Originally Authored at TheFederalist.com
A House panel reviewing the work of the illegally established and since disbanded Select Committee on Jan. 6 released testimony previously concealed by lawmakers for contradicting the committee’s star witness.
On Thursday, the Washington Times reported the House Administration’s subcommittee on Oversight released the transcripts of a Secret Service driver for President Donald Trump who pushed back on claims Trump tried to violently hijack a presidential vehicle to riot at the Capitol.
“I did not see him reach. He never grabbed the steering wheel,” the driver told then-Committee Vice Chair Liz Cheney during an interview. “I didn’t see him, you know, lunge to try to get into the front seat at all.”
The agent’s testimony flew directly in opposition to what lawmakers were told by Cassidy Hutchinson, a former White House aide who worked for Trump’s final first-term chief of staff, Mark Meadows. Hutchinson sensationalized the televised show trials of the Jan. 6 Committee when she claimed an “irate” president assaulted Secret Service agents to try to drive himself to Capitol Hill.
“The president said something to the effect of ‘I’m the f’ing president, take me up to the Capitol now,’” Hutchinson publicly testified in the summer of 2022. “The president reached up towards the front of the vehicle to grab at the steering wheel,” she added, but he was stopped by the head of his security detail.
According to the Washington Times reporting on the newly unveiled transcript, the Secret Service driver said, “What stood out was the irritation in [Mr. Trump’s] voice more than his physical presence, which would have been pretty obvious if he was trying to insert himself between the two front seats.”
Hutchinson was immediately contradicted by the same sources she cited in her public congressional hearing, but she was celebrated by Trump’s opponents as a heroine of the Jan. 6 saga to smear Republicans as complicit in the violence at the Capitol. Lawmakers on the partisan panel appointed by then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi aggressively pursued that narrative to the point of releasing select testimony and riot footage with a series of made-for-TV hearings produced by professional broadcasters.
In March, The Federalist reported Cheney suppressed evidence that Trump pressed Democrats to accept 10,000 National Guard troops ahead of Jan. 6, 2021. Former Deputy Chief of Staff Anthony Ornato told the Select Committee of conversations he heard between White House officials and Democrat leaders wherein Trump himself suggested the pre-emptive reinforcements to guard the Capitol. Democrats, however, refused federal troops in the capital while officials in the Pentagon deliberately resisted Trump’s orders related to preparations for the National Guard. Ornato’s transcript with the committee, however, was kept under seal while Democrats on the panel worked to undermine his credibility.
New details of the Defense Department’s insubordination were reported in House Republicans’ nearly 130-page interim report released Tuesday, in which investigators also called for the Justice Department to conduct a criminal investigation of Cheney. The report calls on the FBI to probe whether Cheney should be criminally culpable for witness tampering over backdoor communications with Hutchinson to circumvent attorney Stefan Passantino, who represented Hutchinson before she changed her testimony.
The Jan. 6 Committee then colluded with allied news outlets to frame Passantino’s representation as nefarious and targeted his law license. Passantino was cleared of misconduct following multiple investigations and has since filed his own bar complaint against Cheney in addition to a $67 million lawsuit against the federal government. The two cases are currently the only open opportunities for court discovery into the disgraced ex-congresswoman’s conduct.