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A mystery left over from the end of yesterday’s January 6 hearing. Who’s the unknown witness whom Trump may or may not have been trying to tamper with?

Maybe it was a butt-dial?

There are only so many people who are still expected to testify but haven’t yet. My first thought was Steve Bannon, who announced a few days ago that he’s finally ready after battling contempt charges, but that makes no sense. Bannon’s a hyper-loyalist; he wouldn’t have told his lawyer that Trump tried to phone him. And he certainly wouldn’t have declined to take Trump’s call. Why would Trump even need to contact Bannon to warn him not to say anything that might damage him? Bannon already understands that.

I’m not sure how the DOJ could go about proving that a call between the two was an attempt to tamper with a witness either. Presumably they’re in regular contact about various matters. Unless Bannon is willing to allege that Trump pressured him, what’s the case?

Here’s my guess at who the mystery witness is:

Matthews was a spokesman for Trump’s 2020 campaign and worked as deputy press secretary in the White House, but she resigned in protest on the evening of January 6. She’s already provided closed-door testimony to the committee and was recently subpoenaed to testify at an upcoming hearing. She was sufficiently far down the chain in the MAGA hierarchy that I assume it’d be highly unusual for her to receive any direct phone calls from Donald Trump. In all likelihood they haven’t spoken since she quit. If he dialed her up recently, after news broke that she would soon testify, you can imagine her thinking, “This can only be about one thing.”

I wonder if he left a voicemail.

Cheney’s revelation at the end of yesterday’s hearing wasn’t the first time witness intimidation has been alleged by the committee. Recall that the hearing at which Hutchinson testified ended with this display:

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At least one of those messages was reportedly sent to Hutchinson herself. In fact, per the Times, the committee scheduled the hearing to have Hutchinson testify when it did because she “was under intense pressure from Trump World, and panel members believed that getting her story out in public would make her less vulnerable, attract powerful allies and be its own kind of protection.”

Behind-the-scenes pressure on witnesses is one way Trump and his allies have tried to influence people who might otherwise do him damage. Michael Cohen got an email from a Giuliani ally in 2018, when he was considering speaking to Robert Mueller’s office, that read, “You are ‘loved’” and “Sleep well tonight … you have friends in high places.” After the FBI raided his office that year, three separate Trump cronies reached out to assure him that “the boss” loved him and had his back. “He behaves like a mob boss, and these messages are fashioned in that style,” Cohen told WaPo last month. “Giving an order without giving the order. No fingerprints attached.”

Flattery isn’t the only inducement for a witness to keep their mouth shut. Sometimes financial generosity is involved:

Trump has also kept former aides tightly in his orbit through promises of employment and contributions to their political causes. Though he has been loath to spend money from his PAC, sometimes resisting aides’ suggestions for even small outlays, last year his Save America PAC sent $1 million to the Conservative Partnership Institute, a nonprofit group where Meadows is a senior partner.

The donation came about one month after the House committee was formed. While Trump advisers insisted there was no quid pro quo involved with the donation, Trump has been inclined to keep Meadows in the fold, even when he is annoyed with him at times, people familiar with the matter said.

Hutchinson was herself a beneficiary of that “generosity” for a time. Her original lawyer when meeting with the January 6 committee was Stefan Passantino, who had worked on ethics(!) in the Trump White House. Conveniently, Passantino’s fees were paid not by Hutchinson, who was unemployed, but by Trump’s Super PAC. As Hutchinson’s engagement with the committee expanded, she allegedly came to realize that Passantino wasn’t as eager for her to keep meeting with them as she was. In the words of a friend who spoke to the Times, “She realized she couldn’t call her attorney to say, ‘Hey, I’ve got more information.’ He was there to insulate the big guy.”

There’s nothing illegal about a third party paying someone’s legal fees, but obviously conflicts arise when the person footing the bill has an interest in the matter, gets to choose the lawyer, and ends up choosing a lawyer who owes them some loyalty. “The obvious example is organized crime, where the crime boss tells the lieutenant that, ‘Joe, here, is going to be your lawyer,’” one law professor explained. “The lawyer’s loyalty, of course, is to the boss, not the lieutenant.”

Flattery, thinly veiled bribes, legal representation — all of those are “soft” ways of influencing a witness. The “hard” way is to harshly punish any witness who insists on damaging you in order to deter others who might be so inclined. Trump doesn’t use violence himself but he savaged Hutchinson on his social media platform during her testimony knowing that doing so would make her a hate object for the sort of MAGA fanatic who’s apt to call up his antagonists and leave death threats. Hutchinson needed a security detail due to “credible security threats” even before she testified publicly, in fact; one can only imagine what her life is like now. That’s what’s waiting for Sarah Matthews — by design — if she follows through on testifying. It’s remarkably brave of her to insist on breaking omerta anyway.

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