The Justice Department is virtually certain to try to indict Cassidy Hutchinson, a former Trump White House aide and a key January 6 witness. And if Donald Trump’s prosecutors do attempt to abuse the legal process to pursue this particular political vendetta — one of many in this DoJ’s “Lock her up!” era of criminal enforcement — they’ll ultimately fail in the courts. Again.

The most fundamental problem with a potential perjury indictment of Hutchinson is that prosecutors almost certainly can’t carry their burden of proof. The gist of the Justice Department’s grand-jury probe (first reported by Punchbowl News) is Hutchinson’s June 2022 testimony to Congress that a Secret Service agent, Tony Ornato, told her about a January 6, 2021, incident in which Donald Trump demanded that the Secret Service drive him to the U.S. Capitol Building and physically lunged at the driver or the steering wheel of his armored car when the Secret Service refused. Trump has furiously denied that any such thing ever happened.

Here’s the key point: Hutchinson did not claim that she witnessed this event. She testified only that Ornato told her about it. The question, then, is not whether the scrum inside the armored car actually happened. The question is whether Ornato told the story to Hutchinson. Hutchinson claims he did; Ornato, a fierce Trump loyalist who broke ordinary Secret Service protocol by serving as a White House security official, has denied Hutchinson’s account.

It’s a literal “she said, he said.” And there’s essentially no way prosecutors can prove that Hutchinson lied — in other words, that Ornato never told her the story about the armored car — beyond a........

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