Over a day later and I’m still trying to wrap my mind around yesterday’s testimony. It’s not like I didn’t already know a lot of it. The up-close-and-personal-details were shocking, those little things that have been hidden away until 25-year-old Cassady Hutchinson stood up and swore to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. I’d never heard of her, but apparently, she was well known on Capitol Hill and was around for a lot of the pre-insurrection talk at the White House. She was right there as the coup attempt took place, right there with Mark Meadows (tRump’s chief of staff), Pat Cipollone (tRump’s attorney) and others. She was a top aide to Meadows.
TB and I were already very much aware of tRump’s involvement from the get go. You had to be a real fool not to realize what he was doing at his speech to his hordes the morning of January 6th. He exhorted them that they might “fight and fight hard” to preserve The Big Lie (OK, he didn’t call it that). We knew he was involved when he did absolutely NOTHING to call off his violent mob for hours and hours. We heard reports that people at the White House were begging him to call the insurrectionists off and he refused. One thing he did do was tweet a message that set his followers raging after Mike Pence. We knew all that. Reinforcements didn’t arrive until AFTER the President sent his go-home-I-love-you video to the traitors.
What we didn’t know: he didn’t even want to do that. He thought Pence deserved to be hanged. He believed the mob wasn’t doing anything wrong. Well, all that seemed pretty obvious.
Hutchinson was stoic but looked frightened all the same. She’d heard all kinds of stories floating around about January 6th but she didn’t feel really scared until a conversation she had with Rudy Giuliani on January 2nd. Giuliani was all bubbling over with glee about “going to the Capitol” on January 6th, and she had a feeling it wasn’t going to be good. She consulted with Mark Meadows, who seems to have been a very detached and cold-hearted character. He was sitting on the sofa scrolling through his phone and that seemed to be something he did frequently.
She tried to discourage him from getting in the middle of all of that potentially violent shit. He did anyway. There was a “war room” at a hotel in DC where tRump’s loyal inside group of screwballs were plotting and planning. She did manage to convince Meadows not to go in person; he participated by phone.
She was at the Ellipse when tRump was going to give his incendiary speech. He was majorly pissed because there wasn’t enough of a crowd in camera view. That’s because most of his traitorous army were armed to the teeth and didn’t want to pass through the secret services’ magnometer machines. They didn’t want their deadly weapons detected and confiscated. She heard tRump become irate and profane. I’m the fucking president, he said. They’re not here to hurt me. Get the fucking mags out of here. Let my people in.
So, he wanted the secret service to allow all those followers waiting outside the Ellipse to come into the circle. It didn’t matter they were carrying knives, guns, spears and what have you because “they’re not here to harm me.” The hell with everyone else, right? Those are the rioters who attacked and injured so many of the Capitol police defending the building.
I wondered about the one statement he made on January 6th that they were all going to March on the Capitol now. I’m going with you, he said. He never showed up, and I remember thinking what a coward he was. Well, it turns out he wanted to go and had a major tantrum when he found out the secret service wouldn’t take him there. According to Hutchinson, Tony Orvaldo, a secret service agent serving as the White House deputy chief of staff, told her that tRump became so enraged he tried to grab the steering wheel and also lunged at lead agent Bobby Engel’s throat in an attempt to force them to take him to the Capitol.
Although shaken then, today both men are denying anything like that happened.
Unhinged and shocking. More along those lines, apparently tRump was wont to throw plates of food and overturn tables when he was irate. And this was the man with the codes. We certainly were protected by all the guardian angels in heaven during that awful man’s administration.
After tRump was returned to the White House, he went to the Oval dining room and watched TV. TB and I were watching coverage of a court case which was suddenly interrupted by live coverage of the incensed mob descending on the Capitol. They quickly broke through the barriers and steamrollered over the Capitol police. We couldn’t believe our eyes.
There was equal horror in the West Wing. Hutchinson tried to alert Meadows but he was scrolling once again, virtually ignoring her. She said Pat Cipollone barreled in, telling Meadows they had to go talk to tRump. And Meadows said, “He doesn’t want to do anything.” tRump had no interest in stopping the violence, in other words. When they finally did go to confront tRump, they had no luck. Cipollone was very upset because tRump had said Pence deserved to be hanged.
For 187 minutes, tRump did nothing but watch the coverage. Finally, he was persuaded to reluctantly release the video telling his supporters to “go home, we love you. You’re special people.”
On January 6, 2021—which was also TB’s birthday by the way, some present! —we realized how close we’d come to a coup of our government. This was the United States? That kind of thing didn’t happen in the greatest democracy in the world, but it did.
Even worse, all of those people in the White House that day knew tRump had lost the election and told him repeatedly he’d lost. There was no steal. They could have said something but none of them did before or after January 6th. The witnesses who testified didn’t speak up when tRump and his cronies carried on (and still carry on) about the Big Lie. They all knew it wasn’t true.
The witnesses are hailed and praised for speaking up now before the committee. I am very glad that they’re being honest about what really happened but I still wonder why they didn’t speak up sooner. Were they afraid of retaliation?
tRump makes me think of Mafia dons. They led their “families” and often would have other soldiers doing all the dirty work. And the soldiers and other family members protected the dons. They had this code of silence called omerta and so it was that no one could figure out just how these organizations worked. Federal agents were frequently frustrated trying to prosecute illegal activities. If it wasn’t for people like Sammy “The Bull” Gravano, Henry Hill, Joseph Valachi and others, that whole criminal syndicate of families wouldn’t have been cracked open.
Liz Cheney closed with some chilling information. Apparently, people in tRump’s world are attempting to interfere with witnesses’ testimony. She shared two of those messages, filled with fake promises and subtle threats. It’s illegal to do that, of course, but that was a major tactic organized crime used to silence witnesses.
What is happening and continuing to happen in this country? Between these hearings and the take-over of the Supreme Court by radical right wingers, I am feeling scared for our future.
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