Grand jury declines to indict ex-White House staffer who testified about January 6

The justice department on Tuesday failed to secure a grand jury indictment against a former White House staffer who provided dramatic but disputed testimony against Donald Trump before a House committee investigating the 6 January 2021 US Capitol insurrection, according to two people familiar with the matter.

A grand jury in Washington rejected prosecutors’ request to return an indictment charging Cassidy Hutchinson, said the people, who spoke to the Associated Press on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss the case. It’s the latest setback in the justice department’s efforts to charge perceived adversaries of the Republican president.

Details of prosecutors’ allegations against Hutchinson were not immediately clear, but Republican lawmakers had accused her of lying under oath in her explosive testimony in 2022 about Trump’s behavior on January 6, when a mob of his supporters stormed the Capitol to halt the congressional certification of his election loss to Democrat Joe Biden.

The account, at a surprise hearing announced just 24 hours earlier, was seen at the time as particularly powerful given Hutchinson’s proximity to power as special assistant to Mark Meadows, Trump’s chief of staff.

Hutchinson described an angry, defiant president who was trying to let armed protesters avoid security screenings at a rally that morning to protest his 2020 election defeat and who later grabbed at the steering wheel of the presidential SUV when the Secret Service refused to let him go to the Capitol. And when the events at the Capitol spiraled toward violence, with the crowd chanting “Hang Mike Pence,” she testified that Trump declined to intervene.

Trump at the time denied much of what Hutchinson said on his social media platform, Truth Social. He called her a “total phony” and “bad news”.

Hutchinson has alleged that members of Trump’s inner circle dangled job opportunities and financial assistance while she was cooperating with the committee. She also testified that her own lawyer – a former ethics counsel in the Trump White House – told her: “The less you remember, the better.”

The US House of Representatives impeached Trump in 2021 on allegations that he incited the mob that attacked the Capitol, but he was later acquitted by the Senate. The justice department under Biden charged Trump with felony offenses, accusing him of illegally working to overturn his 2020 election loss in the run-up to the Capitol attack, but then special counsel Jack Smith abandoned the case after Trump’s 2024 presidential victory. Longstanding justice department policy says sitting presidents cannot face criminal prosecution.

Hutchinson, a native of Pennington, New Jersey, previously worked in the White House office of legislative affairs and interned for Republicans, including the representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana and the senator Ted Cruz of Texas.