Secret Service agent refutes claim president grabbed for vehicle’s wheel.
The Secret Service agent who was driving the SUV with then-President Donald Trump inside on Jan. 6, 2021, refuted the claim that President Trump grabbed for the wheel of the vehicle, according to a U.S. House of Representatives report issued on March 11.
The agent, who is not being identified by name by lawmakers, told a House panel that he “did not see him reach.”
President Trump “never grabbed the steering wheel,” the agent said. “I didn’t see him lunge to try to get into the front seat at all.”
The testimony was given to the Democrat-dominated select committee convened to investigate Jan. 6 in the previous Congress and quoted in a new interim report by House Republicans, who are probing the work that committee did.
Cassidy Hutchinson, a former White House official, testified to the panel in her fourth interview, in 2022, that she was told by Anthony Ornato, another Secret Service agent, that he was told by a fellow agent that President Trump grabbed for the wheel.
“Tony said something to the effect of, ‘did you hear what [expletive] happened?’” Ms. Hutchinson testified on June 20, 2022. Mr. Ornato then “retold the story” he was given, she said, that when President Trump got into the state car, the Beast, after speaking on the Ellipse, he wanted to travel to the Capitol.
She said President Trump became upset when he was told he would be taken back to the White House and “he lunged forward into what I believe … would be called the cab of the presidential limo and went to grab at the steering wheel.” When an agent said, “we’re going back to the White House” and “that’s final,” President Trump “was extremely angry at that response and used his free hand, to my understanding, to then lunge at Bobby Engel,” Ms. Hutchinson claimed, attributing the story to Mr. Ornato.
“Despite the driver of the president’s SUV testifying under oath that the Hutchinson story was false, the select committee chose to validate and promote Hutchinson’s version of the story as fact. The select committee hid the driver’s full testimony and only favorably mentioned his testimony in its final report, it did not release the full transcript,” House Republicans said in the new report.
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