(Luis Cornelio, Headline USA) Cassidy Hutchinson, the infamous star witness in the Jan. 6 Committee hearings in 2022, has reportedly been referred to the Department of Justice for criminal prosecution.
The referral comes from Rep. Barry Loudermilk, who now leads a new Jan. 6 committee and was empowered by the White House and House Speaker Mike Johnson to investigate potential criminality stemming from the 2021 hearings.
According to a Friday report from leftist outlet CNN, Loudermilk accused Hutchinson of lying to Congress when she testified under oath in 2022 that Donald Trump was aware of potential violence on Jan. 6, 2021.
Hutchinson, widely celebrated in left-leaning circles, went on to appear in high-profile cable news interviews and later published a New York Times bestseller recounting her account of Jan. 6.
In 2024, Loudermilk released what he described as evidence indicating that Hutchinson “knowingly provided false testimony” regarding a handwritten note allegedly given to Trump on that day.
According to Loudermilk, Hutchinson claimed she wrote the note urging people at the Capitol to leave. However, then-Trump attorney Eric Herschmann said he was the actual author.
House Republicans retained an independent, certified handwriting analyst who concluded that the note appeared to have been written by Herschmann.
Hutchinson also repeated a secondhand account that Trump supposedly lunged toward the front of a presidential vehicle to force a Secret Service driver to take him to the Capitol.
At the time, Trump’s lead Secret Service agent, Robert Engel, and the driver disputed that account, affirming in a transcribed interview that the lunging never occurred. The Jan. 6 Committee did not release these transcripts publicly.
“He was not screaming at me. Certainly his voice was raised, but it did not seem to me that he was irate — certainly not, certainly didn’t seem as irritated or agitated as he had on the way to the Ellipse,” Engel said, as quoted by leftist newspaper New York Times.
The driver also disputed the claims: “I did not see him reach. He never grabbed the steering wheel. I didn’t see him, you know, lunge to try to get into the front seat at all. You know, what stood out was the irritation in his voice, more than his physical presence.”
The specific details of Hutchinson’s referral to the DOJ remain unclear, and it is not known whether any of these disputed accounts are included in it.
