WATCH: Aide says Trump wanted to let armed supporters into rally, ’They’re not here to hurt me’

Cassidy Hutchinson, a former aide to Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, testified on June 28 as the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack presented its findings to the public.
Hutchinson told Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., that former President Donald Trump was “angry about the extra space [on the Ellipse] and wanted more people to come in” to hear his speech on the day of the Capitol attack.

The committee played video of Hutchinson’s deposition in which she detailed why was Trump was upset — that people with weapons weren’t being let into his rally.

“I overheard the president say something to the effect of, you know, ‘I don’t f-ing care that they have weapons, they aren’t here to hurt me,’” Hutchinson said in the recording, saying he urged them to take the magnetometers away.

Hutchinson then testified she twice attempted to tell Meadows, while he was sitting in a vehicle, that law enforcement at the Capitol needed help defending the building but both times he shut the door when she went to open it.

About 20 to 25 minutes later when she finally told him, Hutchinson said Meadows had a “lack of reaction.”

Hutchinson testified that she had a conversation with former White House counsel Pat Cipollone in which he urged her to relay to Meadows that going to the Capitol on Jan. 6 would be “legally a terrible idea for us.”

“In the days leading up to the 6th, we had conversations about obstructing justice or defrauding the electoral count,” she said.

The hearing was unexpectedly announced a week after the Jan. 6 committee said they were taking a break until the month of July. In the year since its creation, the committee has conducted more than 1,000 interviews, seeking critical information and documents from people witness to, or involved in, the violence that day.

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