Add witness tampering to the charges

[January 6 witness testimony transcripts] reveal how much pressure [WH aide Cassidy] Hutchinson was placed under to remain “loyal” and “in the family” ahead of testimony that established to many that the hearings were a telling and horrific examination of the events on or around January 6.

Her lawyer had told her, “we just want to focus on protecting the president” and she was told, she informed the panel in testimony in September – two months after her public appearance – that she would be “taken care of” if only she followed their desired script.

“I was scared,” she told investigators. “I almost felt like at points Donald Trump was looking over my shoulder.”

[...]


In her testimony, she said she’d accepted the help of former Trump White House ethics counsel Stefan Passantino who, Hutchinson claims, encouraged her to fail to recall some events during the interviews. That claim, made under oath, could provide federal investigators with evidence of witness tampering.

“The less you remember, the better,” Hutchinson recalled Passantino telling her. “Don’t read anything to try to jog your memory. Don’t try to put together timelines … Especially if you put together timelines, we have to give those over to the committee.”

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“We’re gonna get you a really good job in Trump world,” Passantino told her, Cassidy testified. “We’re gonna get you taken care of. We want to keep you in the family”.

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Hutchinson also testified that an array of Trump officials, including her former boss and then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, had promised that loyalty would be beneficial to her.

[...]

After the second session, Hutchinson said her testimony was shared with others in the Trump orbit. It was, she said, “the first clear indicator for me of he doesn’t care about what I want, he doesn’t care about what I think is best for me, he’s doing what he thinks is best for Trump and the people in Trump’s orbit”.

[...]

According to transcripts, Hutchinson has felt uneasy about Passantino’s advice to downplay what she knew and that she had struggled between repeating testimony she had offered in February and March, replete with “I cannot recall” statements.

Without telling Passantino, Hutchinson contacted former White House aide Alyssa Farah Griffin to ask to act as a backchannel to the committee so they could call her back in a third time and know what questions to ask her. “If I’m going to pass the mirror test for the rest of my life, I need to try to fix some of this,” she testified in September, referring to wanting to be able to look at her own reflection without feeing shame.

But, she said, she “knew in some fashion it would get back to him if I said anything he would find disloyal,” she testified. “And the prospect of that genuinely scared me. You know, I’d seen this world ruin people’s lives or try to ruin people’s careers.”

[...]

Hutchinson changed attorneys to Jody Hunt, a longtime confidant of Jeff Sessions, the former Republican senator from Alabama who had served as Trump’s first attorney general.
  Guardian