Since wrapping up its year-and-a-half-long investigation of Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election and the insurrection that followed, the January 6 committee has released several batches of witness transcripts as a sort of companion piece to its 845-page report. Not surprisingly, few people come out of these transcripts looking good. Take, for example, former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, who, according to the claim of former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson, spent the last weeks of the Trump administration literally burning documents, which is something you just never want to do. Also not looking great, or at least at all sympathetic? Longtime Trump adviser Hope Hicks, who apparently watched the violent attack on the Capitol unfold and thought, Oh no! This is going to affect all those cushy private sector jobs I had lined up!
Yes, text messages released by the committee show Hicks whining to Julie Radford, former chief of staff to Ivanka Trump, that “in one day,” the insurrection-inciting president “ended every future opportunity that doesn’t include speaking engagements at the local proud boys chapter.” She added, putting a fine point on it: “And all of us that didn’t have jobs lined up will be perpetually unemployed. I’m so mad and upset. We all look like domestic terrorists now.” In another missive, Hicks wrote, “Not being dramatic, but we are all fucked,” noting that Alyssa Farah Griffin, who resigned as White House communications director a few weeks after Trump lost the election, looked “like a genius” for quitting.
Of course, Hicks had a chance to (at least attempt to) put some daylight between herself and the worst president in modern history, whose actions led to a violent attack on democracy and the deaths of multiple people—but chose not to. When she let it leak that she would be leaving the administration, she (1) did not do so immediately but rather with just a few days to go until Joe Biden’s inauguration, and (2) made it clear that she was absolutely not taking a moral stand against the shocking violence that had unfolded in her boss’s name. According to reports at the time, Hicks told people she was not leaving Team Trump over the riots that left five people dead and literal shit all over the floors of the Capitol building; instead, it was “part of planned departure and normal drift away at the end of an administration.”
As for her employability, as Jezebel notes, Hicks probably won’t be joining the breadline anytime soon:
In other revelations around the January 6 transcript dumps, we learned this week that longtime Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway urged Melania Trump to get her husband to stop the insurrection, arguing that though he might listen to people who work for him, he “reserves fear for one person, Melania Trump.” (Unfortunately, the then first lady was uninterested in doing anything about the attack, as she was reportedly busy helping with rug photography at the time.) We also learned that the 45th president called Senator Josh Hawley half a dozen times the day before the riot and then again the day of. (Given Hawley’s fist-pumping solidarity with the mob of election deniers gathered at the Capitol, whom he later fled from, you can understand why.)
And then, of course, there’s the deeply disturbing news that Stefan Passantino, a former White House ethics lawyer from the Trump administration, allegedly tried to get Cassidy Hutchinson to give false testimony before the January 6 committee, effectively acting like an employee of a Mob boss.
Per CBS News:
In a statement, Passantino insisted to CBS News that he represented Hutchinson “honorably, ethically, and fully consistent with her sole interests as she communicated them to me.” Hutchinson replaced Passantino before her public hearing with the January 6 committee, bringing on attorney Jody Hunt. During her public testimony, she shared incredibly damning information about Trump, including that he knew some of his supporters were armed before they went to the Capitol and that he told people Mike Pence deserved chants calling for his hanging.
More Great Stories From Vanity Fair
Inside Kamala Harris’s Loyal Circle of Hollywood Friends
Peter Thiel, J.D. Vance, and the Dangerous Dance of the New Right
The Untold Stories of Humphrey Bogart’s Volatile Life
The Truth About Meghan, Harry, and Their California Dream
Inside California’s Freedom-Loving, Bible-Thumping Hub of Hard Tech
The Best TV Shows of 2024, So Far
Listen Now: VF’s Still Watching Podcast Dissects House of the Dragon