Tuesday afternoon, Mark Meadows’ senior aide will give testimony before the January 6 select committee. Meadows was Donald Trump’s former chief of staff.
The panel’s unexpected hearing, which was scheduled for Monday after they found fresh evidence and out of fear for Cassidy Hutchinson’s safety, will include Cassidy Hutchinson as its featured witness.
Prior to, during, and following the January 6 Capitol incident, Hutchinson had continuous access to Meadows, former President Donald Trump, and other members of the White House inner circle. She also functioned as many members of Congress’ primary point of contact when they wanted to get in touch with the White House.
According to CNN, the witness said before the nine-member panel that Trump told Meadows he approved of his fans yelling “hang Mike Pence” as they stormed the Capitol.
Investigators learned from her testimony that Trump had complained that his vice president had been rescued during the breach.
According to Punchbowl News, Hutchinson’s evidence is crucial for the arguments the panel intends to make at its hearings in July. Due to what Hutchinson disclosed before the committee, there is also “sincere fear” for her personal safety and security, sources informed the newspaper.
These factors have contributed to the panel feeling it was important to schedule an extra hearing on Tuesday rather than wait until the House returns from its recess next month.
Chairman Bennie Thompson previously said the final hearing of the month would be on June 23, and that there would be no more hearings until July.
At the previous five public sessions, several video excerpts from Hutchinson’s deposition were already broadcast, including one in which she identified some of the House Republicans who asked Trump for pardons after the incident last year.
She has previously testified four times before the panel, with the most recent testimony occurring just ten days ago.
Hutchinson has cooperated, but her employer won’t go before the panel. The Justice Department decided not to pursue a criminal prosecution against Meadows despite a vote in the House to approve contempt proceedings against him.
Last year, before abruptly declaring he would no longer cooperate with the committee, Meadows provided the select committee with hundreds of text messages from senators, White House aides, and other important figures.
Punchbowl News was informed by many sources that Hutchinson’s appearance at the impromptu hearing occurred after she got a new attorney earlier this month and started cooperating more with the inquiry.
Former Hutchinson attorney Stefan Passantino served as the White House’s ethics counsel while Jody Hunt, her new attorney, served as Jeff Sessions’ chief of staff.
Regarding moves to annul the Georgia election, Hutchinson was in touch with Georgian authorities.
She also testified that she saw Meadows burning papers in his office after meeting with Pennsylvania GOP Representative Scott Petty before January 6, 2021. Perry was one of the lawmakers pushing to get Jeffrey Clark into the acting Attorney General spot to bolster Trump’s election fraud claims.
The January 6 committee announced Monday that it will hold a surprise hearing Tuesday at 1:00 p.m. to present ‘recently obtained evidence,’ despite the House being out of session until mid-July.
The last-minute announcement came roughly 24 hours before the hearing is scheduled to commence.
Unlike previous announcements, the panel did not identify who it would be hearing from but confirmed it would ‘receive witness testimony.’
In its last hearing on Thursday, the committee outlined how Donald Trump attempted to pressure the Justice Department to pursue his baseless election fraud theories. Former Trump DOJ officials testified about an explosive stand-off between the ex-president and ‘hundreds’ of administration officials who were ready to resign if 2020 election denier Jeffrey Clark was appointed Attorney General.
Ex-White House aides also accused certain Republican lawmakers of seeking a pardon from the former president, which committee members have insisted is a sign of culpability in Trump’s scheme.
But Thompson told reporters the day before that the panel’s remaining planned hearings would be put off until after the House of Representatives returns from recess, which would be the week of July 11.
Those two were originally scheduled for this week.
‘We’ve taken in some additional information that’s going to require additional work,’ the Mississippi Democrat said.
‘So rather than present hearings that have not been the quality of the hearings in the past, we made a decision to just move into sometime in July.’
The British documentary filmmaker Alex Holder, who started filming the Trump White House in September 2020 for a three-part series and has sit-down interviews with the former president himself as well as his family members and former Vice President Mike Pence, was one of the factors that contributed to the delay. Holder’s footage included a wealth of new material.
Holder gave a closed-door testimony on Thursday after the committee subpoenaed his records, which are said to contain three interviews with Trump, two of which were conducted after the assault on January 6.
The committee has made an effort to portray the violence as Trump and his associates’ “last stand” in a larger scheme to rig the 2016 election during all of its hearings.
The former president, lawmakers say, pushed claims he knew were false and pressured other government officials to do so.
It’s presented through a mix of videotaped and in-person testimony, primarily from Republican officials and Trump aides, that the then-commander-in-chief was told time and again by members of his own orbit that there was no widespread fraud.
Despite not paying as close attention to the hearings as legislators would like, a new poll released on Sunday reveals that the American people is beginning to understand the seriousness of the committee’s accusations.
After witnessing the hearings, 46% of American voters surveyed by CBS News said they thought the committee should recommend criminal charges against Trump.
31 percent of respondents said the panel should advise against it, while only 23 percent said it should not make any recommendations at all.
In a survey conducted between June 22 and 24, 50% of participants felt he attempted to “remain in office by criminal methods.”
But when it comes to watching the proceedings, less than one-fifth of voters said they were paying significant attention.
Just 18 percent of Americans said they were spending ‘a lot’ of time watching the hearings.
A 30-percent plurality said they were paying ‘some’ attention to them, and 53 percent of respondents admitted to paying ‘not much’ attention or ‘none at all.’
