Thank you, Mr. Chairman

 

It has been a week of unparalleled shittiness for America and Chairman Bennie Thompson decided we needed a little boost, a reason to keep on believing and hoping things will get better.  So he brought us Cassidy Hutchinson. 

Who?  She graduated from a college I never heard of, she interned for Steve Scalise and Ted Cruz, and she thinks Trump's "achievements" need to be recognized.  So far, not someone I would spend five minutes with.  She is said to be 25 years old.  But she was hired out of college to be the assistant to Mark Meadows when he became White House chief of staff in 2018, and this is where it gets interesting.

Meadows apparently wanted Hutchinson in every meeting "taking notes," a decision he may now regret.  She saw it all and she described it for the House Select Committee and oh, my, it was awesome, as the twenty-somethings say.  Nothing she said about Trump was surprising but all of it was tasty -- the food-flinging, the steering wheel slapstick, the blatant witness tampering and more F-bombs than a Tarantino movie.  Some fly-on-the-wall details:

She walked Giuliani to his car on January 2 and he asked if she was "excited" about the events planned for January 6.  She says she was "scared and nervous."  She knew these clowns.  She heard the words "Proud Boys" and "Oath Keepers," and not in the context of "Jesus, we should alert Homeland Security."

Trump was "fucking furious" about the size of the mob on the Ellipse, reduced because the Secret Service was screening for weapons.  He assured them they weren't there to shoot him, let them through so the crowd looks bigger!

She tried to call Meadows's attention to the mayhem on the television in his office.  He continued to stare at his phone, almost as if he wasn't surprised.

Trump demanded that "The Beast" (never has the presidential car been better named) be driven to the Capitol.  When his driver refused he grabbed the wheel, then lunged for the man's neck, screaming, "I'm the fucking president!"  We don't pay these agents enough.

She quoted Pat Cipollone, the White House counsel:  "Man, we need to do something more.  They're literally calling for the Vice-President to be fucking hung."  To which Meadows responded, "You heard him, Pat, he thinks Mike deserves it.  He doesn't think they're doing anything wrong."  

In the midst of the riot Trump tweeted, "Mike Pence didn't have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution."  Hutchinson pronounced herself "disgusted.  It was un-American.  We were watching the Capitol building get defaced over a lie."

She added Giuliani and Meadows to the list of plotters who requested pardons, to the amazement of nobody.  I wouldn't be surprised if Michael Flynn already had one.  Liz Cheney, who did the questioning, treated us to audio of the general repeatedly invoking the Fifth Amendment.  Even when asked if he believes in the peaceful transfer of power, our military hero apparently feared self-incrimination.

Then Cheney shared these responses from a couple of unnamed (so far) witnesses, who clearly were warned off in unmistakable mobster language.  "Good graces."  "Loyal."  "Protecting who I need to protect."  No fish wrapped in trousers?  Cheney calls this witness-tampering.  The only part I don't believe is "Trump does read transcripts."  

Trump watches television.  When he got back to the White House he saw Bill Barr telling the Associated Press there was no evidence of voter fraud, not even in Georgia.  Shortly afterward Hutchinson encountered a valet wiping ketchup off the wall and cleaning up broken crockery.  He flings his lunch when displeased, sometimes pulls the cloth off the table.  Barr should have known better than to go on at lunchtime.

And...hot off the Ministry of Truth Social wire, the septuagenarian toddler's measured response:  She's "a total phony and 'leaker'" of whom he knows almost nothing.  She wanted to go with certain others to Florida and "I personally turned her down...she was very upset and angry...She is bad news!"  

Well, he's right about that.  As Mick Mulvaney observed, "It's never the crime, it's always the cover-up." I look forward to the next torchlight rally where Trump denounces her as "no more than a seven."  Free-yow!

Cassidy Hutchinson is being compared to John Dean, another insider who decided to excise "the cancer on the presidency" he saw in the Watergate cover-up.  Dean was a lot more culpable, as White House counsel to Nixon, and served a prison sentence.  I don't know if he fielded the kind of death threats that will be coming this young woman's way, or what she plans to do with the rest of her life.  She could have claimed to be only one step up from an intern, pleaded the Fifth and quietly slipped away, but she didn't.  The last word was Bennie Thompson's, inviting others who might be remembering something significant, or those who discovered "some courage you had hidden away somewhere -- our door is always open."

That was the only picture of him smiling that I could find.