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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Now we turn to yesterday's January 6th committee hearing, maybe the most devastating so far for Donald Trump and some of his top aides as a Trump White House insider reveal what many in his circle, including then attorney Rudy Giuliani and Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, knew leading up to the January 6th insurrection at the Capitol and what they did during it. If you didn't hear it yourself, maybe you're one of those people who tape this so you can watch it as weekend entertainment. Maybe there's nobody like that, but maybe it was you. If that's you, spoiler alert.

There was testimony including about Trump knowing that people in the January 6th crowd were heavily armed and he and his Chief of Staff Mark Meadows dismissing that as a concern and then Trump physically tried to grab the wheel of his car from his Secret Service driver to take the car to the Capitol when the driver refused to go and that many people from Trump's most inner circle urged him repeatedly to tell the rioters to go home, but he waited for hours, even encouraged them with a tweet and said to his aides at the White House that they were doing nothing wrong. Here's Cassidy Hutchinson, yesterday's witness. On January 6th, she was the principal assistant to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. She talks here about something she said to him that day about the evolving scene and what she heard from Rudy Giuliani.

Cassidy Hutchinson: I remember leaning against the doorway and saying, "I just had an interesting conversation with Rudy, Mark. Sounds like we're going to go to the Capitol." He didn't look up from his phone and said something to the effect of there's a lot going on, Cass, but I don't know. Things might get real, real bad on January 6th.

Brian Lehrer: Now, Giuliani and Meadows, like the five Republican Congress members who had been referenced previously in a hearing, asked for presidential pardons from Trump according to Hutchinson. That revelation was new yesterday, Giuliani and Meadows' pardon request, begging the question, what crime did they think they may have been committing? Joining me now to recap yesterday's hearing is Michael Kranish, national political investigative reporter for The Washington Post, co-author of the book, Trump Revealed: An American Journey of Ambition, Ego, Money and Power. His article today in The Washington Post is called Cassidy Hutchinson's Path from Trusted Insider to Explosive Witness. Michael, thanks for coming on today. Welcome to WNYC.

Michael Kranish: Thanks for having me, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: Let's talk about Cassidy Hutchinson's path from trusted insider to explosive witness. She is somebody that most Americans never heard of until yesterday and then this was a surprise hearing that wasn't even scheduled. Who is she and how much of a trusted insider was she?

Michael Kranish: Well, it's pretty extraordinary. At the time of some of these events that you just described, she was just about to turn 24 years old. She grew up in Pennington, New Jersey, went to Christopher Newport University in Virginia, got a couple of internships while she was in college on Capitol Hill with Senator Ted Cruz and Representative Steve Scalise and then applied for an internship at the White House.

Brian Lehrer: By the way, can I just jump in on that? Those are very conservative credentials, interning with of all members of Congress, Ted Cruz and Steve Scalise.

Michael Kranish: Yes, very much. Then she got a much coveted, one of the most sought after internships probably in the country, internship to work at the White House. She worked in the Office of Legislative Affairs. She got that and then when she graduated from college, which was in the spring of 2019, if I recall correctly, she then got a full-time job at the Office of Legislative Affairs in the White House. Then Mark Meadows came to be Chief of Staff in March 2020. She's 23 at this time and she eventually becomes his principal assistant. She has an office just steps away from the Oval Office and next to Mark Meadows.

She has extraordinary access. She's, by any definition, one of the youngest and least experienced persons in the White House and she's central. She really sees and hears a lot. Unlike Watergate, we don't have evidence that there's been a taping system where we hear what people are saying in the Oval Office, but we have been getting in the last couple of hearings fly on the wall descriptions from people who heard very important conversations that really changed some of the perspective about what we know about what happened particularly in the days up to and on January 6th.

Brian Lehrer: She's only 25 now, so I guess she was 23 then.

Michael Kranish: Well, if you just turned 24, so-

Brian Lehrer: At that time.

Michael Kranish: -that's in middle of December of 2020. She turns 24 and she's witnessing all this. She had studied Political Science, American Studies. She wanted to be a public servant. It's extraordinary by any measure to be in the position that she was in to see this.

Brian Lehrer: You reported that some people derisively called her Chief Cassidy and even House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's staff asked White House aides why she was in on legislative meetings. Why did she rise so high so fast?

