WASHINGTON — A report by the House Jan. 6 committee failed to resolve conflicting testimony about former President Donald Trump’s actions inside a presidential SUV on the day of the U.S. Capitol assault.
In one of the most compelling moments during hearings over the summer, former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson testified that she was told Trump reacted angrily when his security detail refused to take him to the Capitol after he had just delivered a fiery address urging his followers to march on the building as Congress prepared to certify the victory of Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election.
Hutchinson said she heard that Trump had lunged for the steering wheel of the vehicle. Trump, in a social media post during the hearing, denied the incident took place.
In a summary report released Monday, the panel said the person who Hutchinson said had relayed the account didn’t recall it. Tony Ornato, a long-time Secret Service agent who was working at the time as a deputy chief of staff to Trump, returned for a follow-up closed-door interview with the panel after Hutchinson’s testimony and said he didn’t remember the conversation she said she had heard.
The Secret Service also has denied her account of Trump’s outburst.
But the panel asserted in the summary of its 17-month investigation that it has “has significant concerns about the credibility” of Ornato’s testimony.
The committee’s summary said two witnesses — including a White House employee with national security responsibilities who the report doesn’t name and Hutchinson — testified that Ornato had related an account of Trump’s “irate” behavior when he was told that he would not be driven to the Capitol.
Both accounts recall Ornato describing this episode from his office in the White House, with another member of the Secret Service present. Multiple other witness accounts indicate that Trump became “irate,” “heated,” in the presidential vehicle, the panel’s summary states.
“The committee has regarded both Hutchinson and the corroborating testimony by the White House employee with national security responsibilities as earnest and has no reason to conclude that either had a reason to invent their accounts,” the report concludes.
Ornato’s lawyer, Kate Driscoll, said he “remained cooperative during the entirety of the committee’s investigation, and testified truthfully before the committee on three occasions.”
She added that the committee did not understand Ornato’s White House role.
“Most of the committee’s questions were about emails that he neither sent nor received,” she said. “It is also clear that they did not fully appreciate or ignored Mr. Ornato’s testimony regarding the president’s request to go to the Capitol."
