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    Justice Dept. Seeks to Force Trump White House Lawyers to Testify in Jan. 6 Inquiry

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    The move is part of an effort by prosecutors to punch through the claims of privilege the former president is using to hamper the investigation of his push to overturn the election.The Justice Department has asked a federal judge to force the two top lawyers in Donald J. Trump’s White House to provide additional grand jury testimony as prosecutors seek to break through the former president’s attempts to shield his efforts to overturn the 2020 election from investigation, according to two people familiar with the matter.Prosecutors filed a motion to compel testimony from the two lawyers, Pat A. Cipollone and Patrick F. Philbin, last week. They told Beryl A. Howell, a judge in Federal District Court in Washington who oversees grand jury matters, that their need for the evidence the men could provide should overcome Mr. Trump’s claims that the information is protected by attorney-client and executive privilege, the people said.The filing was the latest skirmish in a behind-the-scenes legal struggle between the government and Mr. Trump’s lawyers to determine how much testimony witnesses close to the former president can provide to the grand jury, which is examining Mr. Trump’s role in numerous schemes to reverse his election defeat, culminating in the mob attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.Mr. Cipollone, Mr. Trump’s former White House counsel, and Mr. Philbin, who served as his deputy, initially appeared before the grand jury last month after receiving subpoenas, but declined to answer some of the questions prosecutors had about advice they gave to Mr. Trump or interactions they had with him in the chaotic post-election period, one of the people familiar with the matter said.The government’s filing, which was reported earlier by CNN, asked Judge Howell to force the men to return to the grand jury and respond to at least some of the questions they had declined to answer.If compelled to testify fully, Mr. Cipollone and Mr. Philbin could provide the grand jury with firsthand accounts of the advice they gave Mr. Trump about his efforts to derail the results of the election with a variety of schemes, including one to create fake slates of pro-Trump electors in states won by Joseph R. Biden Jr. They could also tell the grand jury about Mr. Trump’s activities and mind-set on Jan. 6 and the tumultuous weeks leading up to it.Judge Howell has already ruled in favor of the government in a similar privilege dispute concerning testimony from two top aides to former Vice President Mike Pence, Marc Short and Greg Jacob, according to several people familiar with the matter. Both Mr. Short and Mr. Jacob returned to the grand jury this month and answered questions that Mr. Trump’s lawyers had sought to block as being privileged during their original appearances.Prosecutors are also seeking to force Patrick F. Philbin, the former deputy White House counsel, to provide additional testimony.Erin Schaff/The New York TimesThe closed-door battle over how much evidence the grand jury should hear about Mr. Trump’s role in reversing his defeat and how much should be kept away as privileged is almost certain to continue as more witnesses close to the former president are called in for testimony.Last month, about 40 subpoenas were issued to a large group of former Trump aides — among them, Mark Meadows, Mr. Trump’s final chief of staff; Dan Scavino, his onetime deputy chief of staff for communications; and Stephen Miller, Mr. Trump’s top speechwriter and a senior policy adviser.It is likely that Mr. Trump will try to assert some form of privilege over the testimony of each of those potential witnesses in a bid to narrow what the grand jury can hear about him.Even as the Justice Department presses forward in seeking evidence about Mr. Trump’s involvement in the events leading up to the Capitol attack, the House committee investigating Jan. 6 is also continuing to hear from witnesses.On Tuesday, Hope Hicks, a former top aide to Mr. Trump, testified for about four hours in front of the panel, according to two people familiar with the matter.The interview of Ms. Hicks, which was conducted virtually, came late in the committee’s 16-month investigation and after it has most likely concluded holding public hearings. Still, the members of the panel have kept pushing for more information about Mr. Trump’s state of mind in the final weeks of his administration and how often he was told there was no evidence of a stolen election.During a meeting with Mr. Trump, Ms. Hicks told the former president that she had seen no evidence of widespread fraud that could overturn the results of the election, according to the book “Confidence Man” by Maggie Haberman, a reporter for The New York Times.“You’re wrong,” Mr. Trump replied, hoping to scare others out of agreeing with her.Throughout August, the panel interviewed top administration officials, including Robert O’Brien, Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser; Elaine Chao, the former transportation secretary; and Mike Pompeo, the former secretary of state. Investigators asked questions regarding reports of discussions about invoking the 25th Amendment to remove the president from office, among other topics.Ms. Hicks served as the White House communications director in 2017 and 2018 and then returned to the White House as a counselor to Mr. Trump during his final 10 months in office.It was not immediately clear exactly what Ms. Hicks told the committee, but investigators went over certain text messages with her, according to a person familiar with the matter.A spokesman for the committee and a lawyer for Ms. Hicks declined to comment.Maggie Haberman More

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      For Trump’s Lawyers, Legal Exposure Comes With the Job

