Betsy DeVos poured millions into the voucher campaign, in hopes of getting it passed by a Republican legislature and avoiding a referendum. In a previous referendum, Michigan voters overwhelmingly rejected vouchers for private and religious schools.
Democrats won control of both houses of the legislature in 2022, so that idea is dead, for now.
Beth LeBlanc of The Detroit News reported:
Conservative groups last month abandoned their efforts to pass voter-initiated laws seeking to create stricter voter identification rules and a tax-incentivized scholarship fund in Michigan that could be used for private school education.
The demise of the Let MI Kids Learn ballot initiative serves as a blow to the West Michigan family of former U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, the Republican mega-donor who helped to launch the effort to create a tax incentive that would finance private school scholarships for students whose parents could not afford the tuition.
Members of the DeVos family contributed roughly $7.9 million toward the Let MI Kids Learn ballot initiative in 2021 and 2022, making up the lion’s share of the financing for the effort, according to state campaign finance records….
The end of the Let MI Kids Learn ballot initiative marks a “major victory for public school students, parents and educators,” said Casandra Ulbrich, a spokesperson for an opposition group called For MI Kids, for MI Schools.
The Secure MI Vote initiative, which also was pulled on Dec. 28, had largely been rendered irrelevant by the November passage of Proposal 2, which cemented in the Michigan Constitution voting rules that Secure MI Vote sought to change in statute, said Jamie Roe, spokesman for the Secure MI Vote effort and a Republican political consultant.
The AFT commissioned a highly reputable polling form to find out how voters think about the big education issues. The poll was conducted after the election last November. Bottom line: Voters want better, well/resourced public schools; few are interested in the Republican agenda of fighting “wokeness,” censoring books, and choice.
New Polling Reveals GOP/McCarthy Schools Agenda Is Unpopular and at Odds with Parents’ Priorities
Latest Data Show Parents, Voters Reject Culture War Agenda, Support Academic Focus and Safe Schools Instead
WASHINGTON—The American Federation of Teachers today released new national polling that shows voters overwhelmingly reject House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s anti-school, culture war agenda. Instead, voters want to see political leaders prioritize what kids need to succeed in school: strong fundamental academic skills and safe and welcoming school environments.
“The latest education poll tells us loud and clear: Voters, including parents, oppose McCarthy’s agenda to prioritize political fights in schools and instead support real solutions, like getting our kids and teachers what they need to recover and thrive,” said AFT President Randi Weingarten.
“Rather than reacting to MAGA-driven culture wars, voters overwhelmingly say they want lawmakers to get back to basics: to invest in public schools and get educators the resources they need to create safe and welcoming environments, boost academic skills and pave pathways to career, college and beyond.”
According to Geoff Garin, president of Hart Research Associates: “One key weakness of the culture war agenda is that voters and parents reject the idea that teachers today are pushing a ‘woke’ political agenda in the schools. Most have high confidence in teachers. Voters see the ‘culture war’ as a distraction from what’s important and believe that politicians who are pushing these issues are doing so for their own political benefit.”
Polling conducted by Hart Research Associates from Dec. 12-17, 2022, among 1,502 registered voters nationwide, including 558 public school parents, shows that support for and trust in public schools and teachers remains incredibly strong:
93 percent of respondents said improving public education is an important priority for government officials.
66 percent said the government spends too little on education; 69 percent want to see more spending.
By 29 points, voters said their schools teach appropriate content, with an even greater trust in teachers.
Voters who prioritized education supported Democrats by 8 points.
Top education priorities for voters include providing:
students with strong fundamental academic skills;
opportunities for all children to succeed, including through career and technical education and greater mental health supports, as examples; and
a safe and welcoming environment for kids to learn.
According to voters, the most serious problems facing schools include:
teacher shortages;
inadequate funding;
unsafe schools; and
pandemic learning loss. (And, critically, voters and parents are looking forward to find solutions: by 85 percent to 15 percent, they want Congress to focus on improving schools through greater support, rather than through McCarthy’s investigation agenda.)
