A federal grand jury in Washington has declined to return an indictment against Cassidy Hutchinson, a former White House staffer who delivered high-profile testimony before the congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, according to people familiar with the matter.
The decision marks a setback for Justice Department prosecutors pursuing charges against perceived adversaries of President Donald Trump. The exact nature of the allegations brought before the grand jury against Hutchinson was not immediately clear, though Republican lawmakers had previously accused her of making false statements under oath during her 2022 appearance before the House Select Committee.
Hutchinson served as a special assistant to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, giving her close proximity to power during the final months of the Trump administration. Her surprise appearance before the House committee riveted the public as she described an angry and defiant president on the morning of Jan. 6. Among her most explosive claims was an account that Trump attempted to force his security detail to take him to the Capitol, where a crowd of his supporters had gathered to protest his election loss to Democrat Joe Biden, and that he lunged for the steering wheel of the presidential SUV when Secret Service agents refused.
Trump consistently denied her accounts, dismissing her on social media as a “total phony.” While Hutchinson acknowledged during her testimony that she did not witness the vehicle altercation firsthand and was instead relaying what she had been told by a White House security official, her narrative immediately drew intense scrutiny and competing accounts.
In March 2024, House Republicans published a previously undisclosed transcript featuring an interview with the Secret Service officer who drove the presidential SUV on the day of the riot. While the driver’s account corroborated certain aspects of Hutchinson’s testimony regarding Trump’s desire to join the crowds at the Capitol, the driver directly contradicted the claim about the vehicle’s controls, stating under oath that he did not see an altercation and that Trump never grabbed the steering wheel or lunged toward the front seat.
During her congressional appearances, Hutchinson also alleged that members of Trump’s inner circle attempted to influence her cooperation by dangling job opportunities and financial assistance. Furthermore, she testified that her initial legal counsel, a former ethics attorney in the Trump White House, advised her that memory lapses would serve her well.
The broader legal fallout from the events of Jan. 6 has seen numerous twists across multiple administrations. The House of Representatives impeached Trump in 2021 on a charge of inciting the insurrection, though the Senate subsequently acquitted him. The Justice Department later brought felony charges against Trump for attempting to overturn the 2020 election results, but special counsel Jack Smith moved to drop the case following Trump’s victory in the 2024 presidential election, citing longstanding department policy that shields a sitting president from criminal prosecution.
Hutchinson, a native of Pennington, New Jersey, previously held positions in the White House Office of Legislative Affairs and completed internships for congressional Republicans, including Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana and Senator Ted Cruz of Texas.
