JACK SMITH REVEALS JAN. 6 COMMITTEE CHARADE. Today marks the fifth anniversary of the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot. The world has moved on; the news is dominated by Venezuela and the midterm elections, now just months away. But in recent weeks, Jack Smith, the prosecutor chosen by the Biden administration to pursue President Donald Trump, revealed something remarkable about Jan. 6, or, more specifically, about the high-profile congressional “investigation” conducted by the House Jan. 6 Committee.
Smith’s revelation concerned the committee’s most sensational testimony, from former Trump White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson. Once a top assistant to then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, Hutchinson first told her story to the committee on Feb. 23, 2022. In three separate interviews, she had little if anything notable to say.
Then, in June, Hutchinson changed lawyers and offered the committee a really big story: On Jan. 6, she said, then-President Trump demanded that the Secret Service drive him to the Capitol, and when agents declined to do so, Trump physically attacked his own Secret Service detail in an effort to grab the wheel of the presidential limousine and point it toward the Capitol.
According to a New York Times account of the inner workings of the committee, Hutchinson told the tale directly to committee vice-chair Liz Cheney, who became so excited that she ordered the committee to hold a new hearing ASAP. The television showrunner who crafted the committee’s hearings came up with a script, and the other members of the committee, who essentially served as extras in the show, were told to show up, shut up, and look serious while Hutchinson told her story to a national TV audience.
Hutchinson’s testimony raised immediate and obvious questions, although they did not seem immediate or obvious to most of the press covering the show. The questions were: What did the Secret Service agents who were in the car say about what happened? What about the driver? They were the people who were there at the time — Hutchinson was in the White House and never saw any of it. What did they say? Why not ask them?
Cheney did not tell the public that the committee had already interviewed at least one Secret Service official who mentioned nothing about any alleged Trump lunge for the steering wheel. It would have been nice had the committee told viewers about that, but that would have detracted from Hutchinson’s blockbuster performance. So Cheney and her fellow committee members said nothing. Meanwhile, many media figures flipped out over Hutchinson’s account, celebrating her “courage” and devoting days of discussion to their belief that she had proved Trump guilty of something or the other.
But now comes Smith. In a Dec. 17 deposition before the House Judiciary Committee, the former special counsel told how his office investigated Hutchinson’s sensational, super-blockbuster Trump-grabbed-the-wheel story. Smith’s prosecutors talked to everyone involved and came up with… mostly nothing.
“Ms. Hutchinson, regarding that particular claim, was a second- or even third-hand witness,” Smith told the committee. “She had heard other people talk about that. And so we interviewed, I think, the people she talked to, and we also interviewed, if my recollection is correct, officers who were there, including the officer who was in the car. And that officer, if my recollection is correct, and I want to make sure I’m right about this, said that President Trump was very angry and wanted to go to the Capitol, but the version of events that he explained was not the same as what Cassidy Hutchinson said she heard from somebody second-hand.”
Smith, of course, indicted Trump in a case based on Jan. 6 and planned to take him to trial. So the Judiciary Committee asked him, “Did your office consider whether you would call Cassidy Hutchinson as a witness at trial?”
“We didn’t make a final determination about any witnesses,” Smith answered. “And my recollection with Ms. Hutchinson, at least one of the issues was a number of the things that she gave evidence on were second-hand hearsay, were things that she had heard from other people, and, as a result, that testimony may or may not be admissible, and it certainly wouldn’t be as powerful as first-hand testimony.”
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Smith did not say that he had eliminated Hutchinson as a witness, but his words suggested that if he were trying to present a concise, compelling case to a jury, he would not include Hutchinson’s hearsay version of events. “If I were a defense attorney and Ms. Hutchinson were a witness, the first thing I would do was seek to preclude some of her testimony because it was hearsay,” Smith said.
With that, the final molecules of air leaked out of the Cassidy Hutchinson balloon. It is hard to remember today just how wildly agitated many in the press became when Hutchinson told her story, unchallenged, to the Jan. 6 committee. It’s an old saw that a lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can put on its shoes. That’s certainly what happened in this case. It would be months and years before the public learned about problems with Hutchinson’s testimony. Now, from the improbable source of Jack Smith, we have the final word — not just on Hutchinson’s account, but on the misleading methods of the Jan. 6 committee.