KEY AIDE TESTIFIES

Insight into Trump's rage

• Former U.S. president Donald Trump tried to seize the steering wheel of his presidential car and tried to grab his Secret Service agent by the throat on the day of the Capitol riots, a former White House aide testified Tuesday.

Cassidy Hutchinson said Trump was “irate” when Bobby Engel, his head of security, told him it was unsafe for him to join supporters on Jan 6, 2021.

According to her evidence, Trump said: “I'm the f––g president, take me up to the Capitol now.”

Trump had said that the protesters were “not here to hurt me,” recalled Hutchinson, testifying before the House panel investigating the insurrection. Told by security officials that it wasn't safe to go to the Capitol after he addressed his supporters, Trump lunged toward the steering wheel of the armoured vehicle, she said.

The 25-year-old former aide said she was told of the altercation in the SUV — dubbed “The Beast” — immediately afterward by White House security officials, and that Engel was in the room and didn't dispute the account. Engel had grabbed Trump's arm to prevent him from gaining control of the armoured vehicle, she was told, and Trump then used his free hand to lunge at Engel.

Hutchinson, then a special assistant to White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, described chaos inside and outside the White House that day as hundreds of Trump's supporters marched toward the Capitol, shouting the president's false claims of widespread fraud in the 2020 election. Aides inside the executive mansion — several of whom had been warned of violence beforehand — became increasingly alarmed as rioters at the Capitol overran police, broke through windows and doors and interrupted the certification of Joe Biden's victory.

Trump was less concerned, even as he heard there were cries in the crowd to “hang Mike Pence!” Hutchinson recalled that Meadows told aides that Trump “thinks Mike deserves it.” The president tweeted during the attack that Pence didn't have the courage to object to Biden's win as he presided over the joint session of Congress.

As for the rioters, Meadows said, Trump “doesn't think they're doing anything wrong.”

Hutchinson told the panel the former president had been informed early in the day that some of the protesters had weapons, but he told officials to remove metal detectors to “let my people in” and march to the Capitol.

Hutchinson's explosive testimony — featured in a surprise hearing announced just 24 hours earlier — came at the latest of the sessions the House committee investigating the Capitol insurrection is conducting to inform the public about what happened as Trump's supporters broke into the Capitol and sent lawmakers running from the House and Senate.

“As an American I was disgusted,” Hutchinson told the committee, reacting to Trump's tweet about Pence. “It was unpatriotic, it was un-American, and you were watching the Capitol building get defaced over a lie.”

“I still struggle to work through the emotions of that,” she said.

Trump denied much of what Hutchinson said on his social media platform, Truth Social, including that he tried to grab the steering wheel of the presidential SUV or that he said Mike Pence deserved to be hung. “I hardly know who this person, Cassidy Hutchinson, is,” Trump wrote, calling her a “total phoney” and “bad news.”

Hutchinson depicted a president flailing in anger and prone to violent outbursts as the window to overturn his election loss closed. Some aides sought to rein in his impulses. Some did not.

At one point, Hutchinson said, White House Counsel Pat Cipollone barrelled down the hallway and confronted Meadows about the fact that rioters had breached the Capitol. Meadows, staring at his phone, told the White House lawyer that Trump didn't want to do anything. An exasperated Cipollone said that blood would be on Meadows' hands if nothing was done, she said.

Earlier, Cipollone had worried out loud that “we're going to get charged with every crime imaginable” if Trump went to the Capitol as the mob of his supporters was breaking in. But there were conversations about him “going into the House chamber at one point,” Hutchinson said.

Hutchinson quoted Trump as directing his staff, in profane terms, to take away the metal-detecting magnetometers that he thought would slow down supporters who were gathering for his speech that morning on the Ellipse, in back of the White House. In a clip of an earlier closed-door interview with the committee, she recalled the president saying words to the effect of: ”'I don't f-in' care that they have weapons.' ”

Before the crowd left for the Capitol, Hutchinson said she received an angry call from House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy, who had just heard the president say he was coming. “Don't come up here,” McCarthy told her, before hanging up.

In the days before the attack, Hutchinson said she was “scared, and nervous for what could happen” after conversations with Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, Meadows and others.

Meadows told Hutchinson that “things might get real, real bad,” she said. Giuliani told her it was going to be “a great day” and “we're going to the Capitol.”

As a White House insider, Hutchinson told stories of a raging president who was unable to acknowledge his defeat. At the beginning of December, she said, she heard noise inside the White House around the time an Associated Press article was published in which Attorney General William Barr said the Justice Department had not found evidence of voter fraud that could have affected the election outcome.

She said she entered a room and noticed ketchup dripping down a wall and broken porcelain. The president, it turned out, had thrown his lunch at the wall in disgust over the article and she was urged to steer clear of him.

He denied that, too, on Tuesday.