“COVID was terrible for everyone,” added Weingarten. “Educators and parents took on the challenges of teaching, learning and reconnecting and are now asking elected officials to focus on the building blocks of student success. Instead, legislators in 45 states have proposed hundreds of laws making that harder—laws seeking to ban books from school libraries; restrict what teachers can say about race, racism, LGBTQIA+ issues and American history; and limit the school activities in which transgender students can participate. Voters are saying that not only are these laws bad policy—they’re also bad politics.”
In state after state in the November midterms, voters elected pro-public education governors and school board candidates and rejected far-right attacks on teachers and vulnerable LGBTQIA+ students.
The survey’s confidence interval is ±3.0 percentage points.
Click here for toplines, here for the poll memo and here for the poll slides.
Far-right extremists concocted a cascading series of so-called culture wars that have no basis in fact or reality. Their purpose is to undermine public trust in teachers and public schools, paving the way for divisive “school choice,” which defunds public schools.
Teachers are intimidated, fearful that they might violate the law by teaching factual history about race and racism. Students are deprived of honesty in their history and social studies classes. Schools are slandered by extremists. Needless divisions are created by the lies propagated by zealots whose goal is to privatize public funding for schools.
First came the furor over “critical race theory,” which is not taught in K-12 schools. CRT is a law school course of study that examines systemic racism. The claim that it permeates K-12 schools was created as a menace threatening the children of America by rightwing ideologue Chris Rufo, who shamelessly smeared the teachers of America as purveyors of race hatred that humiliated white children. Rufo made clear in a speech at Hillsdale College that the only path forward was school choice. The entire point of Rufo’s gambit was the destruction of public trust in public schools.
Then came a manufactured brouhaha over transgender students who wanted to use a bathroom aligned with their sexual identity. The number of transgender students is minuscule, probably 1%. And yet again there was a furor that could have easily been resolved with a gender-neutral bathroom. Ron DeSantis made a campaign ad with a female swimmer who complained that she competed against a trans woman. What she didn’t mention was that the trans woman was beaten, as was she, by three other female swimmers.
And then came the nutty claim that teachers were “grooming” students to be gay. Another smear. No evidence whatever. Reading books about gay characters would turn students gay, said the critics; but would reading about elephants make students want to be elephants?
Simultaneously, extremists raised loud alarms about books that introduced students to dangerous ideas about sexuality and racism. If they read books with gay characters, students would turn gay. If they read about racism, they would “hate America.” So school libraries had to be purged; even public libraries had to be purged. One almost expected public book burnings. So much power attributed to books, as if the Internet doesn’t exist, as if kids can’t watch porn of all kinds, as if public television does not regularly run shows about American’s shameful history of racism.
As citizens and parents, we must stand up for truth and sanity. We must defend our schools and teachers against libelous claims. We must oppose those who would ban books.
Of course, parents should meet with their children’s teachers. They should partner with them to help their children. They should ask questions about the curriculum. They should share their concerns. Learning benefits when parents, teachers, students, and communities work together.
Ron DeSantis wants to prove he is more like Trump than Trump, to show he has even less humanity than the Master.
The Miami Herald reported:
A Leon County Circuit Court judge on Friday refused to dismiss a lawsuit against Ron DeSantis brought by a North Miami Beach state senator who has accused Florida’s governor of illegally using taxpayer funds to fly migrants from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts last September.
Judge John C. Cooper set a Jan. 30 trial date to hear the constitutional challenge brought by Sen. Jason Pizzo, a Democrat who is suing in his capacity as a private citizen. Cooper rejected attempts by DeSantis’ lawyers to dismiss the case, although he did agree to release Chief Financial Officer Jimmy Patronis as a defendant. Pizzo argues that the 2022-23 state appropriations bill that financed the controversial flights improperly used the budget to create a substantial new program instead of authorizing it through a separate law. Under long-standing principles of the Florida Constitution, substantial policies and programs must be first authorized in a separate law so that they can be widely discussed and reviewed by lawmakers.
DeSantis signed the budget on June 8, including the provision that allocated $12 million in interest the state earned from COVID relief funds to pay for “relocation services” run by the Florida Department of Transportation “to facilitate the transport of unauthorized aliens from this state.” Records obtained by the Florida Center for Government Accountability, the Miami Herald, and other news organizations have shed light on the covert operation involving the governor’s staff, who worked with a politically connected vendor to wriggle around the budget requirement that Florida use the money to export Florida migrants — not those living in some other state.
