At the time, she was the assistant to Mark Meadows, the chief of staff of the American president, and her office was a few meters from the Oval Office.
On Tuesday, the young woman revealed the precise actions and gestures of the former president on this day when American democracy trembled. Opponents of the billionaire now hope that this testimony will lead to criminal prosecution.
“It is irrefutable evidence” which establishes “a well-founded accusation of his guilt in the sedition prosecution”, indicated in the New York Times Sol Wisenberg, a former collaborator of the prosecutor Kenneth Starr during the impeachment trial of Bill Clinton.
In front of elected officials, Cassidy Hutchinson portrayed a president unable to accept his defeat and ready to do anything to stay in power. She also offered what the commission has lacked so far: direct testimony that Donald Trump knew his accusations of voter fraud were false and that, aware of potential violence from his supporters, he encouraged them to march on the Congress.
– Broken dishes –
On January 6, he would have tried without success to take the wheel of the presidential car from an agent of his protection service to go to the Capitol.
For David Greenberg, professor of journalism at Rutgers-New Brunswick University, the statements of the young woman are “fascinating and revealing”.
History will remember “his vivid description of the ketchup running down the wall and the broken dishes, the result of a fit of anger from Mr. Trump”, he told AFP.
It also, he said, showed that Mr. Trump “was ready to unleash armed protesters on the Capitol.”
Cassidy Hutchinson said the ex-president knew his supporters were armed when he called on them to march on Congress and “fight like hell” to stop elected officials from certifying Joe Biden’s victory.
His testimony is “credible, frightening and very damaging to the ex-president and his allies”, said Mike Hernandez, political analyst for the television channel Telemundo 51.
“While this won’t change Republican opinion, it may convince some not to make Mr. Trump the party’s 2024 nominee,” he told AFP.
The assault on the Capitol was described as spontaneous, but the young woman stressed that Donald Trump’s plans to join his supporters were premeditated.
White House legal adviser Pat Cipollone reportedly told him to make sure the presidential motorcade didn’t leave the presidency or they would be “prosecuted for every possible crime”.
Some US media reported that the President’s protection officers in the car may deny his account to the commission.
– “She saw it all” –
Prior to her appearance before the commission, Cassidy Hutchinson was unknown to the general public.
His loyalty to the former Republican president does not seem to be in question. Donald Trump himself claimed that she was “a huge Trump fan long after January 6”.
Born in New Jersey, she studied political science in Virginia before working as a parliamentary assistant to elected Republicans.
She joined the parliamentary affairs department of the White House and then, in March 2020, joined the team of Mark Meadows.
Thanks to her daily reports with elected officials and White House officials, she was “in a position to know a lot of things within” the presidency, explained Liz Cheney, an elected Republican member of the commission.
Alyssa Farah Griffin, former White House communications director, told CNN that she knows most of the Republican Party officials in Congress personally.
“She was texting them, so she saw it all,” she said.
Donald Trump, on the contrary, denounced Tuesday on his social network Truth Social the “completely bogus” testimony of a “lower-ranking” collaborator.
