Travis Gettys is a senior editor for Raw Story based in northern Kentucky. He previously worked as a web editor for WLWT-TV and a contributing writer for the Kentucky Enquirer, and he also wrote for the award-winning Sadly, No! blog. He has covered national, state and local politics, breaking news, criminal investigations and trials, sports and a variety of community issues, with a special emphasis on racial justice, right-wing extremism and gun safety.
Cassidy Hutchinson admitted that she feels tremendous guilt for the actions she took -- and didn't take -- leading up to the Jan. 6 insurrection.
The former White House staffer eventually served as a key witness in the House Select Committee investigation and then wrote a new book, "Enough," about her experience as the chief aide to Donald Trump's chief of staff Mark Meadows, and she told MSNBC's "Morning Joe" that she wishes she had done more to push back on the former president's claims about his election loss.
"In that job, looking back with hindsight, I see it in a different perspective today, but I saw it as my job to get things done no matter what it took," Cassidy said. "In those moments, I saw it as my duty and obligation to help Mark be able to facilitate something so we didn't have a bigger crisis that day. Looking back now, you know, I see that there's a lack of leadership, and there was a lack of leadership that day."
"I don't have a hero complex that I saved anything on Jan. 6 at all, and I live with the guilt of being complicit and possibly instrumental leading up to Jan. 6, and part of the reason I wrote the book is because I didn't just land in the chair to testify, but it took a long time to get there," she added.
Hutchinson expressed regret in waiting so long to denounce what she had witnessed in the Trump White House and said she even disagreed initially with her friend and fellow staffer Alyssa Farah Griffin's decision to come forward Jan. 7, 2021, and say the former president was wrong to attempt to overturn his loss.
"There's a shift on me on Jan. 6 that I don't fully think I was cognizant to at the time," Hutchinson said. "It took a while to get to where I was able to realize this, and it's the Trumpworld mentality, where I fell into that, and there's nothing wrong with it, necessarily, but it was a year and a half where I was going to testify and being more forthright with the committee, and this is not the public service I had envisioned a career being with, so I think that the points of reflection that I had helped bring me to the moment, but I am still working through a lot of those things."
