What Makes Someone Blow the Whistle?
Of all the workplaces in America, few are as fabled or photographed as the one called the “Oval.” As in the Oval Office, West Wing of the White House, office of the president of the United States.
Cassidy Hutchinson, who was a special assistant to former President Donald Trump, White House coordinator for legislative affairs, and principal assistant to White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, was a 25-year-old government aide in 2020 on a rapid trajectory to power.
Hutchinson, an avowed Republican, started her Washington career after her freshman year of college, when she interned during the summer of 2016 for Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz. The next summer she interned for U.S. Rep. and Republican House Whip Steve Scalise, which she followed with a summer internship in the White House Office of Legislative Affairs.
In March 2020, Meadows picked Hutchinson as his second-in-command. Her office, adjacent to Meadows, was mere feet from the Oval Office.
In her bestselling memoir, Enough, Hutchinson revealed in excruciating detail her insider’s view of exactly what happened at the White House on Jan. 6, 2021. Before the book was published, 13 million Americans had witnessed Hutchinson’s televised recounting of that day in her testimony before the U.S. House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol.
What was not clear from the Select Committee hearing in June 2022 was that Hutchinson had already given more than 24 hours of subpoenaed deposition testimony. At that time, she was represented by, as she called it, a “Trump world” lawyer who, among other dictates, advised her to rely on the expression “I don’t recall” as an acceptable answer to deposition questions.
Hutchinson, a stickler for timelines and accuracy, told her lawyer she wanted to print out a calendar to bring with her to the deposition. “What do you need a calendar for?” the attorney asked. “To make sure I’m getting the dates right with these things,” she replied. “No, no, no,” was his response, Hutchinson recalled in Enough. “We want to get you in and get you out.”
She was, as her then-counsel told her, “an assistant, nothing more. The less you remember, the better.”
But, in fact, Cassidy Hutchinson—mere assistant or not—was a whistleblower.
Her tale of how she summoned the intestinal fortitude to reverse course and put her loyalty to the president aside, a man she said she “adored,” for whom she had volunteered to move to Florida to work for and to “protect” at Mar-a-Lago after he left the White House, is a classic morality tale for the modern workplace.
To claim whistleblower status, and the protection from reprisal available under the law, an individual must provide “the right information [of wrongdoing] to the right people,” according to the whistleblower definition on the Director of National Intelligence website.
The federal government warns employees, contractors, and military personnel that “this tool is designed for reporting wrongdoing and not personal grievances, policy disputes, or management disagreements.”
The image of a would-be whistleblower as an agent of treachery with an ax to grind is commonplace. And certainly, some who “blow the whistle” are not complaining about an actual violation of law or ethical breach that harms the public.
But for those willing to report a genuine illegality while still keeping their jobs, it is a “whistleblower’s dilemma,” as a recent Wharton School of Business article phrased it: “The employee must make the ethical decision of whether there is in fact wrongdoing, and whether the wrongdoing is so bad that it outweighs any duties of loyalty they have to the organization on the ethical scale.” When the wrongdoing is really severe, “it can be thought of as a way of saving the organization.”
Toward the end of her memoir, Hutchinson reflects on her motive for choosing to re-testify and expand on her sworn testimony about the events of Jan. 6. Though seemingly modest, her words reflect a definite “saving the organization” mindset:
“I’ve been an idealist since childhood, a romantic about America since I carried the flag onstage at my preschool graduation and sensed a calling to serve my country. I’m gratified that there are people for whom my testimony meant something; listeners whose eyes were opened to the fragility of our democracy. I did what was expected of me, what should be expected of an American. I did my civic duty, no more than that.”
