Former Trump White House communications director Alyssa Farah on Thursday detailed the series of events that led to the damning testimony Cassidy Hutchinson — a former top aide to White House chief of staff Mark Meadows — delivered during a Jan. 6 Select Committee public hearing this week.
During an appearance on CNN’s “New Day,” Farah described putting Hutchinson, her personal friend, in touch with Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY), who serves as vice chair for the committee, a couple months ago. Farah recalled Hutchinson saying there was “more I want to share with the committee” after Hutchinson gave her initial testimony to the panel behind closed doors.
Farah revealed that Trumpworld had assigned lawyers to many lower level staffers who could not cover legal fees on their own. Farah noted that Hutchinson was initially represented by Stefan Passantino, a former Trump White House lawyer with deep ties to the former president. In the weeks leading up to her testimony on Tuesday, Hutchinson switched her lawyer to Jody Hunt, former Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ chief of staff when Sessions recused himself from the Russia probe.
“She did her interview, she complied with the committee, but she shared with me: there is more I want to share that was not asked in those settings, how do we do this?” Farah said. “In that process, she got a new attorney of her own.”
Following Hutchinson’s decision to switch lawyers, Farah, in her words, said Cheney “had a sense of questions that needed to be asked that weren’t previously.”
“So that’s how this shocking testimony that people didn’t realize before kind of came about, and it didn’t come up in her earlier interviews, some of these facts,” Farah said.
Hutchinson’s testimony on Tuesday sent shockwaves throughout Trumpworld as she recalled Trump and his allies’ movements in the days leading up to and on Jan. 6. Hutchinson detailed the resistance figures in Trump’s inner circle demonstrated as he pushed to march to the Capitol alongside his supporters on Jan. 6, following the “Stop the Steal” rally on the Ellipse.
Additionally, Hutchinson recalled other White House aides telling her that Trump lunged at the steering wheel of the presidential SUV he was riding in after the rally when his Secret Service chief refused to take him to the Capitol.
