They knew.
Donald Trump. His chief of staff, Mark Meadows. His closest advisers in the White House.
They knew about what could happen on Jan. 6. About how there was a real potential for violence if Proud Boys and Oath Keepers marched on the U.S. Capitol like Trump had asked them to.
About how things could — as Meadows said — “get real, real bad.”
About how people who attended Trump’s rally that morning were heavily armed, with military-grade equipment and AR-15s, and how the Capitol Police would eventually be unable to contain them.
About how what Trump wanted to do that day — march with his supporters to the Capitol to stop certification of the electoral vote count — could lead to them being “charged with every crime imaginable,” according to the White House counsel.
Until Tuesday, Americans suspected all of this. Then Cassidy Hutchinson walked into Tuesday’s Jan. 6 hearing on Capitol Hill and confirmed it.
In an explosive and courageous appearance, the top aide to the president’s chief of staff explained in breathtaking detail how Trump and his enablers, including North Carolina’s very own Meadows, allowed an insurrection to occur.
“It was un-American,” Hutchinson testified. “We were watching the Capitol building get defaced over a lie.”
The House committee had previously said that it would not hold any more hearings until July, after they’d taken time to review new evidence. Tuesday’s hearing — the committee’s sixth so far — was announced at the last minute and largely shrouded in secrecy. Media reports indicated that the urgency was in part due to legitimate concerns about Hutchinson’s physical security.
Meadows, who previously represented western North Carolina in Congress, has been implicated in many of the committee’s hearings despite refusing to testify himself. We know he was deeply involved in efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election, which, as the committee has laid out, included knowingly false claims of election fraud, a fake electors scheme, a pressure campaign on state election officials and an illegal plot to block or delay the certification of Electoral College votes on Jan. 6.
But on Tuesday, we learned exactly what he said and did as the events of Jan. 6 unfolded.
That morning, Meadows was told that the crowd attending Trump’s rally had guns, knives, oversized sticks, bear spray and spears fastened onto the end of flagpoles. Meadows, sitting on a couch in his office, didn’t look up from his phone.
Later that day, as it became increasingly likely that the mob would breach the Capitol’s entrance, Hutchinson tried to get her boss’s attention. Again, with chaos unfolding around him, Meadows didn’t look up from his phone. Hutchinson remembered thinking, “Mark needs to snap out of it … he needs to care.”
Eventually, that mob managed to break into the Capitol. White House counsel Pat Cipollone barreled down the hallway and into Meadows’ office, telling him the president needed to do something. Meadows said Trump didn’t want to, and he didn’t seem particularly interested in trying to convince him otherwise.
“Mark, something needs to be done, or people are going to die and the blood’s going to be on your f---ing hands,” Hutchinson remembered Cipollone saying.
Hutchinson also testified that Meadows later sought a presidential pardon related to his behavior on Jan. 6. Which is, of course, not exactly the kind of behavior you’d expect from a man who believes he’s innocent.
We learned a lot about Mark Meadows and his cowardice on Tuesday, but we certainly didn’t learn any of it from Meadows himself. Because while Hutchinson was sharing what she knew, Meadows was hiding. Hiding from the truth, hiding from accountability and, most importantly, hiding from the American public, who deserve the answers he is refusing to give.
So Cassidy Hutchinson — a 25-year-old woman with far less rank and power than nearly everyone she testified about — did it instead.
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