Pizzo argues that in addition to violating the Constitution by using the budget language to create a new program, the Florida Department of Transportation violated another law when it created written “guidelines” for the contract, rather than requiring vendors to submit a sealed bid as is required by state law for contracts over $35,000. Pizzo also argues that the $1.5 million paid to Vertol Systems Company, Inc. , the Destin-based company whose CEO is a former legal client of the governor’s “public safety czar” Larry Keefe, “far exceed the $35,000 cost threshold triggering the competitive solicitation.” The money appears to be for payments of $650,000 and $950,000, although three purchase orders for $950,000 have been posted on the state contract disclosure web site. The Miami Herald learned that after Vertol coordinated two planeloads of migrants to Massachusetts from Texas on Sept. 14, it expected to conduct a second flight the next week bringing migrants from San Antonio to Delaware. But, after intense media scrutiny and an investigation by a Texas sheriff, that flight was called off.
State transaction records show that Vertol was paid in advance for both projects, including the flights that were never completed. Pizzo argued that Patronis should also be a defendant in the lawsuit because he “has failed to take action to recover any portion of those funds … for services which to date have not been performed.” He also accused Patronis of failing to demand information from FDOT to justify the expense and explain its contracting decisions. Patronis’ lawyer, Ty Jackson of the GrayRobinson law firm, argued that the CFO had no role in deciding how to spend state funds. Cooper agreed and dismissed him as a defendant in the case. “It’s not his baby,’’ Cooper concluded during the hearing Friday. “He’s not the one who decided to do it and says he’s going to do it again. The CFO cut a check.”
Nicholas Meros, deputy general counsel for DeSantis, argued that the governor and legislators “did not create a new program” when they inserted the authority to spend $12 million on migrant relocation services into state law. The reason, he said, is that the provision expanded on another law that prohibited the state from entering into a contract with anyone who transports “an unauthorized alien” into Florida except to detain or remove that person “from this state or the United States.” That provision became law through SB 1808, a bill that passed on March 9 but wasn’t signed by the governor until June 17. That was 15 days after the governor signed the budget and Section 185, the provision that included the $12 million in relocation funds.
Under questioning by Cooper, Meros did not appear to be aware that the law he argued the budget was modifying wasn’t on the books yet when legislators passed the budget. It was another example of the confusing arguments the governor and his staff have had to pursue to justify spending Florida money to relocate migrants arriving in Texas, not Florida.
Cooper noted that before DeSantis could say he was relocating migrants out of Florida, he had to pay to fly them in. “I don’t’ see anything … that says you can go to Texas and pick up people, bring them to Florida for a few minutes and then take them to another state under this program,’’ he said.
Records released in November, after the Florida Center for Government Accountability filed a lawsuit, show that the two planes carrying migrants from San Antonio to Martha’s Vineyard made a 30-minute pit stop in the Panhandle town of Crestview.
The flights have been denounced by the governor’s critics as a stunt, but they have also contributed to his stature as a conservative stalwart among Republican voters as he considers a run for president in 2024. The attention also put a spotlight on the immigration crisis along the southern border.
As Republicans accused President Joe Biden of not doing enough to stem the growing influx of migrants, DeSantis announced last week he would increase state resources aimed at the surge of migrants from Cuba and Haiti. His deputies said the effort will focus on using state airplanes to help the federal government’s efforts to interdict and return migrants to their countries of origin.
Pizzo is asking the court to declare the section of the budget that includes the $12 million in relocation funds unconstitutional, and to prohibit the governor from spending any more of the money. He also argues the state violates the Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution because Congress gives the federal government exclusive power over immigration, and that by inserting itself into immigration enforcement, the state is violating the federal Constitution.
DeSantis’ lawyers argue, however, that the relocation program “does not regulate the flow of aliens into or out of the United States or determine anybody’s citizenship status.’’ Instead, they said in a motion filed last week that the state is only making funds available to “facilitate the transport of consenting unauthorized aliens from Florida to other states.”
