Tuesday’s blockbuster testimony before the House Jan. 6 Select Committee brought the American public directly into former President Donald Trump’s inner White House sanctum to understand his thinking and motivation as the Capitol insurrection was being planned and launched. The evidence and testimony strongly suggest that he knew an attack was planned, that some attackers were armed, and that he was directly involved in the insurrection’s violent outcome. Trump allegedly was so anxious to be a witness to the siege that he physically grappled with his limousine security personnel when they told him he could not go to Capitol Hill amid the Jan. 6, 2021, pandemonium.
Testimony by Cassidy Hutchinson, an aide to Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows, portrayed the president alternately as a willing conspirator and power-crazed madman. He threw dishes in anger when told by then-Attorney General Bill Barr that there was no legal justification to overturn the 2020 presidential election result. In addition to allegedly reaching for the steering wheel of his limousine, he may have reached for the throat area of a security adviser who told him conditions on Capitol Hill were too dangerous for him to go there during the insurrection. That account is, at best, third-hand and requires corroboration under oath from those directly involved. But the account doesn’t conflict with other witness accounts to Trump’s violent behavior and Barr’s conclusion that Trump had become “unhinged.”
When advised that there were people carrying assault rifles and handguns just beyond the security perimeter for his Jan. 6 rally, Trump angrily protested as Hutchinson stood nearby in a security tent, “They’re not here to hurt me.” He and Meadows seemed entirely uninterested in the presence of armed men among the crowd members who, soon afterward, stormed the Capitol. If Trump didn’t know what their plans were, how else could he have been so confident that they weren’t there to hurt him — especially since Trump and his spin doctors repeatedly blamed Antifa leftists for the siege?