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      The many lawyers who have helped the former president avoid removal from office and indictment have drawn legal problems of their own.A dark joke has begun circulating among lawyers following the many legal travails of former President Donald J. Trump: MAGA actually stands for “making attorneys get attorneys.”Over six years and nine major investigations by Congress, the Justice Department and local prosecutors, as Mr. Trump has managed to avoid removal from the presidency and indictment, it has become clear that serving as one of his lawyers is a remarkably risky job — and one that can involve considerable legal exposure. Time after time, his attorneys have been asked to testify as witnesses to potential crimes — or come under scrutiny as possible criminal conspirators themselves.While the consequences his lawyers faced were extraordinary when Mr. Trump was in the White House, the dangers have only intensified since he left office and have become increasingly acute in recent weeks, as the former president has come under scrutiny in two different Justice Department investigations and has been forced yet again to find lawyers willing to represent him.Last week, a Justice Department filing revealed that Mr. Trump’s lawyers had misled federal investigators about whether he had handed over to the Justice Department all the classified documents he took from the White House when he left office. That raised questions about whether the lawyers, M. Evan Corcoran and Christina Bobb, could be prosecuted themselves and might ultimately be forced to become witnesses against their client. (Ms. Bobb recently retained a lawyer, according to a person familiar with the situation.)The revelation capped a summer in which a team of lawyers that had been advising Mr. Trump as he tried to overturn the 2020 election faced a range of repercussions across the country from federal investigators, local prosecutors, state bar associations and government accountability groups.One of Mr. Trump’s highest-profile lawyers, Rudolph W. Giuliani, was named as a target in a state criminal investigation in Georgia. The conservative lawyer John Eastman, who came up with what he conceded privately was an unlawful strategy to help Mr. Trump overturn the election, said he believed he was a target in that same investigation and declined to answer questions while being deposed before a grand jury. Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Eastman have also been named as subjects of interest in a flurry of federal grand jury subpoenas seeking evidence about attempts by Mr. Trump’s allies to create fake slates of electors to help keep him in office.Two others who worked for Mr. Trump in the White House — the White House counsel Pat A. Cipollone and his deputy Patrick F. Philbin — were subpoenaed to appear before a federal grand jury in Washington investigating the efforts to overturn the 2020 election, including the roles that Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Eastman had played in helping Mr. Trump.Mr. Cipollone, Mr. Philbin and at least nine other lawyers who worked for Mr. Trump have testified before the congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack. Earlier this year, Mr. Cipollone and Mr. Philbin also were interviewed by the F.B.I. as part of its investigation into the classified documents investigation.A video clip of John Eastman, left, invoking the Fifth Amendment during a deposition for the House Jan. 6 committee was shown in a hearing this summer.Doug Mills/The New York TimesAnd 17 mostly lesser-known lawyers who represented Mr. Trump in battleground states as he tried to overturn the election are facing ethics complaints, putting them at risk of being disciplined or disbarred by bar associations or the courts.Vigorously defending the client — even one known for unscrupulous behavior or accused of an egregious crime — is part of a lawyer’s basic job description. But attorneys are bound by a code of professional conduct that forbids them from crossing certain lines, including knowingly making false claims, filing frivolous lawsuits or motions, and doing anything to further a crime.The adage for lawyers representing clients accused of criminality, said Fritz Scheller, a longtime Florida defense lawyer, is that at the end of the day, no matter how bad it may have been for the client, the lawyer still gets to walk out the front door of the courthouse without any personal legal issues.“That bad day for the criminal defense attorney becomes his worst day when he leaves through the courthouse door used for defendants on their way to jail,” Mr. Scheller said.What to Know About the Trump InvestigationsCard 1 of 6Numerous inquiries. More

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      Jan. 6 Panel Calls Gingrich to Testify, Saying He Had Role in Trump Plot