Pennsylvania elected a Democrat as its new governor, Josh Shapiro, the former state attorney general. During his campaign against the Trumper candidate Doug Mastriano, Shapiro campaigned as a centrist Democrat and won handily. One worrisome detail is that Gov.-Elect Shapiro endorsed vouchers, despite their widespread failure and their affiliation with hardcore rightwingers. It is therefore somewhat reassuring that he selected an experienced education as the state superintendent. This article was republished by the Keystone Center for Charter Change of the Pennsylvania School Boards Association.
Pa. is getting a new education secretary: Lower Merion superintendent Khalid Mumin
“During the past 15 months, I have grown to love Lower Merion, our inspiring students, exemplary staff, committed families and community members; however, Gov.-elect Shapiro has offered me a unique and exciting opportunity to reshape educational policy and practices across the Commonwealth, so all Pennsylvania students can experience the level of educational excellence our students enjoy and that all students deserve,” Mumin said in a letter to the Lower Merion community. The Secretary of Education job, he said, “was an offer I couldn’t refuse.”
Mumin is scheduled to be sworn in as Acting Secretary of Education on Jan. 17. “For over 25 years, I have served as a teacher, dean of students, principal, and school superintendent — and I know firsthand what it takes to move our education system forward,” Mumin said in a statement. “I look forward to working with the Gov.-Elect to fully fund our schools, make our students’ mental health a priority, and empower parents and guardians to ensure their children receive a quality education.”
Though he currently runs one of the state’s best-funded school systems, Mumin has extensive experience in low-wealth districts, too. Prior to working in Lower Merion, Mumin was superintendent of Reading city schools, where he worked for six years. He also served as an administrator in Maryland.
We will keep a watchful eye on Governor Shapiro, as he chooses whether to fully find the state’s public schools or to waste money on vouchers to satisfy a campaign donor.
After months of waiting, hundreds of Twitter employees laid off by Elon Musk in early November received their separation agreements by email Saturday morning.
The agreements offered one month of severance pay, but with a major catch — employees must sign away their right to ever sue the company, assist anyone in a legal case against the company unless required by law, or speak negatively about Twitter, its management or Elon Musk.
More striking is what the document omitted, said one former engineering manager who was laid off Nov. 4. The separation agreement does not include year-end bonuses, cash contribution for healthcare continuation, additional severance based on tenure, or the cash value of restricted stock units that are typically vested every quarter. These were all part of Twitter’s general severance package prior to Musk’s acquisition of the company in October, according to a previous companywide email….
Twitter, which no longer has a formal communications team, could not be reached for comment.
According to Business Insider, the budget-cutting has gone too far. Bathrooms in the Twitter headquarters are often out of toilet paper. Maintenance staff have been laid off, and bathrooms stink.
A billionaire skimping on toilet paper! That’s no way to run a business or a school.
Jess Piper lives in rural Missouri. She and her husband are farmers with five children. She taught American literature in the local public school. She describes herself as a “woke” progressive. When she added the history of slavery and African American literature to her classes, she said, none of her students (all white) felt embarrassed or uncomfortable. They identified with the abolitionists, not the slaveholders.
She ran for office when she realized that there were no Democrats, and she lost. But she wasn’t discouraged.
Josh Cowen of Michigan State University is among the most experienced voucher researchers in the nation. He is a member of the inner circle of voucher researchers and has been for nearly two decades. He began the work believing that vouchers were promising. As the research accumulated over the years and converged, he realized that vouchers harm the students they are meant to help. I have invited Josh to contribute to this blog whenever he wishes.
He writes here about the claim that the offer of vouchers causes public schools to do better, known as “competitive effects.” Nonsense, he writes.
Over the last few months, as I’ve written here in this blog and elsewhere about how recent data and research show incredibly harmful school voucher impacts for kids, one question that some readers have asked me to address has been the issue of so-called “competitive effects” of vouchers and school choice.
The idea comes from economics, and basically holds that competition between two or more providers of a good or service lowers costs and ultimately provides greater value to consumers. In the economics of education world, the idea that school choice policy forces competition onto public schools to improve the “product” of education is summarized as “a rising tide lifts all boats.”
Before I give you the details, here’s the take-home point: academic research does show that the threat of school choice pressures do prompt upticks in public school test score achievements. That’s particularly true for schools that stand to lose financially from voucher enrollment.
