DETROIT — At the end of the second bruising day of testimony on General Motors’ ignition-switch recall, Mary T. Barra was in no mood for more questions.
As soon as she was excused from a Senate subcommittee hearing Wednesday, the GM chief executive was hustled out the door and into an elevator, surrounded by a cadre of company officials.
It was a hasty retreat from what has become a searing crisis for Barra and a management team that had hoped the congressional hearings would buy the company time to start its recall of 2.6 million small cars, and complete an internal investigation of why it failed to fix a deadly safety defect for more than a decade.
Instead, the hearings showed that GM’s strategy to put Barra front and center, and relying on its own team of advisers, has not defused the growing anger among lawmakers and the consumer backlash against the company.
Now Barra is increasingly looking outside for help.
On Thursday, GM confirmed that it had hired a crisis management adviser, Jeff Eller, who cut his teeth in the Clinton administration and also represented Firestone in its tire recall in 2000. He joins Kenneth Feinberg, a lawyer who specializes in compensation claims for victims of disasters, and Anton R. Valukas, a former US attorney who is conducting an internal investigation.
The creation of the team of outside advisers stands in marked contrast to GM’s early approach to handling the crisis, when it looked primarily inward to set strategy.
Unlike Feinberg, the high-visibility lawyer known for his work distributing payouts after 9/11 and the BP gulf oil spill, Eller is much more of a behind-the-scenes player.
The item on Eller’s resume of most direct interest to GM is his work for Bridgestone/Firestone in 2000, when the company was facing public outrage, mounting litigation, and Washington inquiries over defective tires that caused Ford Explorers to roll over, a problem eventually determined to have led to more than 200 deaths.
Eller declined to be interviewed Thursday, sending back a short e-mail referring all questions to a GM spokesman. He did, however, post on Twitter on Thursday that he was “@ General Motors World Headquarters” and posted a photo apparently taken from the building on Instagram.
A GM spokesman, Greg Martin, said that Eller was retained as part of a larger effort to add specialists with experience in similar crises.
“As we have from the start, we are drawing upon those who have deep experience and expertise in these matters,” Martin said. “Jeff will join a team that is helping us guide our response.”
GM executives had counted on Barra to deliver a core message that the company has become more trustworthy since its emergence from bankruptcy in 2009, and has shed its old bureaucratic culture and outwardly arrogant reputation.
But several lawmakers who grilled Barra seized on her unwillingness to share information about events leading to the switch recall, citing it as an example of why GM should not be trusted.
“I am very troubled that you have not committed to ending this culture of secrecy at General Motors,” Senator Edward Markey of Massachusetts told Barra.
Other senators said they wanted to directly question Valukas, as well as GM’s own corporate lawyers, at future hearings.
Barra is scheduled to hold her first meeting Friday with Feinberg. She said that within 60 days the company will decide how to respond to lawsuits for accidents that predate GM’s bankruptcy. The company is immune from litigation over crashes that occurred before it reorganized in Chapter 11.
But GM’s legal problems are growing fast.
The company turned over a trove of documents Thursday in response to the demand by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration for answers to 107 questions in its investigation.
On Friday, a federal judge in Texas is scheduled to hold a hearing on a motion in a class-action suit against GM to force the company to tell consumers to immediately stop driving recalled cars until the ignition switches are replaced.
Robert Hilliard, the lawyer who filed the suit, sent Barra a letter Thursday asking her to reconsider GM’s assertion that the cars are safe to drive if no objects are attached to the ignition key.