Cassidy Hutchinson testimony 'jolted' DOJ to discuss 'Trump’s potential criminal culpability': NYT

One night before the next public hearing by the House Select Committee Investigating the Jan. 6 Attack on the U.S. Capitol, The New York Times reports that Cassidy Hutchinson's testimony from the last hearing has had an impact in the thinking by Department of Justice brass.

"For the past year and a half, the Justice Department has approached former President Donald J. Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election results with a follow-the-evidence strategy that to critics appeared to border on paralysis — and that limited discussions of his role, even inside the department," the newspaper reported. "The electrifying public testimony delivered last month to the House Jan. 6 panel by Ms. Hutchinson, a former White House aide who was witness to many key moments, jolted top Justice Department officials into discussing the topic of Mr. Trump more directly, at times in the presence of Attorney General Merrick B. Garland and Deputy Attorney General Lisa O. Monaco."

MSNBC's Rachel Maddow predicted the hearing would put increased pressure on Garland.

"In conversations at the department the day after Ms. Hutchinson’s appearance, some of which included Ms. Monaco, officials talked about the pressure that the testimony created to scrutinize Mr. Trump’s potential criminal culpability and whether he intended to break the law," the newspaper reported. "Ms. Hutchinson’s disclosures seemed to have opened a path to broaching the most sensitive topic of all: Mr. Trump’s own actions ahead of the attack."

Professor Laurence Tribe, who taught Garland constitutional law at Harvard, has urged Garland to prosecute Trump under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act law designed to go after the mafia.

"Department officials have said Ms. Hutchinson’s testimony did not alter their investigative strategy to methodically work their way from lower-level actors up to higher rungs of power. 'The only pressure I feel, and the only pressure that our line prosecutors feel, is to do the right thing,' Mr. Garland said this spring. But some of her explosive assertions — that Mr. Trump knew some of his supporters at a rally on Jan. 6, 2021, were armed, that he desperately wanted to join them as they marched to the Capitol and that the White House’s top lawyer feared Mr. Trump’s conduct could lead to criminal charges — were largely new to them and grabbed their attention," the newspaper reported.

Read the full report.