Those tend to be the vulnerable schools with respect to both longstanding historical marginalization, and economic health.
So here’s what you should ask yourself: is that really the way we want to spend public dollars to improve academic outcomes?
Here’s what I mean.
Participant vs. Competitive Effects
First, some definitions. If you’re not in the weeds of school choice research or advocacy, it’s important to clarify the difference between participant and competitive effects because researchers and advocates point to both.
Participant effects are the impact of school vouchers on kids who use them to attend private school. Competitive effects are the impact of school vouchers on kids who stay behind in public classrooms.
It’s inarguable that school vouchers have devasting participant effects. Over the last decade, as voucher programs have gotten larger, we’ve seen impacts as high as twice the academic damage that the pandemic caused to test scores.
But as I wrote above, it’s also true that research shows modest, positive competitive impacts. That is to say: vouchers appear to genuinely pressure public schools to drive up test scores. But voucher advocates who point to that outcome rarely talk about academic drops for kids who use vouchers themselves. When they do, they use industry-funded positive research from groups like the Heritage Foundation or the Goldwater Institute to mask what independent analysts have found.
And as I’ve written both for this page and elsewhere, kids who leave public schools for vouchers tend to do so only temporarily. Their parents are what you might call “voucher curious.” They try a private school out, tend to have average academic declines that are as large as anything we’ve seen in the history of education policy research, and then go back to public schools. Thankfully their outcomes do improve after returning to public education. Studying those kids in Milwaukee, my co-authors and I called that return to academic progress “life after vouchers.”But because these are some of the most at-risk kids in our classrooms, these disruptions can cause long-term if not permanent damage.
So I never want to dismiss the children who temporarily move to voucher schools. They’re not lost to us and they need our help too. Which means it’s important not to talk about competitive effects on public schools without always remembering the horrible outcomes for kids who do leave for vouchers.
It’s “Settled:” Direct Investment in Public Education Works
But what if, despite all of that collateral damage vouchers cause, you’re still wondering about competitive impacts? Just as few voucher activists will cite harmful participant effects when advertising competition, most competition studies do not include analysis of which policy alternatives might be better.
Here’s the obvious alternative: simply spending more money on public schools in the first place.
When I was in graduate school in the early 00’s, the prevailing truism on public school spending was that additional increases in funding had limited value. This thinking was driven almost entirely by the remarkable influence of one man, the economist Eric Hanushek, who compared it to simply “throwing money” at a problem—a phrased used more recently by Betsy DeVos, among others.
Just like the research on voucher participant effects has been entirely upended by more recent evidence, that old work on school spending has been retired by more technically sophisticated statistical approaches and more finely grained data. When it comes to education, money matters—how much, and how it’s spent.
Northwestern economist and National Academy of Education member Kirabo Jackson, one of today’s leading authorities on the subject of school spending, describes the debate as “essentially settled:” direct investment in public education has had consistently large impacts on outcomes ranging from test scores, to graduation rates, to adult earnings later in life. Just a few months ago here in Michigan where I write, University of Michigan scholars released a study showing school finance improvements through our state’s equalization reforms even reduced local crime rates.
Remember that every time you see a conservative scholar point to competition as a policy lever to impact public schools. There may be some small short-term benefit on test scores, but it’s not a substitute for direct and sustained investments directly in schools, teachers and kids.
Just Because We Can, Doesn’t Mean We Should
So yes, research does tend to show that if states threaten public schools with the loss of revenue by implementing private school vouchers, public school test scores may improve somewhat.
Does that mean public schools are better off with vouchers? No. It simply means that so long as standardized tests are the coin of the realm for accountability and revenue, reasonable school leaders will have no choice but to react accordingly. It’s almost tautological: public schools need funding, and threatening to reduce their funding with vouchers is going to have some response—whether desirable or not. In states that have bans on reproductive rights for example in a post Roe v. Wade world, I’m sure we’re going to see the number of abortions drop drastically.
Does that mean eliminating Roe was good public health?
As a researcher who’s become a strong advocate for public schools by following the data and following simply the right thing to do, I put little stock in conservative arguments centered around competitive school voucher impacts simply because the same outcome—test scores—shows massive academic declines for kids who actually go to voucher schools. To me it’s the same argument as saying something like “sure this vaccine kills sick people to whom we administer it, but it doesn’t harm a perfectly healthy patient.”
