BREAKING: Grand jury REFUSES TO INDICT Cassidy Hutchinson, handing Trump’s DOJ another HUMILIATING DEFEAT in its revenge campaign.
Donald Trump’s Justice Department spent years being pushed to punish the woman who told America what happened with Trump on January 6. Then it walked into a D.C. grand jury room and walked out empty-handed, as grand jurors in the nation’s capital continue to reject the DOJ’s attempts to prosecute the people whom the vindictive president considers his enemies.
According to The Washington Post, a federal grand jury in Washington rejected the Justice Department’s attempt to indict former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson over her 2022 testimony to the House January 6 committee. In a brief court appearance Tuesday, a Justice Department lawyer told a magistrate judge that the grand jury “had not concurred” on a proposed indictment. Two people familiar with the matter told the Post he was referring to Hutchinson.
Here’s why that’s a big deal. Grand juries almost never say no. Prosecutors only need to convince a majority of jurors that there’s probable cause a crime was committed, a famously low bar. As the old saying goes, a prosecutor could indict a ham sandwich without a hell of a lot of trouble.
Speaking of sandwiches: D.C. grand jurors also refused to indict the man who threw a Subway sandwich at a National Guardsman. In February, another D.C. grand jury refused to indict six Democratic lawmakers over a video reminding troops they must refuse illegal orders. Now Hutchinson joins the list of the embarrassing failures by Trump’s DOJ, which keeps losing to ordinary citizens who can see exactly what’s going on.
And this one was strange from the start. The case was presented by the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, an unusual choice for a false-statements investigation, the Post reports. It followed a referral from two of Trump’s loudest allies in Congress, Reps. Jim Jordan and Barry Loudermilk, who claimed her testimony was false.
Hutchinson was just 25 when she testified in 2022, and 13 million people watched. She said Trump urged supporters to march on the Capitol knowing they were armed. She also relayed what another aide told her: that Trump grabbed at the steering wheel of his SUV and lunged at the head of his security detail when told he couldn’t go to the Capitol.
That limo story is the part Republicans have attacked for years. The Secret Service agent who drove the vehicle later disputed it, and no other witness corroborated it, though several said Trump was visibly angry. But Hutchinson always said she was recounting what she was told, and a grand jury evidently didn’t see a crime in that.
The Justice Department didn’t respond to the Post’s request for comment.
The message from D.C. jurors couldn’t be clearer: testifying to Congress about the president is not a crime, no matter how much he hates what you said.
Trump wanted a prosecution. He got another rejection slip.
