Jan. 6 panel to hear from aide to Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows

The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol will hold an unexpected public hearing on Tuesday featuring testimony from Cassidy Hutchinson, a top aide to Mark Meadows, former President Donald Trump’s chief of staff during the final months of his presidency.

Tuesday’s session comes just days after committee member Rep. Jamie Raskin said the committee had received a “deluge of new evidence since we got started” with public hearings. The hearing is scheduled to begin at 1 p.m. ET, and CBS News will provide live coverage.

On Monday, the committee said it would be holding the last-minute hearing to “present recently obtained evidence and receive witness testimony.” The committee did not say who would be testifying, but CBS News congressional correspondent Scott MacFarlane reports the surprise witness is Hutchinson, whose taped deposition before the committee has already been used in previous presentations.

“According to committee court filings reviewed by CBS News, she was in the room for key meetings in those chaotic days before January 6th,” MacFarlane reports. 

Hutchinson told the committee that five Republican members of Congress sought “preemptive pardons” from Trump for their participation in a Dec. 21, 2020, meeting in which House GOP members met with the president to plot a path forward to overturn the election results.

Tuesday’s hearing is the sixth public hearing held this month by the committee. So far, the panel has focused on Trump’s pressure campaign on Vice President Mike Pence, the Justice Department, state lawmakers and local elections officials to overturn the 2020 election results.

Last week, documentary filmmaker Alex Holder, who was with Trump and family members before and after Jan. 6, sat for a closed-door deposition with the committee. Committee chair Rep. Bennie Thompson said they will incorporate Holder’s material into future hearings. “It’s been significant,” Thompson said of Holder’s video, adding, “It’s a lot of video we have not been privy to.”

Lawyer Jeffrey Clark, whom Trump wanted to install at the helm of the Justice Department to pursue his baseless claims of election fraud, said his house was raided last week. And former Trump campaign attorney John Eastman, who was ordered earlier this month to turn over over 150 pages of documents, said Monday that his phone was seized last week by federal agents.