That’s not public health. And it’s not public education either.
Finally a simple comment on identity and policy. I identify as a white male who is married to a woman. The vast majority of school voucher research comes from white men like me. Vouchers originated with a while male economist. I decline to accept the idea implied by school competition that there is something moral about setting low-income children and communities of color—as public schools threatened with voucher-induced funding loss often are serving—against each other to improve outcomes.
Research might show it can work, but just because we can does not mean we should.
Let’s just take the other research-supported route and spend more money on public education, period. One way or another, I don’t think a person needs to be a public school advocate to realize that threatening schools is hardly an optimal role for public policy. Not when there’s a more supportive way available simply by investing in schools as if our children’s lives and futures matter.
My thought: it’s possible to think of many policies that would lead to improved competitive effects, but would be horrible policies. As Josh says, just because you can doesn’t mean you should. Suppose your school or district threatened to horse whip children who misbehave; that would lead to better behavior, but only by inflicting inhumane punishments. Similarly, you could cut truancy by administering harsh punishments on those who are truant. There are all sorts of ways to induce competitive effects.
In the case of vouchers, it involves encouraging students to leave their public school to attend a voucher school where they will get an inferior schooling and likely return to their underfunded public school.
Ellie Honig and friends have a podcast called Cafe Insider. It offers insights into current politics. In this free edition, the question is why Attorney General Merrick Garland is moving so slowly to prosecute the planners of the 1/6 insurrection, one of the biggest federal crimes in U.S. history.
Note From Elie: DOJ and The Cost of Getting There Second
Cassidy Hutchinson is sworn in by the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the US Capitol on June 28, 2022. (Photo by Stefani Reynolds / AFP)
Sign up free to receive the CAFE Brief in your inbox every Friday: cafe.com/brief
Cassidy Hutchinson is the perfect witness for a potential prosecution of Donald Trump. She had insider access as an aide to former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows; she was inside the West Wing during the frantic days leading up to January 6, and then as the Capitol attack went down that fateful afternoon, two years ago today. Her testimony is damning to Trump and others, and is corroborated in key respects by independent evidence. She is a compelling figure, at once likable, sympathetic, and believable. She is a prosecutor’s dream.
Also: Cassidy Hutchinson lied to federal investigators, under penalty of perjury.
This is not a matter of opinion or debate. It is a fact, openly admitted now by Hutchinson herself. And it’s not even Hutchinson’s fault, not entirely. I place much of the blame on Justice Department prosecutors who twiddled their thumbs for far too long and let themselves get beaten to the punch by the January 6 Committee. This is the cost of DOJ’s dilatory, meandering, hand-wringing approach to its investigation of the real power sources behind the coup attempt. This is the cost of getting there second.
During the first year-and-a-half or so after January 6, the Justice Department focused its prosecutorial efforts on the people who physically stormed the Capitol. Attorney General Merrick Garland vowed at his February 2021 confirmation hearing to “begin with the people on the ground and we work our way up.”
Of course, DOJ had to prosecute those who breached the Capitol and, for the most part, the feds have done an admirable job on these 900-plus cases.
The problem, however, was with Garland’s bureaucratic, bottom-up approach. Yes, prosecutors sometimes do start at ground level and work up the chain of command – but aggressive prosecutors know you don’t have to do it that way. In fact, circumstances sometimes give prosecutors a direct shot at the upper echelons of power, and there’s no reason to refrain from going after the bosses until after you’re done with the riff-raff. To put it in concrete terms: DOJ absolutely could have identified and talked to Hutchinson, Pat Cipollone, Marc Short, and other key White House insiders back in, say, mid-2021. The Justice Department has now spoken with all these folks, and other well-situated witnesses, but it didn’t get around to them until mid- to late-2022.
