A federal grand jury in Washington on Tuesday refused to indict Cassidy Hutchinson, the former White House aide whose testimony about President Donald Trump's actions on January 6, 2021 made her one of the best-known witnesses of the congressional investigation into the Capitol attack. In a brief court appearance on Tuesday afternoon, Neville S. Hedley, a senior lawyer in the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, told U.S. Magistrate Judge Zia M. Faruqui that the grand jury had returned a "non-concurrence" on a proposed indictment — the panel had not agreed to bring the charge the department asked for. Hedley did not name the defendant in court. Two people familiar with the matter, speaking on condition of anonymity about secret grand jury proceedings, confirmed that the case was Hutchinson's.
The charge prosecutors put to the jurors has not been officially stated. Reporting on the outcome said the department sought a false-statements charge built on Hutchinson's 2022 testimony to the House committee that investigated January 6, but which of her statements prosecutors placed before the grand jury has not been publicly detailed, and the department has not commented. Grand jury proceedings are secret, and no vote count will be published: an indictment needs at least 12 of the 16 to 23 jurors to agree that there is probable cause a crime was committed, and on Tuesday prosecutors did not reach that number.
A refusal of this kind — recorded as a "no bill" — is rare, because the probable-cause threshold is far lower than the proof beyond a reasonable doubt a trial demands, and because no defence lawyer is in the room when the evidence is presented. It is not an acquittal, and it does not end the matter in law: prosecutors remain free to present the same case to the same grand jury or to a new one. Whether the Justice Department will try again, or let the case rest, has not been announced — as of Tuesday night that was unknown.
The case was run not by the U.S. Attorney's Office in Washington, which ordinarily handles such prosecutions in the capital, but by the department's Civil Rights Division, which is headed by Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon and which exists to enforce the country's civil rights laws — an assignment the reporting on the case has described as unusual. People familiar with the matter have said the planned prosecution was a point of controversy inside the department, where some believed there was not enough evidence to bring a viable criminal case.
The road to Tuesday's vote ran through Congress. Representative Barry Loudermilk of Georgia, who has led the Republican review of the January 6 committee's work, sent the Justice Department a criminal referral on Hutchinson earlier this year, and House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan of Ohio signed onto the request; the Republican case behind the referral is that discrepancies between her testimony and other witnesses' accounts show she lied under oath. Reports in April said the department had begun looking into her. On September 24, in President Trump's defamation lawsuit against the BBC, U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Kuntz quashed a subpoena for her deposition and described her in his order as "presently the subject of a criminal investigation," noting her lawyers' position that she would invoke her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination if forced to testify. On October 6, Civil Rights Division prosecutors began presenting evidence to the grand jury — a step first reported on October 8 — and more evidence and witnesses were expected through the month. As of that reporting, Hutchinson herself had not been subpoenaed to appear.
The testimony at issue was given on June 28, 2022, at a surprise hearing of the House select committee announced only 24 hours earlier. Hutchinson, who had been a special assistant to White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, testified that Trump had been told some of his supporters at that morning's rally were carrying weapons and answered, in her recollection, with words to the effect of: "I don't effing care that they have weapons. They're not here to hurt me. Take the effing mags away. Let my people in." She testified that when the crowd at the Capitol turned violent, chanting "Hang Mike Pence," Trump declined to intervene. And she described being told by White House deputy chief of staff Tony Ornato that Trump, furious at being refused a drive to the Capitol, had lunged toward a Secret Service agent and grabbed at the steering wheel of the presidential vehicle — an account she told the committee she was relaying secondhand, not something she saw herself.
That last account has been disputed from the start, and the dispute is the core of the case against her. Ornato and others who were with the president that day denied it. In a transcript of the committee's interview with the Secret Service officer who drove the vehicle, released by House Republicans in March 2024, the driver said Trump "never grabbed the steering wheel" and that he did not see him lunge toward the front seat — though the same transcript corroborated other parts of her account, including that Trump wanted to go to the Capitol. Former special counsel Jack Smith, whose office investigated January 6, told lawmakers earlier this year that Hutchinson was not a powerful witness for a prosecution in part because many of her stories were secondhand. Trump denied much of her testimony at the time, calling her a "total phony," and has since called her a "scam artist" who lied under oath; in 2022 he asked publicly, "What is the Justice Department going to do about this?" and in March he drew attention to the House Republicans' referral of her case to the department.
Neither side in the case said anything publicly on Tuesday. Hutchinson's attorneys did not respond to requests for comment, and the Justice Department did not respond either. One Republican voice raised against the investigation before Tuesday came from Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, who in an August Senate floor speech, and again in comment on the case, called the pursuit of Hutchinson an act of "lawfare" directed by the president, and said such practices by presidents of both parties must stop.
Tuesday's refusal is not the only one of its kind in Washington this year. Grand juries have declined charges in several cases the department has pursued since President Trump returned to office, including, as reported in the coverage of this case, a single charge sought against former FBI Director James Comey and full indictments sought against New York Attorney General Letitia James and six lawmakers who had urged service members to disobey illegal orders. Each refusal has come at the lowest bar in the system — probable cause — which is what makes the run of them unusual in the eyes of the legal experts who follow the department.
For ordinary citizens, the institution at the centre of this story is their own. A grand jury is a panel of residents — neighbours, not officials — and its consent is the gate a federal felony charge must pass before it can be brought at all. What those citizens did on Tuesday, in secret and without giving reasons, was decline to open that gate. For anyone who may one day be asked to testify before Congress or a court, the case carries a plainer lesson about what is now on the record: sworn testimony that powerful people dispute can be tested against a criminal referral years later, and the protection the system offers a witness in that position is the judgment of a room of ordinary people applying a probable-cause standard. Whether the department accepts that judgment or asks another panel is the next fact in this story, and it has not yet happened.
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