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      In a letter to the former House speaker, the select committee said the Georgia Republican had deliberately incited anger among voters with false claims of election fraud.WASHINGTON — The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol on Thursday asked former Speaker Newt Gingrich to sit for a voluntary interview about his involvement in former President Donald J. Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election.In a letter to Mr. Gingrich, the Georgia Republican who held the speakership in the late 1990s, the committee said its investigators had obtained evidence that he was in contact with senior advisers to Mr. Trump about television advertisements that amplified false claims of fraud in the 2020 election and other aspects of the scheme to block the transfer of power, both before and after a mob attacked the Capitol.“Some of the information we have obtained includes email messages that you exchanged with senior advisers to President Trump and others, including Jared Kushner and Jason Miller, in which you provided detailed input into television advertisements that repeated and relied upon false claims about fraud in the 2020 election,” Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi and chairman of the committee, wrote in a letter to Mr. Gingrich.“These advertising efforts were not designed to encourage voting for a particular candidate,” Mr. Thompson added. “Instead, these efforts attempted to cast doubt on the outcome of the election after voting had already taken place. They encouraged members of the public to contact their state officials and pressure them to challenge and overturn the results of the election.”The letter to Mr. Gingrich asked that he preserve all records and communications he had with the White House, Mr. Trump, the Trump legal team and others involved in the events of Jan. 6. It requested that he sit for an interview during the week of Sept. 19.Mr. Thompson said Mr. Gingrich pushed messages explicitly designed to incite anger among voters, even after Georgia election officials had faced intimidation and threats of violence. In particular, Mr. Gingrich advocated promoting the false claims that election workers in Atlanta had smuggled in fake votes in suitcases.“The goal is to arouse the country’s anger through new verifiable information the American people have never seen before,” Mr. Gingrich wrote to Mr. Kushner, Mr. Miller and Larry Weitzner, a media consultant, on Dec. 8, 2020. “If we inform the American people in a way they find convincing and it arouses their anger, they will then bring pressure on legislators and governors.”He also pushed for a coordinated plan to put forward pro-Trump electors in states won by Joseph R. Biden Jr.On Nov. 12, 2020, Mr. Gingrich wrote to Mr. Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, and the White House counsel Pat A. Cipollone, asking: “Is someone in charge of coordinating all the electors?”On the evening of Jan. 6, Mr. Gingrich continued to push efforts to overturn the election, emailing Mr. Meadows, at 10:42 p.m. after the Capitol had been cleared of rioters, asking if there were letters from state legislators about decertifying the results of the election. More

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      Lo que sabemos sobre la reunión para que Trump siguiera en el poder

