Trump appearance of Jan. 6 committee witness tampering would be very hard to prove
Why Trump witness tampering would be so hard to prove
Cassidy Hutchinson could not be intimidated. It was revealed this week that the former assistant to then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows is now cooperating with the Justice Department despite receiving a thinly veiled threat from an anonymous phone caller right before she testified to the House committee looking into the Jan. 6 insurrection earlier this month — a threat she shrugged off.
The caller advised her that he was aware of her upcoming testimony, which had not yet been made public, and ominously urged her to “do the right thing” when she told the committee about President Donald Trump’s actions surrounding the mob’s storming of the Capitol. The warning to Hutchinson failed to sidetrack the investigation, however. She still told the committee that Trump was aware that some of the protesters were armed but nonetheless attempted to join them at the Capitol, only to be thwarted by the intervention of Secret Service agents.
It may have been Trump’s good luck that the Jan. 6 committee witness declined his call.
This wasn’t the only such call. It turns out the former president himself tried to reach out to a potential witness, with a source telling NBC News earlier this month that he had placed a telephone call to a member of the White House support staff who was in talks with the committee.
There is little reason to wonder why Trump did it. When the once and possibly future most powerful person in the world reaches out to a low-level White House staff member with whom, according to CNN’s reporting, he’d seldom had contact even during his administration, it’s safe to conclude that he wasn’t inquiring about the person’s health or the weather.
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