DOJ News: Grand Jury Refuses to Indict Hutchinson
In the latest DOJ news, federal prosecutors on Tuesday failed to persuade a grand jury to indict Cassidy Hutchinson, the former White House aide whose testimony about President Donald Trump’s actions on January 6, 2021, became one of the most contested accounts of that day. The panel returned what prosecutors call a non-concurrence, meaning it rejected the indictment the Justice Department had asked it to approve. The decision was disclosed in a brief court appearance on Tuesday afternoon, when a department lawyer told a magistrate judge that the grand jury had not agreed to the proposed charge. The lawyer did not name the person involved, but two people familiar with the matter confirmed that the subject was Hutchinson. The outcome is a rare and public defeat for a department that has made charging the president’s perceived adversaries a central part of its work, and it arrives exactly one week before voters go to the polls in the midterm elections.
Hutchinson served as a special assistant to Mark Meadows, who was Trump’s chief of staff, and she was in the room with the president and Meadows during the most consequential hours of January 6. In June 2022 she became the star witness for the House committee investigating the Capitol riot, appearing at a surprise hearing announced only a day earlier and giving an account that dominated the news for weeks. Republican lawmakers and allies of the president have argued ever since that she lied under oath and should face a perjury charge, a demand Trump himself has echoed. The Justice Department took up the matter, and its failure to secure an indictment now leaves that effort without a charge and raises fresh questions about how the case was built.
DOJ News: What the Grand Jury Decided
The proceeding took place before a federal grand jury in Washington, where prosecutors presented their case behind closed doors. In a brief appearance on Tuesday, Neville S. Hedley, an acting senior litigation counsel in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, told U.S. Magistrate Judge Zia M. Faruqui that the grand jury had not concurred on the proposed indictment. Hedley did not identify the defendant in court, and the identity of the subject reached the public only through two people familiar with the matter who spoke to news organizations on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss grand jury proceedings.
The charge the department sought was a false-statements charge, according to one news report, though the precise statements prosecutors put before the jurors have not been publicly detailed, and no charging document has been released. What is known is the result: the panel declined to approve it. A refusal of that kind is recorded as a no-bill, and it is not the same as an acquittal. Grand jury proceedings are secret under the federal rules, so no vote count will be published and no transcript will explain which jurors doubted what. But the mechanics of the process make the outcome striking. A federal grand jury has between sixteen and twenty-three members, and only twelve votes are needed to indict. The standard is probable cause, a far lower bar than the proof beyond a reasonable doubt required at trial. There is no defense lawyer in the room and no judge presiding over the evidence. For a panel to refuse under those conditions, the prosecutors’ presentation must have failed to convince even a dozen of its members that a crime was probably committed.
That rarity is what gives the decision its weight. Grand juries almost always approve the charges prosecutors bring them, which is why lawyers sometimes say a prosecutor could indict almost anyone. Yet this panel said no, and it did so in a case the department had pursued for months. The episode fits a pattern that has developed this year. CNN reported that grand juries have declined to bring charges in several cases since Trump took office, including a single proposed charge against former FBI Director James Comey and full indictments against New York Attorney General Letitia James and six lawmakers who urged service members to disobey illegal orders. Each of those cases involved a figure the president has publicly attacked, and each refusal has added to the sense that the department’s campaign against his critics is meeting resistance inside the very process it depends on.
White House News: The Testimony at the Center of the Case
The case against Hutchinson grew out of her appearance before the House committee in the summer of 2022, when she described a president who knew his supporters were armed and wanted them admitted to his rally anyway. She testified that Trump grew angry when he learned that supporters carrying weapons, including guns and knives, were being stopped at security checkpoints before his speech at the Ellipse. She said she heard him say words to the effect of: “I don’t effing care that they have weapons. They’re not here to hurt me. Take the effing mags away. Let my people in.” The account, delivered in a calm voice by a 26-year-old aide who had worked steps from the Oval Office, was seen at the time as particularly powerful because of her proximity to power.
She also described what she said she was told about Trump’s efforts to force his motorcade toward the Capitol after the speech. According to Hutchinson, the then-deputy chief of staff Tony Ornato told her that Trump lunged at a Secret Service member when he was told he could not go to the Capitol, an account Ornato and others who were with the president that day have denied. She further testified that Trump threw a porcelain plate against a wall after learning that his former attorney general, Bill Barr, had said there was no widespread fraud in the 2020 election. And she said that as the riot unfolded and the crowd chanted “Hang Mike Pence,” Trump declined to intervene. Trump denied much of what she said on his social media platform, Truth Social, calling her a “total phony” and “bad news.”
The disputed details are what made her a target. Supporters of the president seized on the fact that parts of her account were secondhand, relayed to her by others rather than witnessed directly, and on the denials from Ornato and the Secret Service agents involved. Former special counsel Jack Smith, who investigated the January 6 attack, told members of Congress in a closed-door interview earlier this year that Hutchinson was not a powerful witness in his investigation, in part because many of her stories were secondhand.
Trump News: A Pattern of Grand Jury Setbacks
The refusal to indict Hutchinson does not stand alone. It is the latest in a series of setbacks for a department that has pursued the president’s critics with unusual energy. The grand jury’s rejection of a proposed charge against Comey, the failure to secure full indictments against James and the six lawmakers, and now the Hutchinson no-bill form a pattern that defense lawyers and legal analysts have begun to describe as a check on the department’s ambitions. The pattern matters because the department’s authority to charge depends on grand juries, and grand juries are drawn from ordinary citizens who are not required to share the administration’s view of who deserves prosecution.
Lawmakers from both parties have called on the department to abandon the Hutchinson investigation. Republican Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana described the matter as an act of “lawfare” directed by the president, a striking criticism from a member of the president’s own party. Inside the department, the case had also been controversial, with some employees believing there was not enough evidence to bring a viable criminal case.
The timing adds to the political weight of the decision. The midterm elections are one week away, on November 3, and the administration has spent the final days of the campaign filing lawsuits and making claims about election integrity. The department has sued states over election results and demanded that voter rolls be purged, moves that critics describe as laying the groundwork to challenge the results. A failed indictment of a Jan. 6 witness fits into the same charged atmosphere, and the refusal may be read by both sides as a verdict on the department’s judgment.
What Happens Next: Can Prosecutors Try Again?
A grand jury’s refusal to indict does not end the matter. Because jeopardy does not attach at the grand jury stage, prosecutors may present the same matter again to the same panel or to another one, with the same evidence or with more of it. The department has not said whether it intends to do so, and it did not respond to detailed questions about its plans. Hutchinson’s attorneys did not respond to requests for comment on Tuesday, and the White House and the Justice Department were also asked for comment. The silence leaves open the question of whether the department will try again with a different presentation or let the matter drop.
If prosecutors do return to a grand jury, they will face the same problem that defeated them this time: the disputed and secondhand nature of much of the testimony. A false-statements charge requires proving that Hutchinson knowingly made a false statement, and the statements at issue involve events she described as told to her by others. Ornato’s denial and the conflicting accounts from those present that day would give any defense lawyer powerful material. The department would need to show not only that Hutchinson’s account was wrong but that she knew it was wrong when she gave it under oath. That is a high bar, and the grand jury’s refusal suggests prosecutors did not clear even the lower one.
Source: CNN