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      Incluso para los estándares de la Casa Blanca de Trump, la reunión celebrada el 18 de diciembre de 2020, que fue analizada en detalle esta semana por el comité que investiga los hechos del 6 de enero, fue extrema.In taped interviews, witnesses described a meeting in which President Donald J. Trump’s outside advisers proposed an executive order to have the military seize voting machines in crucial states Mr. Trump had lost.Doug Mills/The New York TimesLa reunión duró más de seis horas, pasada la medianoche, y terminó en gritos que se escuchaban afuera de la sala. Los participantes lanzaban insultos y casi llegaron a los golpes. Algunas personas se fueron llorando.Incluso para los estándares de la Casa Blanca de Trump, donde las personas solían gritarse y el presidente Donald Trump también les gritaba, la reunión del 18 de diciembre de 2020 es considerada como un evento “desquiciado” y un punto de inflexión en los esfuerzos desesperados de Trump por permanecer en el poder después de haber perdido las elecciones.Los detalles de la reunión han sido reportados previamente, incluso por The New York Times y Axios, pero en una audiencia pública del comité del 6 de enero que se celebró el martes, los participantes en el caos ofrecieron una serie de nuevos detalles impactantes de la reunión entre Trump y las facciones rivales de asesores.“Llegó un punto en el que los gritos se escuchaban afuera”, le dijo Eric Herschmann, un abogado de la Casa Blanca, al comité en un testimonio grabado en video. “Había gente entrando, era tarde en la noche, y fue un día largo. Y pensé que lo que estaban proponiendo era una locura”.La propuesta era que el presidente le ordenara al secretario de Defensa que incautara las máquinas de votación para examinarlas en busca de fraude y que también designara a un abogado especial para acusar potencialmente a las personas de delitos y fue urdida por tres asesores externos: Sidney Powell, una abogada que trabajó en la campaña de Trump y promovió teorías de conspiración sobre un supuesto complot venezolano para manipular las máquinas de votación; Michael T. Flynn, el asesor de seguridad nacional que Trump despidió durante sus primeras semanas en el cargo; y Patrick Byrne, ex director ejecutivo de Overstock.com.Del otro lado estaban Pat A. Cipollone, el abogado de la Casa Blanca; Herschmann; y Derek Lyons, el secretario de personal de la Casa Blanca.La discusión comenzó poco después de que Powell y sus dos acompañantes fueran admitidos en la Casa Blanca por un asistente subalterno y se dirigieron a la Oficina Oval sin tener cita.Estuvieron a solas con Trump, durante unos 15 minutos, antes de que otros funcionarios fueron alertados de su presencia. Cipollone contó que recibió una llamada urgente de un miembro del personal para que fuese a la Oficina Oval.“Abrí la puerta y entré. Vi al general Flynn”, dijo en una entrevista grabada en video que el comité divulgó en la audiencia del martes. “Vi a Sidney Powell sentada ahí. No estaba feliz de ver a las personas que estaban en la Oficina Oval”.Cuando se le pidió que explicara por qué, Cipollone dijo: “En primer lugar, la persona de Overstock, nunca la conocí, nunca supe quién era ese tipo”. Lo primero que hizo, dijo Cipollone, fue decirle a Byrne: “¿Quién es usted?”. “Y me contestó”, dijo Cipollone. “No creo que ninguna de esas personas le estuvieran dando buenos consejos al presidente”.Lyons y Herschmann se unieron al grupo. “No fue una reunión casual”, dijo Lyons al comité en un testimonio grabado en video. “A veces, había gente gritándose, insultándose unos a otros. No eran personas que estaban sentadas en un sofá charlando”.El testimonio en video de Sidney Powell, en el que dijo que los asesores de la Casa Blanca sentían “desprecio y desdén por el presidente”, fue presentado durante la audiencia del martes.Doug Mills/The New York TimesPowell, en su entrevista grabada en video, describió a Trump como “muy interesado en escuchar” lo que ella y sus dos compañeros tenían que decir, cosas que “aparentemente nadie más se había molestado en informarle”.Herschmann dijo que estaba estupefacto por lo que estaba escuchando.“Y yo le preguntaba, ¿estás afirmando que los demócratas están trabajando con Hugo Chávez, los venezolanos y otras personas? Y, en un momento, el general Flynn sacó un diagrama que supuestamente mostraba las direcciones IP de todo el mundo y las comunicaciones a través de las máquinas. Y algunos comentarios sobre, por ejemplo, que los termostatos Nest están conectados a internet”.Cuando los funcionarios de la Casa Blanca le dijeron a Powell que había perdido decenas de juicios que cuestionaban los resultados de las elecciones de 2020, ella respondió: “Bueno, los jueces son corruptos”.“Y le pregunté: ¿Todos?”, dijo Herschmann. “¿Cada uno de los casos que ha perdido en este país? ¿Cada uno de esos jueces es corrupto? ¿Incluso los que nombramos?”.Powell testificó que los asesores de la Casa Blanca de Trump “no mostraron más que desprecio y desdén por el presidente”.El plan, según supieron los asesores de la Casa Blanca, era que Powell se convirtiera en la fiscala especial. Eso no salió bien.“No creo que Sidney Powell diría que pensé que era una buena idea nombrarla como abogada especial”, testificó Cipollone. “No pensé que ella debería ser nombrada en ningún cargo”.Cipollone también testificó que estaba alarmado por la insistencia de Powell y los demás de que hubo fraude electoral sin tener ninguna prueba que lo demostrara. “Cuando otras personas seguían sugiriendo que sí, la respuesta es, ¿a qué se refieren? En algún momento, tienes que demostrar lo que dices o callarte. Esa es mi opinión”.Herschmann describió un momento particularmente intenso. “Flynn me gritó que yo era un desertor y todo, caminaba mientras me gritaba. En cierto momento, también le grité: ‘O te calmas o te sientas’”.Cassidy Hutchinson, una de las principales asistentes de Mark Meadows, el jefe de gabinete de la Casa Blanca, podía escuchar los gritos desde afuera de la Oficina Oval. Le envió un mensaje de texto a un subjefe de personal, Anthony M. Ornato, diciendo que el ala oeste estaba “TRASTORNADA”.Después de que comenzó la reunión, los asesores de la Casa Blanca llamaron a Rudolph Giuliani, el abogado personal de Trump, para argumentar en contra de Powell. Eventualmente, la reunión migró a la Sala Roosevelt y la Sala del Gabinete, donde Giuliani estuvo solo por unos momentos, lo que, según lo que le dijo al comité, le pareció “algo genial”.Finalmente, el grupo recaló en la residencia de la Casa Blanca.Powell creía que había sido nombrada fiscala especial, algo que Trump declaró que quería hacer, por lo que debería tener una autorización de seguridad. Pero el resto de los asistentes se opusieron. Ella testificó que otros dijeron que incluso si eso sucedía, la ignorarían. Ella dijo que los habría “despedido” en el acto por esa insubordinación.Powell aseguró que Trump le dijo algo como: “¿Ves con lo que tengo que lidiar? Tengo que lidiar con esto todo el tiempo”.Eventualmente, Trump se retractó y rechazó la propuesta de los asesores externos. Pero a la mañana siguiente, el 19 de diciembre, escribió en Twitter instando a sus partidarios para que fuesen al Capitolio el 6 de enero, el día en que se fijó la sesión conjunta del Congreso para certificar los resultados del Colegio Electoral.“¡Estar allí, será salvaje!”, escribió.Maggie Haberman es corresponsal de la Casa Blanca. Se unió al Times en 2015 como corresponsal de campaña y formó parte de un equipo que ganó un Pulitzer en 2018 por informar sobre los asesores de Trump y sus conexiones con Rusia. @maggieNYT More

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      Tears, Screaming and Insults: Inside an ‘Unhinged’ Meeting to Keep Trump in Power

