Cassidy Hutchinson asked for financial help from her father, a Trump supporter, to get her own lawyer from outside the former president’s orbit, but her father refused to help her, a transcript of her testimony shows.
“I was communicating with my aunt and uncle, who I had not spoken with in years because they are QAnon fans, but they were looking to [refinance] their house to free up money so I could not have to go back to Trump world. They understood why I didn’t want to,” the former aide to Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows told the committee.
She added, according to the transcript released by the panel: “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.’”
Ms Hutchinson continued: “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 ... 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.”
Ms Hutchinson, a key witness in the January 6 investigation, also told the panel that she started “googling Watergate” hoping to find guidance on how to deal with the situation.
“As I’m driving up to Jersey, it’s like super early in the morning at this point, I start googling ‘Watergate.’ There has to be somebody that participated in Watergate that either had a similar job to me and had exposure. How did they handle this? Did they kind of chaff the Nixon White House?” she said.
“I didn’t know that much about Watergate. I had heard [Nixon White House Counsel] John Dean’s name before, but then I come across this man named [Deputy Assistant to President Nixon] Alex Butterfield,” she added. “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 driving, sort of trying to read about him. I found that he, a couple years ago, worked on this book with Bob Woodward ... 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.”
She continued to the cmmittee: “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.”
Mr Butterfield “talked about 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,” Ms Hutchinson told the committee.
“It wasn’t an identical situation, but the emphasis he placed on the moral questions that he was asking himself resonated with me,” she added. “And then he ended up testifying to the Watergate committee.”
Ms Hutchinon said she wasn’t “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,” she said.
