Former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson has made a number of explosive claims about the Trump administration in her upcoming book “Enough.” Hutchinson kept quiet about what she witnessed during the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol until she was called to testify in the June 2022 hearings on the event. After that, she went into a semi-state of hiding and moved to Atlanta, Georgia for several months after her legal team advised her to leave Washington.
Threats of violence and harm precipitated the move, an unexpected departure for a woman who had managed to climb to the upper echelon of the Oval Office during Trump’s presidency.
“I was the conduit to the White House chief of staff,” she told CBS News’ Tracy Smith. “Pretty much, to get to him, you had to go through me in some capacity.”
Hutchinson writes in her book that the first lawyer she worked with was paid for by a Trump PAC. She was told to “remember” and say little against Trump and his colleagues. While preparing for that experience, she read up on the Watergate scandal and on Alexander Butterfield, the Richard Nixon aide who uncovered the taping system in the White House that led to the president’s resignation.
She reached out to Butterfield, who became “a source of strength.” The two formed a friendship that helped her see “that there was life on the other side of” coming clean about what she saw and experienced in the Trump White House.
Hutchinson’s testimony has been denied by White House deputy chief of staff Tony Ornato, Secret Service agent Bobby Engel and Trump himself. Last week, the former president told “Meet the Press” that “She’s … the craziest account I’ve ever heard. You mean that I was in the Beast, and she said I was in the Beast, and the Secret Service didn’t want – so I took a guy who was like a black belt in karate and grabbed his neck and tried to choke him. How ridiculous.”
Still, Hutchinson is pressing forward. Her book “Enough” will be available online and in bookstores on Tuesday.