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      Even by the standards of the Trump White House, a meeting on Dec. 18, 2020, that was highlighted Tuesday by the Jan. 6 committee was extreme.In taped interviews, witnesses described a meeting in which President Donald J. Trump’s outside advisers proposed an executive order to have the military seize voting machines in crucial states Mr. Trump had lost.Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesThe meeting lasted for more than six hours, past midnight, and devolved into shouting that could be heard outside the room. Participants hurled insults and nearly came to blows. Some people left in tears.Even by the standards of the Trump White House, where people screamed at one another and President Donald J. Trump screamed at them, the Dec. 18, 2020, meeting became known as an “unhinged” event — and an inflection point in Mr. Trump’s desperate efforts to remain in power after he had lost the election.Details of the meeting have been reported before, including by The New York Times and Axios, but at a public hearing on Tuesday of the Jan. 6 committee, participants in the mayhem offered a series of jolting new details of the meeting between Mr. Trump and rival factions of advisers.“It got to the point where the screaming was completely, completely out there,” Eric Herschmann, a White House lawyer, told the committee in videotaped testimony. “I mean, you got people walking in — it was late at night, it had been a long day. And what they were proposing, I thought was nuts.”The proposal, to have the president direct the secretary of defense to seize voting machines to examine for fraud and also to appoint a special counsel to potentially charge people with crimes, had been hatched by three outside advisers: Sidney Powell, a former lawyer for Mr. Trump’s campaign who promoted conspiracy theories about a Venezuelan plot to rig the voting machines; Michael T. Flynn, the national security adviser Mr. Trump fired in his first weeks in office; and Patrick Byrne, the former chief executive of Overstock.com.On the other side were Pat A. Cipollone, the White House counsel; Mr. Herschmann; and Derek Lyons, the White House staff secretary.The arguing began soon after Ms. Powell and her two companions were let into the White House by a junior aide and wandered to the Oval Office without an appointment.They were there alone with Mr. Trump for about 15 minutes before other officials were alerted to their presence. Mr. Cipollone recounted receiving an urgent call from a staff member to get to the Oval Office.“I opened the door and I walked in. I saw General Flynn,” he said in a videotaped interview the committee played at the hearing on Tuesday. “I saw Sidney Powell sitting there. I was not happy to see the people who were in the Oval Office.”Asked to explain why, Mr. Cipollone said, “First of all, the Overstock person, I’ve never met, I never knew who this guy was.” The first thing he did, Mr. Cipollone said, was say to Mr. Byrne, “Who are you?” “And he told me,” Mr. Cipollone said. “I don’t think any of these people were providing the president with good advice.”Mr. Lyons and Mr. Herschmann joined the group. “It was not a casual meeting,” Mr. Lyons told the committee in videotaped testimony. “At times, there were people shouting at each other, hurling insults at each other. It wasn’t just sort of people sitting around on a couch like chitchatting.”Sidney Powell’s videotaped testimony, in which she said White House advisers had “contempt and disdain for the president,” was shown during Tuesday’s hearing.Doug Mills/The New York TimesMs. Powell, in her videotaped interview, described Mr. Trump as “very interested in hearing” what she and her two cohorts had to say, things that “apparently nobody else had bothered to inform him of.”Mr. Herschmann said he was flabbergasted by what he was hearing.“And I was asking, like, are you claiming the Democrats were working with Hugo Chavez, Venezuelans and whomever else? And at one point, General Flynn took out a diagram that supposedly showed IP addresses all over the world and who was communicating with whom via the machines. And some comment about, like, Nest thermostats being hooked up to the internet.”When the White House officials pointed out to Ms. Powell that she had lost dozens of lawsuits challenging the results of the 2020 election, she replied, “Well, the judges are corrupt.”“I’m like, everyone?” Mr. Herschmann testified. “Every single case that you’ve done in the country that you guys lost? Every one of them is corrupt? Even the ones we appointed?”Ms. Powell testified that Mr. Trump’s White House advisers “showed nothing but contempt and disdain for the president.”The plan, the White House advisers learned, was for Ms. Powell to become the special counsel. This did not go over well.“I don’t think Sidney Powell would say that I thought it was a good idea to appoint her special counsel,” Mr. Cipollone testified. “I didn’t think she should be appointed anything.”Mr. Cipollone also testified that he was alarmed by the insistence of Ms. Powell and the others that there had been election fraud when there was no evidence. “When other people kept suggesting that there was, the answer is, what is it? At some point, you have to put up or shut up. That was my view.”Mr. Herschmann described a particularly intense moment. “Flynn screamed at me that I was a quitter and everything, kept on standing up and standing around and screaming at me. At a certain point, I had it with him, so I yelled back, ‘Either come over or sit your f-ing ass back down.’”Cassidy Hutchinson, a top aide to Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, could hear the shouting from outside the Oval Office. She texted a deputy chief of staff, Anthony M. Ornato, that the West Wing was “UNHINGED.”After the meeting had started, Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, was called in by the White House advisers to argue against Ms. Powell. Eventually the meeting migrated to the Roosevelt Room and the Cabinet Room, where Mr. Giuliani found himself alone at one point, something he told the committee he found “kind of cool.”Finally, the group ended up in the White House residence.Ms. Powell believed that she had been appointed special counsel, something that Mr. Trump declared he wanted, including that she should have a security clearance, which other aides opposed. She testified that others said that even if that happened, they would ignore her. She said she would have “fired” them on the spot for such insubordination.Mr. Trump, she said, told her something to the effect of: “You see what I deal with? I deal with this all the time.”Eventually Mr. Trump backed down and rejected the outside advisers’ proposal. But early the next morning, Dec. 19, he posted to Twitter urging his supporters to arrive at the Capitol on Jan. 6, the day that a joint session of Congress was set to certify the Electoral College results.“Be there, will be wild!” he wrote. More

