Former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson shared with lawmakers on the House January 6 Select Committee on Tuesday a picture of her ex-boss, Mark Meadows, escorting Rudy Giuliani out of the WH "to make sure that he doesn't wander back into the mansion."
The photo was taken after a heated meeting with Donald Trump on 18 December, 2020, during which the former New York mayor Giuliani and then-Trump attorney Sidney Powell, along with former national security adviser Michael Flynn clashed with White House counsel over what efforts to undertake in response to the 45th president’s claims of election fraud.
Trump's aides reportedly pushed back on Powell and Flynn, who floated ideas such as seizing voting machines and taking the then-president’s plans to overturn the election even further.
The select committee at its seventh hearing on Tuesday revealed previously unseen video testimony from six participants of the afore-mentioned Oval Office meeting.
One of the participants, ex-White House counsel Pat Cipollone, told the panel that he was "not happy" to see Powell, Flynn and Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne in the Oval Office at the time, as he didn’t believe they were “providing the President with good advice.”
Others described the meeting erupt into ‘screaming matches’ as Flynn and Powell accused White House advisers of giving up on Trump after they challenged their claims about election fraud.
The panel heard from White House lawyer Eric Herschmann that the meeting had reached a point when "screaming was completely -- completely out there."
"It was really unprecedented ... I thought it was nuts," he said in the deposition video.
White House aides who participated in the meeting, including Meadows and counsel Pat Cipollone, were described as pushing back on the suggestion of naming Powell as a special counsel to investigate voter fraud allegations, CNN had previously reported.
"The west wing in UNHINGED," Hutchinson had written in a text message to Anthony Ornato, another top aide, according to messages released by the House January 6 committee on July 12.
In another message Hutchinson sarcastically referred to the trio of Powell, Flynn, and Bryne as the "Dream team!!!!." She also claimed that staffers had cracked open the alcohol to soothe frayed nerves.
"That's why the alcohol opened. It's not flowing around the oval — just the outer oval," she texted, in a reference to the area just outside the Oval Office.
Rudy Giuliani, formerly a member of Trump's legal team, told the panel he likely called the White House attorneys "pussies."
"I'm going to categorically describe it as, 'you guys aren't tough enough' or maybe I put it another way, 'maybe you guys are a bunch of pussies," Giuliani told the committee.
At the previous, sixth panel hearing, Cassidy Hutchinson offered testimony, recalling being told of Trump's anger when informed by his Secret Service agents he could not accompany protesters to the Capitol on January 6.
Donald Trump later dismissed the claims made by Hutchinson in a series of 12 posts on his Truth Social networking app. He slammed the ex-WH aide as "A Total Phony!!!" and called the January 6 Committee "a Kangaroo Court."
Lawmakers on the bipartisan House January 6 Select Committee are holding public hearings as part of their probe into the events at the US Capitol, when supporters of then-US President Donald Trump attempted to block certification of presidential election results that the 45th POTUS had dismissed as fraudulent.
The mob had stormed the US Capitol and temporarily disrupted the work of the joint sitting of Congress. As a result of those events, five people, including a police officer, died.
Trump was accused of "incitement of insurrection" and impeached by the US House of Representatives. He was later acquitted by the US Senate in a trial weeks after he left office. The former POTUS has denied wrongdoing, while denouncing the committee’s work as a ‘witch-hunt’.