Michael Kranish: Simply that Mark Meadows relied on her, depended on her. We haven't heard Meadows explain why, but clearly he made this young woman his principal aide and put an awful lot of confidence in her. She accompanied him to many meetings, according to one of my colleagues reporting, answered some of his texts or emails and so forth. She was there. She talked with him all day long from our reporting. It's strictly because of Meadows and presumably Trump signed off.

We don't know that for sure, but you'd think such an important person who had an office right there-- The White House is as Hutchinson herself mentioned is a pretty small building. I covered the White House for four years when I was at the Boston Globe and you look at it from the outside and it looks like a large structure, but there's really not much place. Many, many senior aides have much less visible offices than Cassidy Hutchinson had.

Brian Lehrer: Interesting. What got her so disillusioned? Mark Meadows, himself, is refusing to testify. She agreed to come and give this explosive testimony live before the House Select Committee yesterday and reveal all this stuff. What happened?

Michael Kranish: Well, as far as we can tell from her testimony, she became very disillusioned by what she saw. Trump, of course, never conceded the election. He said it was stolen. She described this very vivid anecdote that occurred on December 1, 2020. This was the day when the Attorney General then William Barr gave interview to Associated Press saying that he had concluded that there wasn't evidence of such election fraud that meant the election was stolen.

He said there was no evidence of that. She describes this incredible anecdote where she is in her office, she hears a noise down the hall, she goes to investigate in the dining room and the valet tells her that Trump just threw his plate of lunch against the wall, which is bleeding ketchup. The valet tells her that he's very, very upset over what Barr had said, essentially, that the election wasn't stolen.

Then she's hearing in the subsequent weeks that there's this big rally planned for January 6 and at one point hears reports that some of the people coming to this rally are going to bring all sorts of weaponry, so she's very concerned. She hears security officials explain this to her boss, Mark Meadows, and she becomes increasingly concerned about what's happening and what Trump is saying about that in the days leading up to January 6.

Brian Lehrer: Let's play another clip. Hutchinson painted a picture of how so many people within the Trump White House knew that Trump wanted to spur on the people at his rally on the 6th to head to the Capitol and wanted to go with them. I mentioned that incident about trying to commandeer the car, according to what Hutchinson had heard, but let's listen to her recounting the conversation first that she had with White House Counsel Pat Cipollone warning, Cipollone warned, about the criminal liability that Trump and some of the others might face. She speaks here with Congresswoman Liz Cheney, committee member. Hutchinson speaks first.

Cassidy Hutchinson: Mr. Cipollone said something to the effect of please make sure we don't go up to the Capitol, Cassidy. Keep in touch with me. We're going to get charged with every crime imaginable if we make that movement happen.

Liz Cheney: Do you remember which crimes Mr. Cipollone was concerned with?

Cassidy Hutchinson: In the days leading up to the 6th we had conversations about potentially obstructing justice or defrauding the electoral account.

Brian Lehrer: Was that new to you, Michael?

Michael Kranish: Yes. Pat Cipollone has not agreed to testify. He's talked to the committee informally. He's the White House Counsel. He had defended Trump during the first impeachment. He is a potentially crucial witness. The committee has beseeched him to try to appear in public. He has declined so far. What we have instead are relays of what he said from people like Cassidy Hutchinson. There's a couple of key people here we've talked about that if they testify it might even be more explosive. Mark Meadows for one. He's declined, indicted for contempt by the Congress, but then justice didn't prosecute on that. He has provided a lot of text messages that provided a lot of pathways for the investigation.

Pat Cipollone who a lot of people may not be as familiar with until the last couple of hearings, he was going around the White House day after day fretting that the President might be breaking the law on this or there might be laws broken. I wrote a story last week about an effort on January 3rd, in which there was a person who was a mid-level justice official Jeffrey Clark the subject to last week's hearing to make him attorney general so he would pursue perhaps allegations of fraud that the person who was acting attorney general said weren't there to pursue. In that meeting on January 3rd Cipollone said, "If we do that it's a murder-suicide pact." If we do what this person was suggesting in a letter to state legislatures around the country.