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      How Pat Cipollone, Trump’s White House Counsel, Could Help the Jan. 6 Panel

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      Pat A. Cipollone, President Donald J. Trump’s second and final White House counsel, appeared for a videotaped, transcribed interview with the House Jan. 6 committee last week after being subpoenaed, and his testimony could help the panel flesh out episodes at the heart of its investigation.Mr. Cipollone — who also sat for an informal interview with the committee in April — was present for several key meetings related to Mr. Trump’s efforts to retain power and subvert the results of the 2020 election. Several witnesses have described Mr. Cipollone as opposing those efforts at critical moments.In particular, Mr. Cipollone was at a meeting on Dec. 18, 2020, in the Oval Office. During that meeting, Mr. Trump entertained proposals from his former national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn; a lawyer, Sidney Powell; and Patrick Byrne, the former chief executive of Overstock.com, to use the military or the Department of Homeland Security to seize voting machines to look for electoral fraud.Since Mr. Cipollone’s informal appearance in April, the committee has heard from many additional witnesses. One of them — Cassidy Hutchinson, a former aide to Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff in the final year of the Trump administration — provided the committee with extensive testimony about Mr. Trump’s actions and statements ahead of the Capitol riot and during it, as well as about conversations she said she had with senior advisers.Ms. Hutchinson described a conversation with Mr. Cipollone in which he cautioned against Mr. Trump traveling to the Capitol with his supporters after his planned speech at a rally at the Ellipse, near the White House.In Ms. Hutchinson’s telling, Mr. Cipollone warned that “we’re going to get charged with every crime imaginable if we make that movement happen.”Two people close to Mr. Cipollone said he did not recall that conversation, and that the committee had been alerted before his testimony last week that he would not confirm it had taken place.Instead, the committee focused on soliciting testimony from Mr. Cipollone that could support information they had gathered from other witnesses.According to two people familiar with his appearance, Mr. Cipollone was asked about discussions related to presidential pardons in the final weeks of the presidency. He was also asked his opinion of Mr. Trump’s false claims of widespread fraud, as well as Mr. Trump’s attacks on Vice President Mike Pence. More

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      Jan. 6 Panel Questions Cipollone on Pardons and Trump’s Election Claims

