Grand Jury Refuses to Indict Former Trump Aide Hutchinson

A grand jury in Washington has rejected a request from prosecutors to indict Cassidy Hutchinson, a former White House staffer. She gave dramatic but disputed testimony against Donald Trump to a House committee investigating the 6 January 2021 Capitol attack.

The justice department failed to secure the indictment on Tuesday, according to two people familiar with the matter. They spoke to the Associated Press on condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to discuss the case publicly.

It is the latest setback in the department's efforts to charge perceived adversaries of the Republican president. Details of the prosecutors' allegations were not immediately clear. Republican lawmakers had accused Hutchinson of lying under oath in her 2022 testimony.

What she told the committee

Hutchinson was a special assistant to Mark Meadows, Trump's chief of staff. Her account, given at a surprise hearing announced just 24 hours earlier, was seen at the time as particularly powerful because of how close she was to power.

She described an angry, defiant president. By her account, he tried to let armed protesters avoid security screenings at a rally that morning and later grabbed at the steering wheel of the presidential SUV when the Secret Service refused to take him to the Capitol. As the crowd chanted "Hang Mike Pence", she testified, Trump declined to intervene.

Trump denied much of this on Truth Social. He called her a "total phony" and "bad news".

Hutchinson has alleged that members of Trump's inner circle dangled job opportunities and financial help while she cooperated with the committee. She also testified that her own lawyer, a former ethics counsel in the Trump White House, told her: "The less you remember, the better."

The House impeached Trump in 2021 on allegations that he incited the mob, but the Senate acquitted him. The Biden-era justice department later charged him with felonies over efforts to overturn his 2020 defeat. Special counsel Jack Smith abandoned that case after Trump won the 2024 election.

Hutchinson is a native of Pennington, New Jersey.

Source: The Guardian