What got Pat Cipollone to 'immediately change course' and testify to J6 Committee: book
Former White House counsel Pat Cipollone initially rebuffed the House Select Committee's demands to testify about the events on Jan. 6 and what unfolded after the 2020 election.
In her new book, former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) explained that he was only willing to talk because he was outed by Cassidy Hutchinson in her bombshell testimony.
Among the many things that Cipollone is said to have done is fought openly with the far-right sect of Trump World, which wanted to subvert the law to overthrow the 2020 election. Hutchinson's book consistently paints Cipollone as a patriot intent on working to protect the country from extreme voices and ideas from the likes of Rudy Giuliani, Michael Flynn and Mike Lindell.
In Cheney's book, the former lawmaker explains, "Until Cassidy testified, we’d had no luck in persuading Pat Cipollone to testify. The day after her testimony, the Committee sent Pat Cipollone a subpoena. Pat immediately changed course. He appeared for a recorded interview a little over a week later."
At one point, Cipollone was telling White House staff to dodge Trump; otherwise, they'd likely be subpoenaed.
By the time he testified, Cheney couldn't help but notice that he was very different from the others in Trump World.
"Ultimately, I concluded that Kayleigh McEnany was trying very hard to avoid saying anything that might anger Donald Trump," Cheney writes. "This was the opposite approach from that taken by witnesses such as former White House Counsel Pat Cipollone. As our investigation progressed further and it became ever more apparent that the Committee possessed very detailed information about what had happened in the White House, the strategy of lawyers defending Trump allies began to change. Kayleigh was one of our first senior-level White House witnesses. If she had testified after seeing Pat Cipollone’s forthright testimony, I suspect she would have supplied very different answers."
Among the things that Cheney was able to get Cipollone to admit on video ultimately is that Trump didn't want his people to leave the Capitol on Jan. 6.
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