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      Pat A. Cipollone, the former White House counsel for President Donald J. Trump, appeared before the House committee investigating the Capitol attack for roughly eight hours on Friday.WASHINGTON — Pat A. Cipollone, who served as White House counsel for President Donald J. Trump, was asked detailed questions on Friday about pardons, false election fraud claims and the former president’s pressure campaign against Vice President Mike Pence, according to three people familiar with his testimony before the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.The panel did not press him to either corroborate or contradict some specific details of explosive testimony by Cassidy Hutchinson, a former White House aide who captivated the country late last month with her account of an out-of-control president willing to embrace violence and stop at nothing to stay in power, the people said.During a roughly eight-hour interview conducted behind closed doors in the O’Neill House Office Building, the panel covered some of the same ground it did during an informal interview with Mr. Cipollone in April. In the session on Friday, which took place only after Mr. Cipollone was served with a subpoena, investigators focused mainly on Mr. Cipollone’s views on the events of Jan. 6 and generally did not ask about his views of other witnesses’ accounts.Mr. Cipollone, who fought against the most extreme plans to overturn the 2020 election but has long held that his direct conversations with Mr. Trump are protected by executive privilege and attorney-client privilege, invoked certain privileges in declining to answer some of the committee’s questions.Tim Mulvey, a spokesman for the panel, said the committee “received critical testimony on nearly every major topic in its investigation, reinforcing key points regarding Donald Trump’s misconduct and providing highly relevant new information that will play a central role in its upcoming hearings.”“This includes information demonstrating Donald Trump’s supreme dereliction of duty,” Mr. Mulvey said. “The testimony also corroborated key elements of Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony.”The panel recorded Mr. Cipollone on video with potential plans to use clips of his testimony at upcoming hearings. Aides have begun strategizing about whether and where to adjust scripts to include key clips, one person said. The next hearing is scheduled for Tuesday.In the interview, Mr. Cipollone was asked about Mr. Trump’s false claims of a stolen election. The panel has asked similar questions of top Justice Department officials, White House lawyers and Trump campaign officials, who have testified that they did not agree with the effort to overturn the 2020 election.Mr. Cipollone also broke with Mr. Trump in response to questions about the former president’s pressure campaign against Mr. Pence, which included personal meetings, a profane phone call and even a post on Twitter attacking the vice president as rioters stormed the Capitol pledging to hang him, people familiar with the testimony said.Mr. Cipollone’s agreement to sit for an interview before the panel had prompted speculation that his testimony could either buttress or contradict the account of Ms. Hutchinson, who attributed some of the most damning statements about Mr. Trump’s behavior to Mr. Cipollone. For instance, she testified that Mr. Cipollone told her on the morning of Jan. 6 that Mr. Trump’s plan to accompany the mob to the Capitol would cause Trump officials to be “charged with every crime imaginable.”Two people familiar with Mr. Cipollone’s actions that day said he did not recall making that comment to Ms. Hutchinson. Those people said the committee was made aware before the interview that Mr. Cipollone would not confirm that conversation were he to be asked. He was not asked about that specific statement on Friday, according to people familiar with the questions.“Why are Pat Cipollone & his lawyers letting the J6 Committee get away with suborning Cassidy Hutchinson’s perjury?” Mr. Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., who has also testified before the panel, wrote on Twitter on Saturday. “Only cowards let the Left bully them into sitting quietly instead of speaking up and telling the truth. Stop hiding on background, Pat. Grow a spine & go on record.”Mr. Mulvey said there was no “preinterview agreement to limit Cipollone’s testimony” and any suggestion otherwise was “completely false.”Among other subjects, Mr. Cipollone was asked in the interview about conversations in which presidential pardons were discussed.The committee did not press Mr. Cipollone to either corroborate or contradict some specific details of testimony by Cassidy Hutchinson, a former White House aide who appeared before the panel last month.Doug Mills/The New York TimesMs. Hutchinson has testified that on Jan. 7, the day after the assault on the Capitol, Mr. Trump wanted to promise pardons for those involved in the attack, but Mr. Cipollone argued to remove language making such a promise from remarks that the president was to deliver.She has also testified that members of Congress and others close to Mr. Trump sought pardons after the violence of Jan. 6.An adviser to Mr. Cipollone declined to comment on his appearance before the panel.“He was candid with the committee,” Representative Zoe Lofgren, Democrat of California and a member of the panel, said on CNN on Friday. “He was careful in his answers, and I believe that he was honest in his answers.”She added, “We gained some additional insight into the actual day, Jan. 6.”Ms. Lofgren said Mr. Cipollone did not contradict other witnesses. “There were things that he might not be present for or in some cases could not recall with precision,” she said.Mr. Cipollone’s testimony came after he reached a deal to testify before the panel, which had pressed him for weeks to cooperate and issued him a subpoena last month.Mr. Cipollone was a witness to key moments in Mr. Trump’s push to overturn the election results, including discussions about sending false letters to state officials about election fraud and seizing voting machines. He was also in direct contact with Mr. Trump on Jan. 6 as rioters stormed the Capitol.Mr. Trump has railed against Mr. Cipollone’s cooperation. On Thursday, he posted on his social media platform, Truth Social: “Why would a future President of the United States want to have candid and important conversations with his White House Counsel if he thought there was even a small chance that this person, essentially acting as a ‘lawyer’ for the Country, may someday be brought before a partisan and openly hostile Committee in Congress.” More

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      Jan. 6 Panel Secures Deal for Cipollone to Be Interviewed

