Pat Cipollone can provide ‘significant and dramatic’ testimony about possible Trump crimes: reporter
President Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Phoenix, photo by Gage Skidmore.
July 08, 2022
Pat Cipollone will sit down to testify before the House Select Committee to discuss his service as White House counsel during the lead-up to the Jan. 6 insurrection, and a legal affairs reporter explained what evidence he might provide to investigators.
Previous witnesses, including former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson, have testified that Cipollone repeatedly advised Donald Trump that his efforts to overturn his election loss were unlawful, and Politico senior legal affairs reporter Josh Gerstein told MSNBC's "Morning Joe" what the House Select Committee hopes to learn from him.
"I think they want to see if he will verify key elements of Cassidy Hutchinson's very compelling account," Gerstein said. "Remember, she claims Pat Cipollone told her that they were going to be charged with all kinds of crimes, including fraud and obstruction of justice and so forth, if they allowed President Trump to go forward with his plan to visit the Capitol on Jan. 6, presumably after the rally that he held there, which did not happen. But the question is, you know, will he show her account is accurate? It's come under attack by various people since she delivered it a week or so ago, so that's, I think, the primary thing they'll be looking for Cipollone."
There will be some limits to his testimony due to executive privilege and attorney-client privilege, but Gerstein said there was still plenty of room for him to describe what took place in the White House between the election and the certification of Joe Biden's election win.
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"He won't testify, as we understand it, about his direct contacts with the president, their exact conversations," Gerstein said.
"But it sounds like he will talk about what he said and did with other people in the White House. It would be pretty significant to hear that concern from him because, remember, this is a Trump loyalist through and through. I mean, he defended Trump in the impeachment hearings, so he's someone who clearly was in the president's corner politically, but to hear these concerns about potential criminal charges against the White House staff will be pretty dramatic, if that is the testimony that comes forward from him."
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