“I know when he starts to get nervous,” said Cassidy Hutchinson this week in an interview with MSNBC’s Jen Psaki. “I know that Donald Trump has to be nervous, if not extremely frightened right now.”
According to Penn State, Hutchinson was an aide to Trump’s White House and had a desk just steps from the current presumptive GOP presidential candidate. Then came Jan. 6, 2021.
As rioters stormed the Capitol, the 24-year-old’s life changed. Hutchinson later became a pivotal witness to investigations into the deadly demonstration.
“She received national attention after being a key witness in the hearings led by the United States House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol,” said Simon & Schuster, the publisher of her book “Enough”.
Now, Trump has said that Hutchinson will be “prosecuted” for her testimony. This is because he lashes out when he is threatened, she told Psaki (who previously served as White House press secretary under President Joe Biden).
“He is deploying his most loyal allies on Capitol Hill to try to discredit not only my testimony by the entire January 6th investigation as a whole,” Hutchinson said.
Trump held a rally in Washington D.C. on Jan. 6 where he discussed unfounded claims of voter fraud. Rioters attempted to prevent the certification of votes for Biden, who won the election, and some even called for then Vice President Mike Pence to be hanged because he refused to block the certification.
“The facts are out there,” Hutchinson said. “He doesn’t want the facts out there because he doesn’t want the American people to know what actually happened. He’s hoping that his false narrative of what happened on January 6th is what the American people will believe,” as we head towards the presidential election in November.
Trump has continued to make claims about election interference as he campaigns for a second term in the White House.
“It’s really imperative that we keep speaking about the truth, because the facts are the facts and Donald Trump has tried to smear those with his deceit and his lies,” Hutchinson stressed. In particular, she wants the public to know that Trump was aware that people in the Capitol riot crowd had weapons.
Trump is “committed to unleashing political violence,” she said, adding “that’s not what a leader does.”
Many recent polls have shown that Trump and Biden are close, with Trump often edging a bit ahead of the sitting president. However, Bloomberg/Morning Consult poll results released this week showed that Biden had pulled ahead in some swing states and Quinnipiac poll results released Wednesday found that Biden was polling ahead of Trump. As their campaigns continue, Hutchinson warned voters about the Trump camp’s ability to “manipulate” the public and spread conspiracy theories.
“We might be tumbling towards a dictatorship,” she said.