Now here he is later saying he's worried if Trump goes to the Hill, there might be prosecution, maybe even obstruction of justice or inciting a riot or various other things. He is a key figure, as someone that maybe we'll hear from eventually, he said, I think that there were some concerns about privileged conversations with the President, or as famously in Watergate, John Dean, the counsel to Nixon testified explosively in the Watergate hearings. I think there's a lot of people who are super interested in hearing from Pat Cipollone, Mark Meadows, among others who so far have not given--

[crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: It's such an interesting position as somebody who was apparently counseling them to do the right things, at least to stay on the right side of the law, yet, in this context, won't come forward and testify publicly. It's also crazy, isn't it, based on what you were just describing that Cipollone in his high position is like, "Please make sure, Cassidy," and she's like 24 years old.

Michael Kranish: At certain points, it seems like he was trying to go through channels, which would have been the chief of staff who's supposed to theoretically provide access to the Oval Office so that the President's not overwhelmed. We know very well, that many times all sorts of people would gain direct access. In fact, in the story I wrote last month about Mark Meadows and what he did regarding leading up to the days of the insurrection, he often would allow access for people who feeding Trump all sorts of conspiracy theories and other things that some people believe help fed the delusion that the election had been stolen.

Mark Meadows wrote what he called a memoir of his days as chief of staff. In the memoir, he starts out by saying that he knew the most important job of a presidential chief of staff is to be able to tell the President when he's wrong. Did he do that? I've interviewed many White House officials, former officials, and asked them that question. Did you ever hear Mark Meadows tell Trump to his face that he was wrong? They had not been in such a conversation. Maybe there was a one-on-one where Meadows did that. He hasn't really said that, but he did lay out in his book, that's what he would see as his job.

The way Hutchinson painted Meadows, I think it's fair to say if you watch the hearing time and again, she would mimic or emulate Meadows, looking down in his phone like some teenager scrolling. She would do the motion with her thumbs like someone scrolling up, you're not just either just scroll, I have to be honest. A bit of a person who was just endlessly scrolling through his phone, she would say, she basically was trying to get Meadows to snap out of it. I think that those were her exact words. Maybe a parent would do to a kid, and oftentimes he would look up.

I mean, it's pretty dramatic if you're a photographer in a hearing you look for those moments when a witness moves their body to visualize, and that's the moment she did started emulate that action. She constantly was saying how she was trying to get Meadows to pay attention. There were warnings about potential violence and other kinds of warnings. She left the impression that Meadows was, I think it's fair to say, feckless, she didn't use that word, but that's what came across from her description. There was one point at which she describes a conversation in which Meadows was warned about all sorts of things that could happen on January 6th, and he responded that the President doesn't want to do that.

It was a very damning part of the testimony. Now, in fairness, Trump has denied a lot of Hutchinson's account. Meadows hasn't spoken about Hutchinson's account. He hasn't provided testimony. There wasn't cross-examination like there would normally be in a hearing that had all sorts of other members on it, for hearing. There's much we don't know, but I think it's fair to say, this witness along with the witnesses last week, which included the acting attorney general and the deputy acting attorney general, that they provided extraordinary fly-on-the-wall presentations that were as close as we've come to taped conversations. Certainly not as vivid as taped conversation, but it's the closest we've got.

Brian Lehrer: This is WNYC FM, HD and AM New York, WNJT FM 88.1 Trenton, WNJP 88.5 Sussex, WNJY 89.3 Netcong, and WNJO 90.3 Toms River. We are in New York and New Jersey Public Radio and live streaming at WNYC.org. Few more minutes with Michael Kranish from The Washington Post on yesterday's January 6th hearing. Now we get to this moment of high drama, which I think we should say admittedly is third-hand Cassidy referring to something that someone told her about something that they say Trump did, but as the insurrection was moving toward the White House, whereas the crowd--

I'm sorry, toward the Capitol while the crowd was moving toward the Capitol, Trump, according to Hutchinson's testimony yesterday, wanted to go with them to the Capitol himself. He had said as much in his speech at the rally, and I'm going with you. Let's listen to a clip of Hutchinson describing a conversation with Bobby Engel who was the head of Trump security detail, and Tony Ornato then White House Deputy Chief of Staff on the day of January 6th.

Hutchinson: The president said something to the effect of, I'm the effing president. Take me up to the Capitol now. To which Bobby responded, "Sir, we have to go back to the West Wing." The President reached up towards the front of the vehicle to grab at the steering wheel. Mr. Engel grabbed his arm, said, "Sir, you need to take your hand off the steering wheel. We're going back to the West Wing. We're not going to the Capitol." Mr. Trump then used his free hand to lunge toward Bobby Engel. When Mr. Renata had recounted this story to me he had motion towards his clavicles.

