The Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division presented evidence to a federal grand jury in Washington, D.C. this week seeking a criminal indictment of Cassidy Hutchinson, the former White House aide who told the January 6 Select Committee under oath that President Trump lunged at a Secret Service agent and grabbed the steering wheel of his presidential SUV on January 6, 2021.
Both the agent and the driver denied it ever happened.
Hutchinson, who served as an aide to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, became the committee's marquee witness in June 2022 when she delivered the steering wheel story in nationally televised testimony. She claimed that Tony Ornato, then the deputy chief of staff, told her Trump demanded to be driven to the Capitol after his speech and screamed, "I'm the f---ing president, take me up to the Capitol now." When Secret Service agent Bobby Engel refused, Hutchinson testified, Trump lunged toward Engel and grabbed at the steering wheel.
Ornato denied telling her that. Engel denied it happened. The driver's sworn testimony contradicted the account. Four White House employees gave testimony that directly contradicted Hutchinson's claims, according to findings by Rep. Barry Loudermilk's House subcommittee, which issued its report in December 2024.
Loudermilk, the Georgia Republican who chairs the House subcommittee investigating the January 6 committee itself, referred Hutchinson to the Justice Department for a perjury probe. Now Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon's Civil Rights Division — not the U.S. Attorney's Office in Washington, D.C. — is running the investigation and bringing the evidence before a grand jury. Hutchinson has not been subpoenaed to appear.
The perjury question is only half the story. The Loudermilk report found that former Rep. Liz Cheney secretly communicated with Hutchinson through the encrypted messaging app Signal while Hutchinson was still a represented witness — meaning Cheney went around Hutchinson's attorney, Stefan Passantino, to talk directly to the committee's own witness. America First Legal filed a D.C. bar complaint against Cheney over those communications. The subcommittee's findings recommended the FBI investigate Cheney for potentially violating the federal statute that prohibits procuring another person to commit perjury.
Hutchinson herself admitted in later testimony that Passantino coached her to lean on "I don't recall" answers, telling her, "The committee doesn't know what you can and can't recall, so we want to be able to use that as much as we can." She used that admission to distance herself from Passantino — but the new claims she introduced after the Cheney communications began were the ones that Ornato, Engel, and four other witnesses flatly denied.
CNN legal analyst Elie Honig has acknowledged that perjury cases are "historically very difficult to prove." The prosecution would need to show Hutchinson knowingly made false statements with the intent to deceive. That's a high bar. But the DOJ apparently looked at testimony contradicted by every other person in the room and decided the bar wasn't that high.
The steering wheel story did exactly what it was designed to do. It dominated cable news for weeks. It painted the President as physically unhinged. It gave the committee a cinematic moment that no dry policy testimony could match. Hutchinson got a book deal. She got CNN appearances. She got standing ovations from the same Washington class that had spent four years trying to remove Trump from office by any procedural mechanism available.
What she didn't get was a single corroborating witness. Ornato denied it. Engel denied it. The driver denied it. Four staffers contradicted her. And the congresswoman who was secretly texting her on Signal is now facing a bar complaint. Blaze News reports Hutchinson has not yet been formally charged, and a grand jury investigation is not an indictment. But the evidence is in front of the grand jury now, and the Civil Rights Division is presenting it.
She testified under oath. The oath was the whole point.