Pat A. Cipollone, White House counsel to President Donald J. Trump who has repeatedly fought against Mr. Trump’s attempts to undo the 2020 election, has reached a deal to be interviewed Friday before the United Nations’ committee. House investigating the January 6 attack. people familiar with the study.
The agreement was a breakthrough for the panel, which for weeks has been urging Mr Cipollone to cooperate – and issued a subpoena against him last week – believing he could give a crucial testimony.
Mr. Cipollone witnessed pivotal moments in Mr. Trump’s drive to invalidate the election results, including discussions about confiscating voting machines and sending false letters to state officials about electoral fraud. He was also in the West Wing on Jan. 6, 2021, when Mr. Trump responded to the violence at the Capitol when his supporters attacked the building in his name.
People close to Mr Cipollone have repeatedly warned that concerns about executive privilege and attorney-client privilege could limit his cooperation.
But the committee’s negotiators have urged to hear from Mr. Cipollone and Patrick F. Philbin, his White House deputy.
Mr Cipollone will be in attendance for a videotaped, transcribed interview, according to a person familiar with the discussions. He is not expected to testify publicly.
A spokesman for the committee declined to comment.
Panel pressure to hear from Mr Cipollone increased thereafter Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony last week, a former White House aide to the Chief of Staff, Mark Meadows. Ms. Hutchinson described detailed conversations with Mr. Cipollone in which she said counsel had expressed deep concern about Mr. Trump and Mr. Meadows.
Some of Mr Trump’s allies have secretly tried to cast doubt on parts of Ms. Hutchinson’s testimony, which was the commission’s most explosive to date and was sworn in.
Mr. Trump has attempted to invoke executive privilege — a president’s power to deny the release of certain confidential communications with his advisers — to prevent his former aides from cooperating in the investigation. In April, Mr Cipollone and Mr Philbin both appeared for informal interviews with the panel on a limited number of topics, under an agreement reached by their representatives and representatives for Mr. Trump.
According to an email reviewed by The New York Times, the agreement included the opportunity to hold talks about a meeting with Jeffrey Clark, a Justice Department official who was trying to help Trump stay in power; Trump’s interactions with John Eastman, the conservative attorney who drafted a legal strategy to undo the election; all interactions with members of Congress; and Mr Cipollone’s memories of the events of January 6.
The agreement stated that the two men could not discuss any conversations they or others had with Mr. Trump, except for one Oval Office conversation with Mr. Clark during a pivotal meeting on Jan. 3, 2021.
However, both were allowed to discuss the timeline of where they were, who they met and the conversations they had on January 6. Assuming those terms apply to Mr Cipollone’s forthcoming testimony, they would presumably treat conversations as he had them. with Ms. Hutchinson or other officials that day.
Ms. Hutchinson told the panel that she recalled that Mr. Cipollone on January 6 objected to suggestions that Mr. Trump would join a crowd in the Capitol urging to nullify the results of the election.
“We will be charged with every crime imaginable,” Ms. Hutchinson recalled that Mr. Cipollone had said.
People familiar with White House counsel’s schedule on Jan. 6, 2021, say he arrived late at the White House, although it was unclear exactly when.
According to Ms. Hutchinson, Mr. Cipollone urged Mr. Meadows to do more to persuade Mr Trump to call off the rioters. Ms. Hutchinson also told investigators she had heard White House attorneys say a plan to advance pro-Trump voters in states that Joseph R. Biden Jr. won, was not “legally justified”.
House committee members had hoped that Mr Cipollone would testify publicly at an earlier hearing, but he declined. They then made their case public. From the podium in the hearing, Representative Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming, called the former White House counsel by name and said, “Our committee is confident that Donald Trump does not want Mr. Cipollone to testify here. But we believe the American people deserve to hear from Mr. Cipollone personally.”
Key Revelations from the January 6 Hearings
Any damaging account from Mr. Cipollone about Mr. Trump’s actions after the election would be a significant change of circumstances from the president’s first impeachment trial, when Mr. Cipollone was his main defender†
During the first impeachment, Mr. Cipollone accused Representative Adam B. Schiff, the California Democrat who served as a prosecutor in that trial and is now on the Jan. 6 committee, of false charges against Mr. Trump.
A year later, as the president pushed through with plans to undo his defeat, Mr. Cipollone and other White House attorneys repeatedly threatened to resign if Mr. Trump went ahead with some of the more extreme proposals, which eventually won him over. to withdraw. †
Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and a former White House adviser, told the panel that Cipollone’s threats of firing were frequent, implying that he did not take his concerns and those of other members of the counsel’s office seriously. the seriousness of Mr Trump’s plans.
“He and the team always said, ‘Oh, we’re going to resign. We won’t be here if this happens, if that happens,” Mr Kushner said in a video testimony, a clip of which was played during the first public hearing. “So I took it a bit to whine.”