Donald Trump’s former White House lawyer, Pat Cipollone, was summoned Wednesday for a statement by the House committee on January 6.
“The Committee’s investigation Selecto has uncovered evidence that Mr. Cipollone repeatedly raised legal and other concerns about President Trump’s activities on January 6 and in the days preceding it,” said committee chairman and vice chairman Bennie Thompson, D-Mississippi and Wyoming Republican Liz Cheney said in a statement.
Cipollone and former White House deputy counsel Pat Philbin met with committee investigators for an informal interview in April.
Cipollone had been considering some form of cooperation with the committee, under certain restrictions.
Hutchinson told the committee during a Tuesday hearing that on the morning of January 6, Cipollone insisted that Trump should not accompany his supporters to the Capitol after addressing them at the Ellipse near the White House that same day.
“We will be charged with every conceivable crime if we make that move happen,” Cipollone recalled telling him he said at the time.
An attorney familiar with Cipollone’s deliberations told ABC News in response to the committee’s announcement: “Of course a subpoena was necessary before the former House counsel Blanca could even consider the transcribed testimony before the committee.”
“Now that the a citation, it will be evaluated as to matters of privilege that might be appropriate,” the attorney said.
The committee had written in a letter to Cipollone along with the subpoena from him that “they continued to obtain evidence on which you are in a unique position to testify; however, he has refused to cooperate further with us.”
Cipollone also made it clear that his testimony would be limited to the effort by former top Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark to use the powers of the Department of Justice to promote Trump’s attempts to nullify the presidential race of 2020, sources familiar with the deliberations said.
Both Cipollone and Philbin , his deputy, were part of an Oval Office meeting on January 3, 2021, where Trump insisted on replacing then-Attorney General interim Jeffrey Rosen with Clark, a Trump loyalist who had promised to use the Justice Department to investigate the election.
Cipollone and Philbin made it clear to Trump that they would resign if Clark took office, according to a Senate committee report released last year that detailed instances in which that Trump and his allies tried to use the Justice Department to nullify the election.
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