Mick Mulvaney, former acting White House chief of staff and ex-S.C. congressman, has a hunch after the latest Jan. 6 hearings that things are about to get a lot worse for his former boss Donald Trump.
In a series of tweets on June 28, Mulvaney pointed to concerns raised by Wyoming Republican Rep. Liz Cheney about possible witness tampering. Cheney, the vice chairwoman of the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, dropped what Mulvaney called “the real bomb” during her closing statements.
“There is an old maxim: it’s never the crime, it’s always the coverup,” Mulvaney tweeted. “Things went very badly for the former President today. My guess is that it will get worse from here.”
In a second tweet, Mulvaney went further in highlighting the witness tampering claim, saying, “If there is hard evidence, that is a serious problem for the former President.”
The Capitol Hill hearing on June 28 centered on testimony from Cassidy Hutchinson, a former top aide to Trump’s chief of staff at the time of the riot, Mark Meadows.
Hutchinson revealed a stunning portrait of an enraged president who not only urged the Secret Service to let armed protesters into the rally at the Ellipse on Jan. 6, 2021, because “they’re not there to hurt me,” but tried to force Secret Service agents to take him to the building.
Mulvaney, who served as Trump’s top White House aide until March 2020, made the observations as he tweeted in real-time during Hutchinson’s two-hour testimony.
All told, he sent 17 tweets, which ranged from pointing out Hutchinson’s proximity to Meadows and the White House leadership to suggesting Hutchinson’s remarks were “hearsay.”
But as Hutchinson detailed one chaotic scene after another, Mulvaney came to her defense.
He predicted Meadows, along with Tony Ornato, the former head of Trump’s security detail, and Secret Service agent Robert Engel will also eventually testify before the House panel wraps its investigation. Meadows has so far refused to testify before the committee.
“This is explosive stuff. If Cassidy is making this up, they will need to say that. If she isn’t they will have to corroborate,” Mulvaney wrote before adding, “I know her. I don’t think she’s lying.”
Hutchinson had previously provided a trove of information to congressional investigators and sat for interviews behind closed doors. The committee called the surprise hearing this week after she agreed to give public testimony.
Her testimony came as the committee holds a series of televised hearings to inform the public about what happened as Trump’s supporters beat police, broke into a building viewed as a symbol of democracy and interrupted the certification of Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential victory.
“As an American I was disgusted,” Hutchinson told the committee, reacting to Trump’s tweet where he suggested then-Vice President Mike Pence did not have the “courage” to object to Democrat Joe Biden’s victory as he presided over the joint session of Congress that day.
“It was unpatriotic, it was un-American, and you were watching the Capitol building get defaced over a lie,” she said.
By the time Meadows was working in the Trump White House, Mulvaney had been appointed to serve as the Trump administration’s special envoy to Northern Ireland.
Before serving in the Trump administration, Mulvaney represented a congressional district that included the Charlotte suburbs in South Carolina. He was known for a hard focus on fiscal issues and was a founding member of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, a group of hardliners known for their rabble-rousing and for standing up to Republican leadership.
In addition to being acting White House chief of staff for just over 14 months, Mulvaney held various…