President Donald Trump has ordered the Justice Department’s civil rights division to investigate Cassidy Hutchinson, a former White House aide whose televised testimony about Jan. 6 made her one of the most closely watched witnesses to emerge from the House inquiry. The investigation began some weeks ago, after the department received a referral from a Trump ally in Congress accusing Hutchinson of lying to the special House committee that examined the attack on the Capitol.
The move was highly unusual. The civil rights division normally handles systemic abuses such as police misconduct and racial discrimination, not allegations tied to congressional testimony. Trump’s order also fits a broader pattern: an explicitly political effort to use federal power against his opponents, even as other political prosecutions he has pushed have failed to win indictments from grand juries.
Hutchinson, who was 29 at the time of her June 2022 testimony, said under oath that Trump encouraged the crowd gathered near the White House on Jan. 6, 2021, to march to the Capitol even though he knew the crowd was armed and could turn violent. She also said she had heard that Trump lunged at one of his Secret Service agents in a presidential limousine after being told he could not go to Capitol Hill with his supporters.
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Her account gave the House committee some of its most damaging material about Trump’s conduct that day, and it is that testimony that now sits at the center of the inquiry. The Justice Department is not said to be examining the broader events of Jan. 6; it is focused on whether Hutchinson lied to Congress, a claim advanced by a political referral rather than a conventional criminal case.
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That is the tension at the heart of the investigation. A unit created to pursue civil rights violations is being asked to weigh a political witness’s testimony about a president’s actions, in a case sparked by one of the president’s allies. The next test is whether the department turns the referral into formal charges, or whether the probe remains a warning shot in Trump’s drive to recast the machinery of government around his grievances.
