A few days ago, I blogged about Cassidy Hutchinson, her escape from Trump world, and her memoir, Enough.
Feedback I later received suggested I could have driven the point home with more vivid descriptions.
THIS excerpt from a Special Counsel filing seeking to reinstate a gag order Judge Chutkan had put on hold a week or so ago might better show what Hutchinson, emotionally, had to deal with. On Sunday night this week, Chutkan DID re-impose the gag. Trump DID respond with plenty of hatefulness for the judge and other "enemies."
In her memoir, Hutchinson highlighted how important it was to her to have read Bob Woodward's book, The Last of the President's Men (2015), about Nixon chief of staff H.R. Haldeman's deputy Alexander Butterfield.
Butterfield's role in the Nixon White House was very similar to Hutchinson's in the Trump administration.
On page 107 of The Last of the President's Men,
Butterfield left the meeting at that point.
Now alone with Nixon, Haldeman, on the tape, continued, "Newbrand [a career Secret Service agent] will do anything that I tell him to... he has come to me twice and absolutely, sincerely said, 'With what you've done for me and what the president's done for me, I just want you to know if you want someone killed, if you want anything, any way, any direction...'"
Woodward, longtime journalist with the Washington Post, besides having made himself known worldwide (most famously in a book co-authored by Carl Bernstein) with books about Nixon, also wrote a poignant trilogy about Trump; Fear; Rage; and Peril. In other words, hundreds of thousands of words describing the emotional turmoil a twentysomething Hutchinson would face as she prepared to extricate herself from the Trump's inner circle.
Anyway, Hutchinson did muster the wherewithal to admit to the House select committee investigating the J6 insurrection that she had much more to tell them about what happened on January 6, 2021 than she did in her first interviews. In essence, she had a personal epiphany. She refused to be cowed into silence when she knew so much more about what happened before, on, and after January 6.
Last year, in October, Woodward published the Trump Tapes: 20 interviews that show why he is an unparalleled danger.
In more than 50 years of reporting, I have never disclosed the raw interviews or full transcripts of my work. But after listening again to the 20 interviews I conducted with President Donald Trump during his last year as chief executive, I have decided to take the unusual step of releasing them. I was struck by how Trump pounded in my ears in a way the printed page cannot capture.
****
Two other heroes, one a shero (Liz Cheney), the other Adam Kinzinger. On Halloween 2023, Kinzinger's memoir will be published. Both former Republican Members of Congress, they served with Democrats on the Select Committee to investigate the January 6, 2021 insurrection. I admire every member of the committee, but especially Kinzinger and Cheney. Each demonstrated moral integrity and courage unparalleled among their colleagues in the House Republican Conference. They stared down immense from levels of duress to do what they did.
UPDATED to include a clip from a Charlie Sykes interview with Cassidy Hutchinson
No comments:
Post a Comment