Cassidy Hutchinson says she initially lied to the January 6 committee about a claim that Trump grabbed the steering wheel of his SUV and lunged at a Secret Service agent
Cassidy Hutchinson said she lied in her original deposition to the House Capitol-riot committee.
She said she initially told the panel she hadn't heard of Trump lunging at a Secret Service agent.
But soon after her deposition, she said she told her attorney, "I lied, I lied, I lied."
Cassidy Hutchinson, a former aide in the Trump administration and a key witness in the House select committee hearings on the January 6, 2021, Capitol attack, said she initially lied to the panel in a deposition about whether she'd heard that President Donald Trump lunged at a Secret Service agent in the presidential SUV on the day of the riot.
In her newly released depositions, Hutchinson said she was coerced by Stefan Passantino, her Trump-aligned attorney, to mislead it on how much information she knew.
"The committee doesn't know what you can and can't recall, so we want to be able to use that as much as we can unless you really, really remember something very clearly," Hutchinson said Passantino told her.
Hutchinson said she followed the advice of her counsel. When asked about a moment on January 6 when the president is said to have lunged at a member of the Secret Service in the presidential SUV for not taking him to the Capitol alongside protesters, she said she told the panel she had "never heard anything about that."
After the deposition, she told the committee in a separate deposition that she broke down in front of Passantino out of fear that she had just lied to the committee.
"Stefan, I'm fucked. I just lied," Hutchinson said she told Passantino. "I lied, I lied, I lied."
In a later deposition, Hutchinson told the committee she continued to be riddled with guilt after not being entirely truthful to the committee in her first deposition.
"Stefan, I feel really guilty and bad about not answering some questions today," she said she told her counsel.
Hutchinson also apologized for her missteps with the committee.
"I know my history with the committee, and I am sorry that it took so long to get to this place," she told Rep. Liz Cheney, the vice chair of the committee. "I do accept responsibility for it. I'm not pinning blame on everybody else but myself."
Passantino denied any wrongdoing in a statement to Insider.
"As with all my clients during my 30 years of practice, I represented Ms. Hutchinson honorably, ethically, and fully consistent with her sole interests as she communicated them to me," Passantino told Insider. "I believed Ms. Hutchinson was being truthful and cooperative with the Committee throughout the several interview sessions in which I represented her."
Correction: December 22, 2022 — An earlier version of this story misstated the date of the Capitol riot. It took place on January 6, 2021, not January 6, 2020.
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