her arrival was met with an engagement letter demanding a six figure retainer to be paid in full immediately. As for discounts or pro bono possibilities, “If I didn’t have lights to keep on and employees to pay, I wouldn’t charge you at all. But unfortunately that’s just how this works,” her would-be attorney said (Ch. 20).
Unwanted strings
When asked whether the firm would accept money from a Trump-associated defense fund, the attorney reflected her own fears about such an arrangement. “They would come with unwanted stipulations.” The firm could not abide by them, he said.
With the clock ticking, and caught between the “rock” of a ruined financial future and the “hard place” fears of being beholden again to the former president, Hutchinson began another round of calling attorneys, getting nowhere.
Then a beloved “Aunt Steph” visited, offering a reconnection held back previously by a difference in politics, but now reestablished because her niece needed help. The aunt offered to refinance her home to unlock some money. But she worried the approval would not come soon enough to meet her niece’s needs.
The aunt then suggested Hutchinson approach Richard Hutchinson, her
estranged father.
“Why don’t you call him? I hear he’s come into some money.” It would not be pleasant and “you would have to grovel. But if you remain strong, maybe he would help”
(Ch. 20).
“The Shining” meets MAGA
On a cold wintry night in rural New Jersey, Hutchinson eased her car slowly over the gravel of the driveway to the shop of her father’s landscape-care business, wary of approaching too loudly. She had not seen him in years, but the first clues that things had not changed in his strange life were the unkempt yard, overturned grill, and dim light at the back entrance.
Opening the door, she had brought a box of expensive Trump-themed donor gifts for a father now firmly in the grip of the Trump cult and placed it on a work table cluttered with “oily rags and disassembled chain saws”(Feng-Shui for psychopaths?, TRG wondered) (Ch. 20).
She did not see at first, but heard him. Richard Hutchinson was making loud monkey sounds from the upper floor of the shop that looked down at the lower level where she was. Then an oddly smiling head appeared from the upper chamber before head and body suddenly dropped, monkey-like, to the floor. “Did you hear I’m wealthy now?” he asked first, showing an unawareness his daughter was there to ask for money. He had sold some property and said he had more money than he ever had in his life.
In a flash Richard Hutchinson’s odd sense of humor mutated into Jack Nicholson mania. Fanning a wad of envelopes in her face, he fired off another non-sequitur: “You’re the reason I don’t have any money. You need to help me pay these bills!”
“Ungrateful bitch”
Now more than just “uncomfortable,” Hutchinson cut to the chase: “I’ve been subpoenaed and I need money for a lawyer. I’ll pay all of it back if you would give me a loan.”
He said he had “raised me better than to betray people who cared about her” as
he had.
He didn’t raise me at all, she thought.
“Has anyone told you you’re an ungrateful bitch!” he blasted, sending his daughter into sobs on the unshiny tile floor.
Some kind of meat
That night’s encounter also included Richard Hutchinson’s leading his daughter down the steps into the shop’s dark, dank basement, filled with the innocent schoolwork her mother had lovingly pasted on the walls. But their sweet memories were juxtaposed with a pantry filled with mason jars containing nuts, preserved produce, and other things not readily identifiable, like “brown liquid and some kind of meat.”
“What is it?” she asked about one of the jars her father was handing to her. “Chopped up deer tongue. Good eating, Cissy. Try it!” he said excitedly.
Hutchinson shoved it back. He taunted. “You’re such a wimp! What’s happened
to you?”
Hutchinson bolted from the pantry, grabbed the subpoena from her coat pocket and handed it to him, making yet another plea before she would go: “Please, I just need you to listen.” He threw the subpoena in the trash and repeated the “wimp” slur, adding: “I read online you don’t have to reply to ‘Congressional subpoenas.’ That Committee is just a witch hunt to bring Donald Trump down!”
He “prayed” she was not there to “hire a corrupt lawyer. Any lawyer who does not work for Donald Trump is corrupt.”
Trying again, she pleaded: “If you cosign a loan with me you can charge me an interest rate higher than a bank.” Desperately, she even offered to work off the loan by moving back and helping him with the business. That, too, provided fodder for comfortless nonsense and Trump talking points.
“Ask Donald Trump for an attorney!” he bellowed, followed by: “If you move back with me, you wouldn’t have to comply with a subpoena. They’ll never find you here. Daddy will keep you safe,” he said, pulling her in his direction. Pushing away, she responded, “You don’t know how to love without conditions…Please, dad, let go of me! You have to let me go!” Retrieving the subpoena from the trash, she hurried out the back door to her car.
On the drive back, she evaluated her near-brush with disaster as not unlike her time in the White House: “I felt like a prisoner being handed over to another captor.”
