A select congressional committee investigating that January 6th, 2021 riots at the Capitol building fell victim to false stories about former President Donald Trump lunging for the wheel of his Secret Service vehicle during the chaos.
That’s one of the conclusions reached by the U.S. Office of the Inspector General, which last week released a long-awaited report on how Secret Service reacted on J6 as protestors breached the Capitol building while members of Congress were present and preparing to certify the results of the 2020 election. Witnesses who spoke with the OIG rebuffed the story of Cassidy Hutchinson, a star witness for the J6 committee. Shortly after the riots, Hutchinson, an employee of ex-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, testified that she heard from presidential security official Tony Ornato that Trump lunged for the wheel of “the Beast,” the presidential state car where he while traveling as the day unfolded. In her telling, the former president became physically confrontational after learning from Secret Service agents that he was being driven back to the White House instead of the Capitol.