A federal grand jury probing the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol and former President Donald Trump’s fake electors scheme heard testimony from former White House counsel Pat Cipollone for more than two hours on Friday.
Cipollone’s appearance before prosecutors and federal grand jurors is no small event. As White House counsel, he had an intimate and often intense view into former President Donald Trump’s day-to-day.
And as he revealed through his testimony to the Jan. 6 committee earlier this summer, he was present during integral moments ahead of the insurrection. That included periods where Trump discussed strategies to overturn the election results; rejected credible advice from his advisers about the results of the election; and attempted to capture the Department of Justice by elevating those staff who supported the Big Lie. Cipollone was also privy to moments of Trump’s inaction on Jan. 6 as Congress was under attack by the armed mob.
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In addition to Cipollone, his deputy at the White House, Patrick Philbin, appeared before federal grand jurors Friday.
Both former counsels to Trump received subpoenas last month. In addition to Cipollone and Philbin, Marc Short, former Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff, as well as Pence’s counsel Greg Jacob, have testified before a grand jury.
The Justice Department is entrenched in investigating the fake elector angle as it continues its criminal probe. During the Jan. 6 committee hearings, much testimony was offered up publicly from state officials about the overt pressure campaigns foisted on them by the former president and his personal attorneys like Rudy Giuliani and election subversion strategist John Eastman.
Eastman, who has been enmeshed in legal battles for several painful months with Congress and the Justice Department, recently had his phone seized. He joined Rep. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, who had his cellular data seized by law enforcement in early August. He has since sued to have it returned to him, but a judgment has not yet been issued. He has meanwhile attacked the Department of Justice publicly, suggesting the seizure was tyrannical during a recent virtual town hall.
In his lawsuit, according to Politico, Perry said that the department had not accessed his phone but he understood the agency was in the process of securing another warrant in order to dig further.
Prosecutors offered to screen potentially privileged materials, but Perry rebuffed them for the time.
Giuliani, Eastman, and Perry all promoted Trump’s bogus claims of election fraud, but Perry was also responsible, according to testimony and court records, for introducing Trump to Jeffrey Clark, a Department of Justice attorney working in relative obscurity until meeting with the president.
Ultimately, court and congressional records, witness testimony, and widespread reporting have illuminated how Clark attempted to convince top brass at the department to go along with a plan to issue a memo stating voter fraud was widespread in certain battleground states. Those memos detailed plans to advance fake electors for Trump.
As for Cipollone’s take on that memo by Clark? According to sworn testimony delivered by former U.S. deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue, Cipollone had called it “a murder-suicide-pact.”
Just 10 days shy of the insurrection, Cipollone would also threaten to resign.
He wouldn’t go through with it, but the threat alone, which was first spurred by Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen, Deputy Attorney General Donoghue, and other top attorneys, ultimately staved off Clark’s corrupt ascendency in the department and the mailing of the memo to state officials promoting the fake electors.
Cipollone was highly cognizant of the danger surrounding him as the nation sped toward Jan. 6, according to public sworn testimony from Cassidy Hutchinson, the onetime aide to Trump’s former Chief of Staff Mark Meadows.
Hutchinson told the committee in July that when Trump had insisted on being taken to the Capitol after his speech at the Ellipse on Jan. 6, they were “going to get charged with every crime imaginable.”
Specifics of what Cipollone discussed before the grand jury on Friday are, of course, under wraps and neither Cipollone or Philbin spoke to reporters as they entered the courthouse.