Cassidy Hutchinson’s new book reveals a Trump
White House even more chaotic than previously known
Jake Tapper
Jeremy Herb
By Jake
Tapper, Jeremy Herb and Makayla Humphrey, CNN
Updated
4:25 AM EDT, Tue September 26, 2023
She also
depicts major Republican figures, including Speaker Kevin McCarthy, stating
clearly behind the scenes what they refrained from telling the American people:
that Joe Biden won the presidential election and Trump lost.
Hints that
integrity wasn’t exactly the word of the day were there from the beginning, of
course. “Cass, if I can get through this job and manage to keep (Trump) out of
jail, I’ll have done a good job,” Meadows told Hutchinson in June 2020.
Hutchinson’s
book describes her meteoric rise from idealistic Capitol Hill intern at the
beginning of the Trump administration to the indispensable aide to the White
House chief of staff in the president’s final year. Hutchinson, whose testimony
before the January 6 committee provided the most damning inside account of
Trump’s actions – and lack of action – on January 6, describes her internal
struggle about what transpired at the end of the Trump administration and how
she ultimately chose to come forward and testify fully about what she saw in
the West Wing.
To hear
Hutchinson tell it, the Trump world felt almost like a criminal organization
where loyalty was prized above everything. After one 2020 campaign rally,
Meadows asked her, “Would you take a bullet for him?” – meaning Trump.
“Could it
be to the leg?” Hutchinson tried to joke back.
Meadows
responded that he would “do anything” to get Trump reelected.
After
Trump’s indoor, mask-free rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, at the height of the Covid
pandemic, attendee and former GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain contracted
the virus and died.
“We killed
Herman Cain,” Meadows told Hutchinson and asked for his wife’s phone number.
A spokesman
for Meadows disputed Hutchinson’s account in a statement to CNN. The
spokesperson said it was offensive to suggest this was Meadows’ initial
reaction to Cain’s death. “In the days after he was expressing exasperation
that the media would blame the President for Mr. Cain’s death. Very different,”
the spokesperson said.
That did
little to change the White House’s attitude about masking. In fact, at one
visit to an N-95 plant, Hutchinson advised Trump to remove his mask before
facing the cameras because his bronzer is smearing on its elastic straps. In
another instance in the frenzy after the election, visitors to the White House
who tested positive for Covid were admitted regardless because Trump insisted
on meeting with them.
These
ethical mores or – or the lack thereof – were taken to the campaign trail
where, Hutchinson writes, Meadows met furtively with former Hunter Biden
business associate Tony Bobulinski while being shielded from public view by
Secret Service agents.
Hutchinson
didn’t start truly questioning the men she worked alongside until after the
election, but even then, it was late coming. As Trump watched Giuliani’s
notorious hair-dye-leaking press conference at the Republican National
Committee headquarters, he shouted, according to Hutchinson, “Somebody make
this stop! Get him off! Make him stop!”
But even
then, she says, she “didn’t blame the president for any of it yet. I didn’t
want to blame him. I felt strongly that he should concede the election, and I
worried that we were surrounding him with people who fueled his most impulsive
behaviors. I knew things could get out of hand, and fast.”
‘I don’t
want people to know we lost, Mark’
Meadows
emerges in the book as not only duplicitous but as a fall guy for folks who
don’t want to admit that Trump had lost grip with reality. Director of National
Intelligence John Ratcliffe expressed concern about the president’s
unpredictability, noting that one minute “he acknowledges he lost… Then he’ll
immediately backpedal.”
McCarthy
told Hutchinson the same thing. They both blamed Meadows. After the US Supreme
Court declined to hear the bizarre lawsuit filed by Texas Attorney General Ken
Paxton, full of lies and false claims about the election, Trump pushed Meadows,
“Why didn’t we make more calls? We needed to do more. … We can’t let this
stand.”
Trump
continued, “I don’t want people to know we lost, Mark. This is embarrassing.
Figure it out.” Even then, when Meadows assured Trump he would work on it,
Hutchinson’s irritation is with Meadows for giving Trump false hope, not with
Trump for demanding that his delusions become reality.
Hutchinson’s
claim that Trump admitted to Meadows that he lost is the latest in a series of
eye-witness accounts of Trump periodically admitting in private to having lost
the election. Hutchinson testified to both federal investigators and the Fulton
County grand jury, she writes, though she was not referenced in any of the
indictments of Trump.