They pulled her back in
With no family help and the clock ticking on the preparation needed to respond to her subpoena, Hutchinson returned to Washington and signed on with a Trump-paid law firm, “And just like that, I was back in the family” with her father’s notion of family and Donald Trump’s looking eerily the same.
Trump-paid lawyer Stefan Passantino, whose stated goal was, “We just want to protect the president,” was a big proponent of the “Say as little as possible” and “I don’t recall” school of how to deal with subpoenas. “If you don’t 100 percent recall something even if you don’t recall a date or somebody whom you may or may not have seen in the room, that’s an entirely fine answer, and we want you to use that response as much as you deem necessary.”
“But if I do recall something, but not every detail? Can I still say ‘I don’t recall’? Wouldn’t I be perjuring myself? (Ch.21), she asked.
He responded, “The Committee doesn’t know what you can and can’t recall, so we want you to use that as much as you can” (36, Sept. 14 Committee transcript).
Passantino’s strategy also included downplaying her White House role to insignificance. His view: “You were an assistant. You had an administrative role. You really had nothing to do with any of this.”
Hutchinson begged to use calendars, notes, timelines and other documents to refresh her memory in keeping with her personal bent for organization and belief such preparation would give credence to her testimony. But Passantino rejected her idea under “the fewer specifics the better” philosophy. “No, no, no. We just want to get you in and get you out.”
Passantino’s firm also dangled promises of future employment, vowing she would be “taken care of,” meaning she would get a good job (once she continued to testify sparingly before the Committee). But Trump’s demonization of her on social media and even the slightest signs of cooperating with the Committee doomed each prospect. Each dangled offer fell through at the last minute if they even got that far. Now, she appeared radioactive to both Trump-friendly employers as well as those who didn’t like the former president (Politico 23 jan 2021).
Becoming someone else
Hutchinson’s first two interviews before the Committee in February and March were so cryptic and full of holes she feared legal consequences and hated herself for their subtle obeisance to the former president. In reading through her depositions, she found the experience as bad as she feared it would be:
“I felt overcome by the thought that I had become someone I did not expect or want to be. There is more to the story than what is contained in these pages. I withheld information from the Committee. I protected principles, not my principles. Is it too late to fix it?” she wondered (Ch.21).
Hutchinson also feared being caught by other potential witnesses. The Committee was calling a slew of former staffers who could support or refute Hutchinson's version of events.
If the Committee could prove she had not been completely forthcoming, perjury charges could follow. Yet Hutchinson was encouraged to endure that danger by a lawyer and Trump network behind it more interested in protecting the former president than fulfilling her obligation to tell the truth.
Way out
Desperate, Hutchinson turned to former White House colleague Alyssa Farah. Farah, then a part-time consultant for CNN, had been Trump’s director of strategic communications before resigning early on Dec. 3, 2020, incurring the anger of members of the Chief of Staff’s office whom she had not alerted ahead of time. Without denouncing Trump then, she did on Jan. 8, 2021, calling for him to resign.
Swallowing her pride, Hutchinson called Farah, wanting to talk. “Alyssa, I think I’m on the wrong side of this, I’ve made some bad mistakes and I don’t know what to do.” In the comfort of Farah's Georgetown home over several glasses of wine, Farah offered to call Liz Cheney, whom she knew either from various administration jobs and/or because she was cooperating with the Committee. She’d tell Cheney Hutchinson was interested in recanting her testimony and starting over.
But they needed to be careful, so as not to tip off Trump World too quickly. Hutchinson would require another subpoena from the Committee. Without it, Passantino would reject the request.
Farah said she would reach out to Cheney to talk through next steps, but advised her guest this was a do-or-die moment. “You have to promise to be forthcoming. This is your only shot at a second chance.” Hutchinson responded: “You have my word.”
That weekend, Hutchinson headed to New Jersey to spend the weekend with her mother and stepfather, thinking that under such pressure, she needed a “guide and moral compass to remind me of what was at stake.”
Hutchinson pulled over and googled “Watergate” and discovered Alexander Butterfield, the deputy Chief of Staff in the Nixon White House who had testified against that president in the Watergate investigations. She bought two copies of the book on Butterfield written by Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward. From then on, Butterfield would serve as inspiration. Butterfield believed he had a greater obligation to his country and Constitution than to Richard Nixon. Hutchinson would then use Butterfield’s choice as her north star for what she needed to do.
Third deposition as turning point
With Passantino at her side, Hutchinson sat for a third deposition. It was an experiment of sorts as to whether their relationship as witness and attorney would work, and it would prove it would not.
