# Cassidy Hutchinson Former special assistant to White House Chief of Staff [[Mark Meadows]], and the star witness of the [[House Select Committee on the January 6th Attack]]. She is the subject of a Justice Department investigation into whether she lied to Congress. The investigation has been public since April 2026, and in October 2026 it reached a grand jury. **No indictment has been returned.** ## The testimony (June 28, 2022) The committee added a surprise hearing to hear her. Under oath, Hutchinson testified to what she saw and was told inside the West Wing. She said Trump was told that people in the January 6 crowd were armed and wanted the magnetometers removed. She said Meadows had been warned that violence was possible. She also relayed a second-hand account, which she said came from deputy chief of staff Tony Ornato, that Trump had lunged toward the steering wheel of the presidential SUV when agents refused to drive him to the Capitol. The SUV story became the line of attack on her. Secret Service sources disputed it in the press at the time, and the driver later contradicted it under oath. She published a memoir, *Enough*, in 2023. Transcripts the committee released on December 22, 2022 recorded her saying that her first lawyer, [[Stefan Passantino]], a former Trump White House ethics lawyer whose fees were paid by Trump allies, told her "the less you remember, the better." She changed lawyers before her public testimony. That switch, and Cheney's contact with her around it, is what the Republican counter-investigation later targeted. ## The counter-investigation - **2024-12** — Rep. [[Barry Loudermilk]]'s House Administration oversight subcommittee issues a report urging that [[Liz Cheney]] be investigated for witness tampering over her contacts with Hutchinson. Democrats release an email from Hutchinson's lawyer denying any "improper communications." - **2025-01-20** — Biden's preemptive pardons cover the committee's members and staff, but not its witnesses. - **2026-03 (reported March 6)** — [[Barry Loudermilk]] refers her to the Justice Department for lying to Congress in her summer 2022 testimony; House Judiciary Chair [[Jim Jordan]] co-signs (CNN; The New Republic). The referral targets her testimony that Trump knew of the potential for violence on January 6 and pressed ahead. CNN did not report the second-hand SUV account as part of it. - **2026-04** — The *New York Times* reports that DOJ has opened an investigation (as cited by Newsweek). - **2026-09-24** — In Trump's defamation suit against the BBC, a federal judge (Jeffrey Kuntz) quashes the BBC's subpoena for her deposition. She had told the court she would invoke the [[Fifth Amendment]] because DOJ is investigating her, and the order calls her "presently the subject of a criminal investigation" (Newsweek). - **2026-10-08** — CBS News, NBC News and the *Washington Post* report that DOJ's Civil Rights Division, led by [[Harmeet Dhillon]] rather than the D.C. U.S. Attorney's Office, has been presenting evidence to a Washington grand jury on a false-statements theory. The underlying referral is Loudermilk and Jordan's from March. Which statements prosecutors are pursuing had not been reported. ## KB significance She is the test case for the pattern on [[House Select Committee on the January 6th Attack]]: once the investigators were pardoned, the investigation turned on the unprotected witness. Track the grand jury outcome. See also [[Trump Retribution Ecosystem]]. ## Related - [[Cassidy Hutchinson News Log]] — live tracking of the grand jury - [[House Select Committee on the January 6th Attack]] - [[Mark Meadows]] · [[Liz Cheney]] · [[Barry Loudermilk]]