Hutchinson
describes a White House that in its final weeks had turned to utter
lawlessness, with Meadows regularly burning documents in the fireplace of the
chief of staff’s office. After Meadows’ office became smoky before a meeting,
former GOP Rep. Devin Nunes asked Hutchinson, “How often is he burning papers?”
When Meadows’ wife came to help pack his office in January 2021, she pleaded to
Hutchinson, “Mark doesn’t need to burn anything else. All of his suits smell
like a bonfire.”
The Meadows
spokesperson said that Hutchinson’s telling was an “absurd
mischaracterization.”
“Mrs.
Meadows was referencing how the wood fireplace made the office smell smoky —
and we often started it using old newspaper. It had nothing to do with
documents,” the spokesperson said.
On that
wild day of December 18, 2020, when Trump considered proposals in the Oval
Office to seize voting machines, White House deputy chief of staff Tony Ornato
told Hutchinson he “heard the president talk about the Insurrection Act or
martial law,” she writes.
Hutchinson
writes that at one point during the Oval Office meeting, she heard Trump
screaming, “I don’t care how you do it just get it fucking done!” It’s unclear
what the ‘it’ referred to however.
As senior
staffers tried to get Meadows to return to the White House to get the likes of
his onetime national security adviser Mike Flynn, former Trump attorney Sidney
Powell, and former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne to leave the Oval Office, White
House staff secretary Derek Lyons asked, “Does the chief really need more of a
reason to come back? Here it is. Martial law.”
Those
plans, of course, did not come to fruition, and Trump looked for other avenues
to overturn his election loss, pressuring Georgia Secretary of State Brad
Raffensperger to “find” 11,870 votes to flip the Peach State from Biden to
Trump.
“That call
was not good,” White House counsel Pat Cipollone told Meadows, according to
Hutchinson, who writes that Cipollone was listening in on the call. Testifying
under oath to the January 6 committee last year, Cipollone said he had no
memory of knowing about the call until he read about it in the press.
In a
statement to CNN, a spokesman for Cipollone denied he was on the Georgia call,
noting that Cipollone was not among those Meadows introduced at the start of
the call.
‘I think
It’s going to go well’
In the
weeks after the election, January 6 remained the fail-safe, and Hutchinson
writes that Trump visiting Capitol Hill was part of the plan until the very
end. “On New Year’s Eve, (Meadows) asked me to talk to Tony (Ornato) about a
potential motorcade movement to Capitol Hill following the president’s rally.”
“I think
the Sixth is going to go well,” Trump said. “Do you think it’s going to go
well, Chief?”
“Yes, sir,”
Meadows replied. “I think it’s going to go well.”
Many of the
stories Hutchinson tells about that day were parts of her testimony. Trump knew
about the weapons his supporters were carrying – “Big guy knows,” Ornato said,
and at this point in the narrative, Hutchinson still found that news
reassuring, as if it meant Trump would do something to stop it. She recounts
the tell-tale moment at the Ellipse when she heard the president roaring: “Take
the fucking mags (metal detectors) down … Look at all those people in the
trees. They want to come in. Let them. Let my people in. Take the fucking mags
away. They’re not here to hurt me.”
Soon after,
backstage at the rally, Giuliani slipped his hand up Hutchinson’s skirt and up
her thigh, Hutchinson alleges in the book. (Giuliani denied her allegation to
Newsmax, calling it “absurd.”) She stormed away, filled with rage. But it was
nothing compared with the rage she later felt after the Capitol was attacked
and people died, Hutchinson writes.
As the
attack on the Capitol unfolded, Hutchinson said thoughts raced through her mind
about what she needed to do – and she worried it could be the beginning of a
coup.
“We have to
have a plan in place in case the worst happens. In case this is the beginning
of a coup,” she writes.
Even this
was not enough yet. Hutchinson remained part of Team Trump. Unlike White House
communications director Alyssa Farah, who resigned on December 3, 2020, or
deputy White House press secretary Sarah Matthews, who left on January 6, 2021,
Hutchinson remained.
Part of
Hutchinson’s rationale was that she saw herself as someone who could help
maintain protocols during the final days of the Trump presidency, particularly
as Meadows scrambled to get hold of a binder containing highly classified
documents related to the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation into Donald
Trump’s campaign and Russia during the 2016 election.
