Report: Pro-Trump Lawyer Pressured Cassidy Hutchinson to Lie to January 6 Committee

The January 6 committee’s final hearing on Monday has led to yet another explosive finding: that Donald Trump’s effort to obstruct its probe potentially extended to Cassidy Hutchinson, the 26-year-old former White House aide who delivered bombshell testimony back in June. The committee claimed that a Trump-affiliated attorney advised a key witness to deceive the committee about what they recalled. And while the names of those involved were not explicitly revealed, CNN has since learned that former White House chief ethics lawyer Stefan Passantino was the attorney in question and that Hutchinson was the witness.

Citing two unnamed sources, the outlet also noted that Hutchinson has relayed the incident to the Department of Justice, which is conducting its own January 6 investigation. Passantino, whose representation of Hutchinson began last year and ended in the weeks leading up to her testimony in June, has not been charged with a crime. The committee’s summary of its final report specifically claims that an unnamed lawyer “advised the witness that the witness could, in certain circumstances, tell the Committee that she did not recall facts when she actually did recall them.” When the witness questioned that strategy, the lawyer purportedly doubled down. “‘They don’t know what you know,’” the report quotes the attorney as saying. “‘They don’t know that you can recall some of these things. So you saying ‘I don’t recall’ is an entirely acceptable response to this.’”

The panel also alleged that “the lawyer instructed the client about a particular issue that would cast a bad light on President Trump: ‘No, no, no, no, no. We don’t want to go there. We don’t want to talk about that.’”

In a statement to Insider, Passantino denied urging Hutchinson to mislead the committee. “As with all my clients during my 30 years of practice, I represented Ms. Hutchinson honorably, ethically, and fully consistent with her sole interests as she communicated them to me,” he said. “I believed Ms. Hutchinson was being truthful and cooperative with the committee throughout the several interview sessions in which I represented her.”

Before changing her legal representation ahead of the hearing, Hutchinson, a former aide to Mark Meadows, was represented by Elections LLC, a firm that counts Passantino as a founding partner. According to CNN, in the last two years Elections LLC has received $425,000 from Save America, a Trump PAC that has doled out payments to other firms representing witnesses caught in the January 6 probe.