Jack Smith questions reliability of key J6 witness’s testimony

Former special counsel Jack Smith contradicted claims made by former White House aide and January 6 Committee witness Cassidy Hutchinson in a recent congressional testimony.

Smith told the House Judiciary Committee this month that he evaluated Hutchinson’s explosive allegations as part of his investigation and prosecution of President Donald Trump related to the 2020 election, according to a transcript released Wednesday.

Smith said they were flawed because Hutchinson did not provide first-hand information.

When asked during the deposition how he would have approached Hutchinson’s cross-examination, Smith said he would have decided to prohibit the use of part of his testimony.

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Former Special Counsel Jack Smith arrives for a closed-door deposition before the House Judiciary Committee in Washington, DC, December 17, 2025. (Kent Nishimura/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

“If I were a defense attorney and Ms. Hutchinson was a witness, the first thing I would do is seek to exclude some of her testimony because it was hearsay, and I don’t have the entirety of her testimony in front of me right now, but I remember it being a decent portion of it,” Smith said.

Smith was also asked about Hutchinson’s specific claims, including that Trump was aware that some of his supporters would be armed at his rally and that Trump attempted to grab his driver’s steering wheel out of anger.

Hutchinson “was a second- or even third-hand witness,” Smith said, adding that other witnesses gave “different views” than his.

Cassidy Hutchinson, an aide to Mark Meadows when he was White House chief of staff in the Trump administration, gestures to her neck as she tells a story involving President Trump during the January 6 House Select Committee hearing on Capitol Hill June 28, 2022. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

“We interviewed, I think, the people that she spoke to, and we also interviewed, if I remember correctly, the officers that were there, including the officer that was in the car,” Smith said. “And this officer, as I recall, and I want to make sure I’m correct, said that President Trump was very angry and wanted to go to the Capitol, but the version of events that he explained was not the same version of events that Cassidy Hutchinson said she heard from someone second-hand.”

Smith noted that “a number of things she testified about were second-hand hearsay, things she had heard from other people, and therefore that testimony may or may not be admissible, and it certainly would not be as powerful as first-hand testimony.”

Hutchinson became a key witness in the Democratic-led Jan. 6 committee investigation into the attack on the U.S. Capitol, testifying privately on several occasions and publicly. His testimony made headlines, but his claims became a focus for Republicans, who found the committee’s work lacked credibility because its only Republican members were two vocally anti-Trump lawmakers.

Hutchinson served as a top aide to White House chief of staff Mark Meadows during the final months of Trump’s first presidency, giving him insight into internal discussions among White House officials in the aftermath of the 2020 election.

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The January 6 riot at the United States Capitol in 2021. (Julio Cortez, file)

At a high-profile hearing in June 2022, Hutchinson testified under oath about what she said were warnings inside the White House about the possibility of violence on Jan. 6 and Trump’s alleged awareness that some supporters attending his rally would be armed.

In another claim that was later disputed by other witnesses, Hutchinson also recalled conversations about how Trump tried to take the wheel of a U.S. Secret Service agent because he wanted to go to the Capitol and not the West Wing.

Hutchinson testified that he was told that the president “said something like, ‘I’m the fucking president, take me to the Capitol now,’ to which [the agent] replied, “Sir, we need to return to the West Wing. “The president reached up toward the front of the vehicle to grab the steering wheel.”

Hutchinson had not mentioned this particular story in any of his previous interviews with the committee. She later said she withheld the information on the instructions of her former lawyer, Stefan Passantino.

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Smith was questioned about Hutchinson in a more than eight-hour closed-door deposition this month focused on his investigations and prosecutions of Trump related to the 2020 election and Trump’s alleged withholding of classified documents.

Smith also defended his investigative practices, including subpoenaing the phone data of Senate and House lawmakers. He also defended some of his prosecutorial decisions, including seeking silence orders against Trump and bringing an unusually slim indictment against Trump after the Supreme Court ruled that Trump enjoyed certain protections of presidential immunity.