She was
shocked when Meadows gave the classified documents to two right-wing media
personalities who regularly toe the MAGA line.
The Meadows
spokesman said that Hutchinson’s account was false, and that the documents had
already been declassified by Trump. The White House counsel’s office asked for
the documents back, the spokesperson said, because they contained elements of
personal information that needed to be redacted.
“It was not
an issue of classification – it was about procedural redactions,” the
spokesperson said.
Hutchinson,
however, writes that Cipollone told her the documents were still full of
classified information, and he demanded their return. Before she could leave to
call Meadows, Cipollone added: “Hey Cass, while you’re on the phone with him,
can you tell him we cannot pardon Kimberly Guilfoyle’s gynecologist?”
“My jaw was
hanging as I turned around to look at Pat. I knew by the look on his face that
he was dead serious,” she writes.
According
to Guilfoyle’s testimony to the January 6 committee, she was seeking to help
the son of her former gynecologist, a well-respected California doctor.
‘We just
want to protect the president’
The book is
a journey, with Hutchinson judging herself to have been “complicit” in the
decisions that led to January 6. After telling the story of her troubled
upbringing – with a largely absent and ultimately abusive father – Hutchinson’s
story is mostly about her time working for a president she once “adored.”
Initially,
Hutchinson says, she was “transfixed” by Trump and how he electrified the
crowds at his rallies. Working in the White House, first in the Office of
Legislative Affairs and then under Meadows, she focused on her mission of
helping the president and being a “loyal foot soldier,” she writes.
Numerous
examples of Trump’s questionable behavior are glossed over as Hutchinson, ever
the loyal aide, saw them as normal at the time. That includes Trump’s 2019
phone call with Zelensky that ultimately led to his first impeachment and the
2020 Atlantic story about Trump referring to American soldiers killed during
World War I as “losers” and “suckers” – which a former senior administration
official with firsthand knowledge confirmed to CNN.
In the
summer of 2017, Trump’s first year in office, Hutchinson was an intern in Sen.
Ted Cruz’s office. By 2020, she was dressing down the Texas Republican senator
for showing up uninvited to Trump’s arrival on a Texas tarmac, warning him that
if he didn’t leave it would be the “last presidential event you ever receive an
invitation to.”
Trump
loyalists attack Hutchinson to this day as having tried to work for the 45th
president in Florida well past January 6, 2021, and Hutchinson fully owns up to
that, making clear that her break with the president and his team didn’t come
until Meadows fully made clear she wouldn’t be part of the post-presidency – a
move that didn’t happen until her final three days in the White House.
Much of
what Trump loyalists throw at her to discredit her – for instance, her pleading
for help in getting a lawyer – she admits in “Enough.”
The House
January 6 committee made much of Hutchinson changing lawyers because of
suggestions that her first, Stefan Passantino, was encouraging her to be less
than truthful under oath. Hutchinson writes that Passantino discouraged her
from fully cooperating. “No, no, no. We want to get you in and get you out,” he
told her.
“We were to
downplay my role, he explained, as strictly administrative. I was an assistant,
nothing more,” she writes. “Stefan never told me to lie to the committee. ‘I
don’t want you to perjure yourself,’ he insisted. ‘But “I don’t recall” isn’t
perjury.’” At another time he told her, “We just want to protect the
president,” she writes.
The book
also explains one of the mysteries of the January 6 inquiry: With so many
uncooperative witnesses, how did the committee know what to ask Hutchinson to
get her to disclose her damning testimony while she was still represented by
the attorney paid for by Trump world? It turns out, Hutchinson writes, that she
coordinated with Farah, who is now a CNN political commentator, telling her
everything she knew. Farah spoke with committee vice chair Liz Cheney, who then
knew what to ask Hutchinson during the committee’s third closed-door deposition
with her.
Jobs are
dangled and then withdrawn from Hutchinson as she begins to cooperate with the
committee. Soon, she is shut out out and then demonized by Trump world. She
leaves open the question as to what might have happened historically if Trump
and Meadows had trusted her and invited her to Mar-a-Lago.
But
Hutchinson’s courageous testimony did occur, so perhaps more important to the
republic today is the question of how many more witnesses with
Trump-world-funded attorneys involved in current prosecutions and
investigations are experiencing the same situation.
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