Passantino was aghast the Committee and its vice-chair “knew so much” since their last outing. Cheney asked pointed questions about Trump’s reaction to the calls to “hang Mike Pence,” Mark Meadows’ taking home sensitive national security documents, Trump’s knowledge about the vast amounts of weaponry around the capital, Congressional reps wanting pardons, and the Jan. 2 Georgia call.
Afterwards, Cheney and Hutchinson hugged, exchanging whispers of “Thank you” and “I’m trying to do the right thing.” Cheney’s deputy Dan George walked Hutchinson and her lawyer out, promising that another session was in the offing, this time live.
Lies and old fashioneds
During dinner afterwards, Passantino left the table and called Mark Meadows’ lawyers and Eric Herschmann to fill them in, without describing exactly what he said to them when he rejoined his client. Generally, he urged her to stop cooperating with the Committee, incurring the “small risk”of going to jail. Hutchinson indulged in the comfort of old fashioneds to steady her nerves.
Passantino never answered her subsequent text questions about his strategy, even though it posed harm to her reputation and risked prison time. Following that final test, Hutchinson texted Cheney who called soon after. Hutchinson said she would be happy to cooperate in a fourth deposition, held live, but could no longer trust Passantino as her lawyer. Given her financial condition, she would be willing to represent herself if no suitable attorney could be found.
In a voice clearly suggesting “no” to self-representation, Cheney promised she would confer with Committee colleagues and call back quickly, as the window was closing on Hutchinson’s ability to switch lawyers safely and efficiently.
Steeped in the kind of Republicanism that existed as the norm before Donald Trump, Cheney in her sleep could offer the names of the most respected and best connected attorneys in the business. And she did, providing a list of the best-of-the-best to Hutchinson whose task then was to get busy and call.
New lawyers
On a drive to New Jersey to visit her mother and stepfather, Hutchinson pulled over into a Wendy’s parking lot and took the first callback from the list of names Cheney provided. Attorneys Jody Hunt and Bill Jordan of the Alston Bird firm were the first to call back. Their rapport was immediate. Hutchinson knew instantly they would best help “navigate the storm” as she would reveal new details about Donald Trump's role on Jan. 6 (Ch. 22).
The sprawling, wealthy, and well-connected Alston and Bird firm could afford to take on Hutchinson on a feeless, pro-bono basis. “We know no young person like yourself could afford the kind of legal fees” associated with this project, Jordan assured her in their first conversation, validating for Hutchinson a reality she had known for
too long.
They also had a respect for the Department of Justice, a player in Hutchinson’s future witness obligations. They had served in the DOJ’s civil litigation division before joining Alston Bird before the waning years of the Trump administration. They knew how best to work with the DOJ, and oppose it when mounting a client’s defense.
Unlike the Trump-paid attorneys, Hunt and Jordan were fastidious, where Trump's people avoided details. Where the Alston Bird team respected the Committee, the Trump people gamed it, engendering distrust on both sides. And where they were honest with Hutchinson, the Trump lawyers dangled jobs that never panned out, refused to openly discuss the pros and cons of their ideas with their client, and worked behind her back with lawyers harboring different Trump-related clients
and aims.
Protectors
To this writer, Hunt and Jordan became the father figures Hutchinson had not had or found in either her biological father or the man she once “adored,” the former president. They protected her from violence, mitigated financial challenges, and supported her quest to tell the whole truth in her testimony. They provided a needed change from a personal and professional life filled too often with fear and distrust.
The Hero
To this former English teacher, it’s also hard not to see in Hutchinson’s journey the literary parallels to heroes down through time. As Hutchinson has become an icon to many, a symmetry appears to great epic hero traits described in stories like the Odyssey and Beowulf across the millenia: bravery (check); a battle of good versus evil (check); stepping up to protect values and country when others won’t (check – see Mark Meadows); a descent into confusion and depression (a wilderness) helped by someone who is judicious and all-seeing (check – see Liz Cheney); and an emergence as stronger and wiser because of their quest (check).
Those heroes became leaders of countries and great religions, while Hutchinson has so far received adulation in everyday terms: grocery store customers sobbing “thank you” in the checkout line, and a dad at a ball game reaching over rows of spectators attempting a hug or to rub her shoulders (undetermined) while declaring she’s kept his children from growing up in a fascist state.
But a new puppy and return to her beloved Washington are keeping her grounded as Hutchinson plans her next chapter, whatever that is. One idea shared recently on Ari Melber was that she wants to help people like her – whistleblowers and other truth-tellers – make similar transitions. What this would look like, exactly, remains ambiguous. But it sounds like she will remain on the forefront of creating a brave new world.
–trg
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