Did the former White House chief of staff throw documents in the fireplace? To throw documents into the fireplace at the White House certainly sounds bad. And it’s now come to light that sworn testimony indicates that the chief of staff of the Trump White House did just that.
(Subscribe to Our YouTube Channel Here. Check out More 19FortyFive Videos Here)
According to testimony from former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson that took place in May but was just released by the January 6 Committee, Hutchinson saw her boss, then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, throw documents into a fireplace at the White House “maybe a dozen, maybe just over a dozen” times in the last days of the Trump Administration.
Vice, which reported on the documents, stated that the burnings happened between December 2020 and January 2021, during the presidential transition and in the run-up to the January 6 capitol riot.
Hutchinson was not sure which documents were disposed of.
She did tell the committee that Meadows burned documents, on at least two occasions, following meetings with Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA). Perry was one of the four House members who were referred by the Committee to the House Ethics Committee after they refused to comply with subpoenas.
Such allegations had been reported on before, including by the New York Times, but what’s new is the release of transcripts of the former aide’s testimony.
“The Presidential Records Act only asks that you keep the original copy of a document,” Hutchinson said in her testimony. “So, yes. However, I don’t know if they were the first or original copies of anything. It’s entirely possible that he had put things in his fireplace that he also would have put into a burn bag that there were duplicates of or that there was an electronic copy of.”
It happened so often, in fact, that Hutchinson worried about the prospect of a fire.
[I]t was when we would have the GSA, General Services Administrative staff come to light it first thing in the morning, and then they had logs next to his fireplace and his closet too,” Hutchinson said, per Law and Crime’s published transcript.
“So throughout the day, he would put more logs on the fireplace to keep it burning throughout the day. And I recall roughly a dozen times where he would take the — I don’t know the formal name for what it’s called that covers the fireplace — but take that off and then throw a few more pieces of paper in with it when he put more logs on the fireplace.”
In May, Politico reported that Meadows’ destruction of papers was “a key focus for the select committee.”
Meadows, a former Congressman who was Trump’s final chief of staff, was not among those who were subject to a referral by the January 6 Committee, but that does not necessarily mean he is out of the woods when it comes to legal trouble.
Hutchinson is the former White House official who came forward and testified in a public hearing of the January 6 Committee back in June.
This led to a backlash by Trump supporters — many of whom, ludicrously, compared her to Amber Heard — but her testimony has mostly held up.
CNN also reported this week that Hutchinson had told the committee that she had broken with her original, Trump-paid lawyer Stefan Passantino, before dismissing him and hiring a different attorney. Transcripts even showed Passantino interrupting his client at various times.
Hutchinson also said in her testimony that the QAnon conspiracy theory had been openly discussed at the White House- and that Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) had spoken of QAnon supporters coming to Washington for the January 6 rally.
“I remember Marjorie Taylor Greene bringing QAnon up several times, though, in the presence of the president, privately with Mark,” the former aide told the committee. “I remember Mark having a few conversations, too, about – more specific to QAnon stuff and more about the idea that they had with the election and, you know, not as much pertaining to the planning of the January 6th rally.”
More: MAGA Needs To Move on From Donald Trump
More: Would Putin Dare Use Nuclear Weapons in Ukraine?
More: Putin’s War Machine Won’t Fight in Ukraine?
Stephen Silver is a Senior Editor for 19FortyFive. He is an award-winning journalist, essayist and film critic, who is also a contributor to the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Broad Street Review, and Splice Today. The co-founder of the Philadelphia Film Critics Circle, Stephen lives in suburban Philadelphia with his wife and two sons. Follow him on Twitter at @StephenSilver.
