The former Trump White House counsel Pat Cipollone is expected to testify to the House January 6 select committee on Friday after reaching an agreement over the scope of his cooperation with a subpoena compelling his testimony, according to a source familiar with the matter.
The testimony from Cipollone is expected to be a transcribed interview and recorded on camera, the source said, and the former top White House lawyer is expected to only answer questions on a narrow subset of topics and conversations with the former president.
Among the topics Cipollone could discuss include how he told Donald Trump that pressuring Mike Pence, the vice-president, to refuse to certify Joe Biden’s election win was unlawful, and Trump’s plot to coerce the justice department into falsely saying the 2020 election was corrupt.
The closed-door deposition, to that end, could amount to a chance for the panel to corroborate testimony by the former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson, who testified that Cipollone repeatedly warned that Trump’s ideas to overturn the 2020 election violated the law.
Hutchinson, according to her public testimony at a special hearing last week, was told by Cipollone that “we’re going to be charged with every crime imaginable” if Trump went to the Capitol that day as he pressured Congress to not certify Biden’s win.
It was not immediately clear on Wednesday why the scope of his testimony had to be limited, given Biden and the current White House counsel has previously waived privilege concerns for other former administration witnesses.
Cipollone’s agreement comes days after the select committee finally issued a subpoena following weeks of unsuccessful negotiations, with the order compelling his testimony about at least three parts of Trump’s efforts to reverse his election defeat to Biden.
The subpoena marked a dramatic escalation for the panel and showed its resolve in seeking to obtain inside information about how the former president sought to return himself to office from the unique perspective of the White House counsel’s office.
“Mr Cipollone repeatedly raised legal and other concerns about President Trump’s activities on January 6 and in the days that preceded,” the chairman of the select committee, Bennie Thompson, said in a statement accompanying the subpoena.
“The committee needs to hear from him on the record, as other former White House counsels have done in other congressional investigations. Concerns Mr Cipollone has about the prerogatives of the office he previously held are clearly outweighed by the need for his testimony.”
Cipollone was a key witness to some of Trump’s most brazen schemes to overturn the 2020 election results, which, the select committee has said in its hearings, was part of a sprawling and probably illegal multi-pronged strategy that culminated in the Capitol attack.