Cassidy Hutchinson Googled "Watergate" to help decide whether to cooperate with January 6 committee

• The committee released a 138-page interview with Cassidy Hutchinson, an aide in the Trump White House.
• Hutchinson tells the story of her "mental breakdown" after Stefan Passantino, her lawyer at the time, pressured her to withhold information.

Last April, Cassidy Hutchinson was in the midst of a crisis. The former aide to Mark Meadows, Donald Trump's chief of staff, had given two interviews to the January 6 committee. Hutchinson's lawyer, Stefan Passantino, was still in touch with Trump's inner circle. According to Hutchinson's testimony, released by the committee this morning, Passantino had pushed Hutchinson to give the committee as little information as possible. After Cassidy's first interview with the committee, two members of Trump's inner circle had dangled the prospect of giving Hutchinson a job.

Hutchinson felt guilty that she wasn't giving the committee the whole truth. "I didn't like the way that I answered questions," she said later. But she didn't know what to do about it. The weight of what she had done did not hit her until days later, on April 22, when she was alone in her apartment, scrolling through Twitter. The committee had just made a public filing in its lawsuit against Mark Meadows, her former boss. Hutchinson's last name appeared repeatedly in the footnotes beside were citations from her interviews. Things were getting real.

"So then I'm like, 'Oh shit," the 26 year-old Hutchinson told the committee.

She felt that she had been carrying water for Meadows and Trump. The guilt of that had been uncomfortable at times, but bearable. Then it started to become public.

"I remember sitting there reading on my phone like this, glancing out the window, and I just kept thinking like, "Oh, my God, I became someone that I never thought I was going to become," she continued. "I was completely hedging for Trump and for Mark where I would say, like, I was sticking up for them and saying that, like, essentially what they did wasn't really so bad."

She felt that she had to get out of Washington. She jumped in her car and drove to her parents house, in New Jersey. On the way, she considered the possibility that history might offer some insights into her situation. She Googled "Watergate." She only knew the basics about the scandal that had ended the Nixon presidency, and she wanted to find someone from that crisis who had faced a similar dilemma. She settled on Alexander Butterfield, the White House aide who told Congress that Nixon had an Oval Office taping system. She opened a new tab and found that he'd written a book with Bob Woodward. She had it shipped to her parents house. She read it three times.

"The emphasis he placed on the moral questions that he was asking himself resonated with me," Hutchinson told the committee.

Hutchinson thought about "the mirror test," which she'd heard about from a member of Congress. Could she live with looking herself in the mirror every morning for the rest of her life, knowing what she'd done?

"If I'm going to pass the mirror test for the erst of my life," she told the committee, "I need to try and fix some of this."

Hutchinson didn't think that she had anyting on Trump on par with Nixon's taping system. But she had heard about an incident from Tony Ornato, Trump's deputy chief of staff at the time, where Trump angrily demanded to be drive to the Capitol to join the rioters on January 6. Ornato had even joked with her about it, she told the committee later. "It could be worse," Ornato said, according to Hutchinson's recollection. "The President could have tried to strangle you on January 6th."

She decided that she would share what she knew. She didn't tell Passantino. "I didn't really want to tip him off to anything," she said later. "I have the genius idea to take the matter into my own hands ... maybe I can do a little course correction here."