Quick Take: Shadow of a Doubt
What's up with the dispute between the Secret Service and the January 6 Committee?
You have to wonder what the staff of the House January 6 Committee thinks it’s doing. On Tuesday the Committee heard testimony from Cassidy Hutchinson, an aide to former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. To call it injurious to Donald Trump would be to understate the case by an order of magnitude. National Review Online’s Andrew C. McCarthy called it “devastating”—and yeah, it was all of that. Among other things, she related how Trump, immediately after delivering his rabble-rousing speech to a crowd of supporters outside the White House, got into a Secret Service SUV and ordered his detail to take him to the Capitol. The agent in charge demurred, explaining that it was too dangerous. Trump thereupon flew into a rage, shouting “I’m the f***ing president, take me up to the Capitol now.” And then, according to Hutchinson, he lunged toward the steering wheel of the SUV. When the agent in charge attempted to restrain the President, Trump physically assaulted him.
Here’s the problem though: This portion of Hutchinson’s testimony was not an eyewitness account. She said she learned about it from another Secret Service agent in whom the agent supposedly assaulted by Trump had confided. But now the Secret Service is disputing Hutchinson’s story—claiming, apparently, that the lunge and assault never happened. And when Rep. Liz Cheny, one of the two Republicans on the Committee, asserted her confidence in Hutchinson’s testimony and denounced character assassination by “anonymous sources and by men who are claiming executive privilege,” Secret Service chief of communications Anthony Guglielmi had a tart response. No Secret Service personnel, he noted, were summoned to answer questions about Hutchinson’s testimony in the ten days before Tuesday’s session, nor have there been any such requests from the Committee subsequently.
My sense is that the bulk of Hutchinson’s testimony was factual; for the most part it merely elaborated on Trump’s atrocious behavior that day. How, then, to account for the Secret Service’s pushback? I’m not necessarily saying that someone is lying, but that’s the obvious explanation, isn’t it?
But what really baffles me is the seeming incompetence of the Committee members and staffers. Obviously they knew in advance what Hutchinson would say. Given the bombshell character of her testimony, you’d think that they’d try to corroborate it by deposing the Secret Service agents involved. That seems not to have happened, however. And unless the Committee takes swift action to clear the matter up, Hutchinson’s “devastating” testimony is compromised by the shadow of a doubt.
Regarding the former president, my mind was made up long ago. Given his behavior in the aftermath of the 2020 election, Donald Trump’s unfitness for political office at any level is inarguable. He bears primary responsibility of the January 6, 2021 mob action that trashed the US Capitol, having spent his time between November 3, 2020 and that day spinning a demented conspiracy theory about a stolen election. On the day of the riot, his incendiary speech to his supporters was the action of a demagogue and a disgrace to the high office he then held.
What a shame, then, that the House of Representatives, controlled by the Democratic Party, failed in its duty to conduct a fair, impartial investigation of the assault on the Capitol. Its partisan one-sidedness has been obvious throughout—and that, I believe, explains why Hutchinson’s testimony was bungled. Her story was just too good to verify.