Cassidy Hutchinson was a 25-year-old aide to White House chief of staff Mark Meadows when she testified before the House Jan. 6 committee in June 2022. She made a number of damning revelations about Trump to the committee including that:
Trump had been warned that some of his supporters at the Ellipse were armed, but he wanted the magnetometers removed anyway
Anthony Ornato, then the White House deputy chief of staff, told her that Trump lunged at the steering wheel of his vehicle when his Secret Service detail refused to drive him to the Capitol, where his supporters were marching
Trump has demanded her prosecution ever since. On Oct. 8, Punchbowl News, CBS, and NBC reported that the Justice Department has begun presenting evidence to a federal grand jury in Washington with the aim of indicting her for lying to Congress.
The case rests on a referral from Reps. Jim Jordan and Barry Loudermilk earlier this year. The steering-wheel story was secondhand, and Hutchinson said so at the time. That Ornato and the driver later disputed it is evidence of a dispute between witnesses, not of perjury. Hutchinson sat for more than 30 hours of sworn testimony, and the committee had every incentive to catch her in a lie if there was one. A federal judge noted in a Sept. 24 order that she was already “presently the subject of a criminal investigation.”
What sets this case apart from the administration’s prosecution of James Comey, Letitia James, and others is the choice of prosecutor. False-statement cases are typically handled by U.S. Attorney’s offices, in this instance Jeanine Pirro’s in the District of Columbia. Instead, the matter has been assigned to the Civil Rights Division under Harmeet Dhillon, whose office enforces anti-discrimination law and has no ordinary role in prosecuting congressional testimony.
The Washington Post reported that prosecutors are looking to charge her with a civil rights violation, a theory that would treat disputed testimony about the president as a crime against someone’s rights. Reporting on former Attorney General Pam Bondi’s firing in April described the Hutchinson inquiry as one of her last-ditch attempts to placate Trump. A grand jury may decline to indict. The point is that a president who spent four years calling for a witness’s prosecution now has a Justice Department willing to stretch the Civil Rights Division’s mandate to go after her.
The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.
© The UnPopulist, 2026
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