Brian Lehrer: Well, Michael, so take us further into that as much as you can, on what Hutchinson said was going on at that moment in the car, maybe who this Mr. Ornato is that she heard it from and what exactly Trump had in mind trying to at least reportedly commandeer a car away from the Secret Service driver.

Michael Kranish: Yes. As you say, this is something that she's relaying that she heard from someone else. She said it was relayed about a person who also heard the description and didn't dispute it. Trump has denied it. We haven't heard from the two individuals that she mentioned, and there have been some reports about that the Secret Service would deny aspects of this. There's much we don't know, but to set the stage, literally, Trump was on stage [unintelligible 00:17:26] on January 6th, and he said, we're going to the Capitol, and I'll be there with you. Then he gets in the car, and Mark Meadows in his memoir said that this was just metaphorical Trump was never intending to go to the Capitol.

Other people said that Trump did want to go to the Capitol. In fact, he told my colleague, Josh Dossey in an interview some weeks ago that he did want to go to the capitol and the Secret Service stopped him. There's that information as well. Trump, if he's going to go to the Capitol, that's exactly what Pat Cipollone, the White House Counsel had warned shouldn't be done because there'll be all sorts of potential criminality involved if you're inciting folks and that's when they were about to certify the election, so it would be pretty incredible on top of what happened with the riot inside the Capitol of the President's then there and whatever he would have said.

She described it that he still wanted to go that he wanted to follow through on what he said on the stage and that they said, we can't go there, they don't have the assets, by which they mean we don't have the security personnel to protect you up there. They all knew and Trump knew, according to Hutchinson's testimony, that many of these people were carrying all sorts of different kinds of weapons. They would have already been very knowledgeable about that. The committee played police radio traffic in which there was an officer saying, there's a person here in a tree, or there's a person here who's got an assault weapon and so forth.

They were very concerned about that. As I mentioned earlier I was a White House reporter for four years. I know how incredibly concerned I can only imagine in this case, how concerned they would have been about security. They change movements all the time out of concerns, reports, rumors, whatever, that there might be the smallest security threat. These was thousands of people, a number of whom they believed or knew for sure were armed. I can only imagine that if Trump was trying to go to the Capitol and they were aware of this, that someone would have said, "No, we can't do that," if that's what Trump was trying to do.

Whether he actually put his hands on the steering wheel and reached to someone's clavicle as she described, those two gentlemen, in particular, that she mentioned in the testimony, it'd be great to hear from them and hear their part of the story. We know from Trump's own words that he had said and he told The Washington Post that he didn't want to go to the Capitol.

Brian Lehrer: To wrap this up, and then we'll have the news folks and Senator Gillibrand will join us after that, we'll talk more about this and other things, yesterday it's like how many times can one jaw drop watching the revelations come one after another, but what do you see as the biggest good that can come out of it, or even the aim of the committee at this point? Because sometimes it seems like it's mostly about building a criminal case against Trump and his coup d'etat henchman, but is it more than that?

Michael Kranish: Well, I wrote in the story today that she worked for all these Republicans, she worked for the White House and she's essentially in effect saying to Republicans who we hope to move on that hold on, there's more here to know. You should be concerned. I saw it firsthand. I'm not a partisan. I was there trying to promote what the White House was doing, the committee itself can't bring charges. They're essentially going to give a report. For the public, we've had quite a number of hearings and the witnesses have been increasingly explosive, if you will. It's really going to be important to watch what the Justice Department does. Are they going to indict Trump? I think that's what a lot of people are waiting to see.

They're doing their investigation in a very slow, methodical way as is their manner. There are other investigations that are going on. There is not an investigation by the office of inspector general at Justice. There's investigations going on in Georgia about what happened down there. There's a number of investigations. At some point, no matter how explosive a person's testimony may be, these people are testifying under oath, Trump issued statements, of course, those aren't under oath in that manner. The next step for a lot of people is what's going to happen. Is there going to be any charge bought against Trump or others who worked with him on a lot of these events that have been described.

Brian Lehrer: Michael Kranish, national political investigative reporter for The Washington Post, and co-author of Trump Revealed: An American journey of Ambition, Ego, Money and Power. Michael, thank you so much.

Michael Kranish: Thanks for having me, Brian.

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