In the meantime, while DOJ was focused exclusively on the guys in face paint and rhino horns, the January 6 Committee – armed with less powerful investigative tools and resources– got to Hutchinson first. In February 2022 – before she gave her blockbuster, nationally broadcast testimony in June 2022 – she testified behind closed doors. The Committee asked Hutchinson whether she knew anything about a dispute on January 6 between Trump and Secret Service agents, who refused his command to take him to the Capitol. Hutchinson testified that she had heard of no such thing. At this point, Hutchinson was represented by a lawyer named Stefan Passantino, a former Trump White House ethics lawyer (yes: ethics) who was being paid by Trump’s “Save America” political action committee. (Put a pin in this; we’ll get back to Passantino in a bit).
This testimony by Hutchinson, given under penalty of perjury, was false. Months later, in June 2022, she testified publicly that she had heard that Trump had lashed out physically and verbally at Secret Service agents, at one point physically lunging for the steering wheel of the presidential SUV. In a subsequent deposition in September 2022, Hutchinson admitted that she had lied to the Committee the first time around. After her original false testimony, Hutchinson was racked with worry; she said to Passantino, “Stefan, I’m f****d. I just lied… I lied. I lied, I lied, I lied.” (That’s four “I lieds,” for those keeping count.)
There are perfectly understandable and defensible reasons why Hutchinson lied in her first deposition. As she later explained to the Committee, she was under enormous personal and financial pressure to hew to the party line and avoid testifying in any way that might harm Trump. According to Hutchinson, Passantino reinforced that perception, telling her that, “We just want to focus on protecting the President.” Worse, Hutchinson testified that when she told Passantino during prep sessions about the incident between Trump and the Secret Service, Passantino told her, “No, no, no, no, no… We don’t want to go there. We don’t want to talk about that.” (That’s five “nos,” for those keeping count.) Passantino said she could simply claim she did not recall, and there’s no way the Committee could know what she did or did not remember. Passantino contests Hutchinson’s account and starkly denies any wrongdoing.
While this was all going down, Garland was asleep at the wheel. When Hutchinson testified publicly in June 2022, federal prosecutors reportedly were “astonished” as they sat on their couches, watching on television along with the rest of us in the general public.
So here’s the problem now for DOJ (and the Fulton County DA). Hutchinson, as vital a witness as she is, is also damaged goods. She’s probably not fatally undermined but, make no mistake, defense lawyers will have a field day cross-examining her:
You lied to the Committee, didn’t you? (Yes)
You knew you were testifying to the United States House of Representatives, right? (I knew that)
And you knew you were testifying under penalty of perjury, right? (That’s right)
Just like you’re under penalty of perjury now at this trial? (Yes).
But you lied. (Correct)
You knew you could get prosecuted and go to federal prison if you lied, didn’t you? (I did)
Yet you lied, anyway. (Yes)
“I lied, I lied, I lied, I lied.” Those were your words. (Right)
By the way: you haven’t been prosecuted for perjury, have you? Even though you lied? (No, I haven’t)
These prosecutors did you a favor. They could have thrown you in prison, but they gave you a free pass, didn’t they? (Well, I guess I haven’t been charged with anything)
But you did commit perjury. (I suppose so)
Again: I find Hutchinson, on the whole, to be remarkably credible. I believe the substance of her testimony, and I believe that she lied only because of pressure applied by Passantino and others in Trumpworld. But there’s no denying it: this line of cross-examination will hurt.
Yes, Hutchinson has a plausible explanation why she originally lied to the Committee. I’ve seen plenty of witnesses in her situation, and it’s common and understandable for a person who feels financial or political or personal pressure to shade the truth. Prosecutors will surely make this argument if they ever call Hutchinson as a witness and need to rehabilitate her. But it’s an unforced error by DOJ. The Justice Department got beat to the punch, and now they needlessly have to fight a battle over Hutchinson’s credibility. By their inaction, Justice Department prosecutors have handed defense lawyers a gift.
Garland boosters sometimes argue: oh, but he is the humble tortoise, the slow but steady technician who lacks flash but wins the race in the end. Sounds reassuring, but this is apologist pablum. Speed absolutely matters. There’s a reason why prosecutors fight like mad to get to key witnesses first, and then protect them against having to testify in other settings: to prevent a Hutchinson-like scenario where, through no real fault of the witness herself, she winds up giving testimony that undermines her credibility down the line.
As I’ve noted many times in this space, prosecutors may still indict Trump, someday. But Garland’s own delay will make the ultimate job – securing a conviction – even more difficult than it needed to be.