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      The former White House counsel pushed back on President Donald J. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election and was in the West Wing to witness his actions on Jan. 6, 2021.Pat A. Cipollone, the White House counsel to President Donald J. Trump who repeatedly fought Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, has reached a deal to be interviewed by Friday before the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack, according to people familiar with the inquiry.The agreement was a breakthrough for the panel, which has pressed for weeks for Mr. Cipollone to cooperate — and issued a subpoena to him last week — believing he could provide crucial testimony.Mr. Cipollone was a witness to pivotal moments in Mr. Trump’s push to invalidate the election results, including discussions about seizing voting machines and sending false letters to state officials about election fraud. He was also in the West Wing on Jan. 6, 2021, as Mr. Trump reacted to the violence at the Capitol, when his supporters attacked the building in his name.People close to Mr. Cipollone have repeatedly cautioned that concerns about executive privilege and attorney-client privilege could limit his cooperation.But committee negotiators have pressed to hear from Mr. Cipollone and Patrick F. Philbin, who was his deputy in the White House.Mr. Cipollone will sit for a videotaped, transcribed interview, according to a person familiar with the discussions. He is not expected to testify publicly.A committee spokesman declined to comment.The panel’s push to hear from Mr. Cipollone intensified after the testimony last week of Cassidy Hutchinson, a former White House aide to the chief of staff, Mark Meadows. Ms. Hutchinson described detailed conversations with Mr. Cipollone in which she said the counsel had expressed deep concerns about the actions of Mr. Trump and Mr. Meadows.Some allies of Mr. Trump have privately tried to cast doubt on parts of Ms. Hutchinson’s testimony, which was the committee’s most explosive to date and was delivered under oath. Mr. Trump has tried to invoke executive privilege — a president’s power to withhold the release of certain confidential communications with his advisers — to prevent his former aides from cooperating with the investigation. In April, Mr. Cipollone and Mr. Philbin both appeared for informal interviews with the panel on a limited set of topics, according to an agreement reached by their representatives and representatives for Mr. Trump.The agreement, according to an email reviewed by The New York Times, allowed discussions of a meeting with Jeffrey Clark, a Justice Department official who tried to help Mr. Trump cling to power; Mr. Trump’s interactions with John Eastman, the conservative lawyer who drafted a legal strategy for overturning the election; any interactions with members of Congress; and Mr. Cipollone’s recollections of the events of Jan. 6.The agreement said that the two men could not discuss conversations they or others had with Mr. Trump, other than one discussion in the Oval Office with Mr. Clark in a pivotal meeting on Jan. 3, 2021.However, both were permitted to discuss the timeline of where they were, with whom they met and conversations they had on Jan. 6. Assuming those conditions hold for Mr. Cipollone’s forthcoming testimony, they would presumably cover conversations such as ones he may have had with Ms. Hutchinson or other officials that day.Ms. Hutchinson told the panel that she recalled that on Jan. 6, Mr. Cipollone had objected to suggestions that Mr. Trump join a crowd at the Capitol that was pressing to overturn the results of the election.“We’re going to get charged with every crime imaginable,” Ms. Hutchinson recalled Mr. Cipollone saying.People familiar with the White House counsel’s schedule on Jan. 6, 2021, say he arrived late to the White House, although it was unclear precisely when.According to Ms. Hutchinson, Mr. Cipollone urged Mr. Meadows to do more to persuade Mr. Trump to call off the rioters. Ms. Hutchinson also told investigators that she heard lawyers from the White House Counsel’s Office say a plan to put forward pro-Trump electors in states that Joseph R. Biden Jr. won was not “legally sound.”Members of the House committee had hoped that Mr. Cipollone would testify publicly at a previous hearing, but he declined. They then took their case public. From the hearing room dais, Representative Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming, singled out the former White House counsel by name, saying: “Our committee is certain that Donald Trump does not want Mr. Cipollone to testify here. But we think the American people deserve to hear from Mr. Cipollone personally.”Key Revelations From the Jan. 6 HearingsCard 1 of 7Making a case against Trump. More

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      Jan. 6 Committee Subpoenas Pat Cipollone, Trump’s White House Counsel

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      Mr. Cipollone, who repeatedly fought extreme plans to overturn the election, had resisted publicly testifying to the panel.WASHINGTON — The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol issued a subpoena Wednesday for the testimony of Pat A. Cipollone, the White House counsel to President Donald J. Trump who repeatedly fought back against extreme plans to overturn the 2020 election, after he resisted testifying publicly.In a statement accompanying the subpoena, the leaders of the committee said they were seeking Mr. Cipollone’s deposition testimony because investigators needed to “hear from him on the record, as other former White House counsels have done in other congressional investigations.”The committee said it was seeking information about Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election and his involvement in plans to submit false slates of electors to Congress and interfere with the Justice Department.The subpoena of a White House counsel, a rare step for a congressional committee, sent a clear signal of the aggressive tactics the panel is willing to use to try to force cooperation of even the White House’s former top lawyer, who most likely could invoke attorney-client privilege in response to many questions. But the testimony of Mr. Cipollone — who participated in key conversations on Jan. 6 and throughout Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the election, and is known to have doubted the legality of many of those plans — could prove consequential.The committee has at times used the leverage a subpoena creates to force witnesses to negotiate a deal for their cooperation. Discussions about the scope of a possible appearance are expected to begin soon.“Any concerns Mr. Cipollone has about the institutional prerogatives of the office he previously held are clearly outweighed by the need for his testimony,” Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi, and Representative Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming, said in a statement.A lawyer familiar with Mr. Cipollone’s deliberations, who was not authorized to speak for the record, said that the subpoena was needed before the former White House counsel could consider transcribed testimony before the committee, and that Mr. Cipollone would now evaluate matters of privilege as appropriate.Photos of Mr. Cipollone and Patrick F. Philbin, who was his deputy, on screen during one of the Jan. 6 commitee’s hearings. Both men met with the panel in April, but they were not under oath.Jason Andrew for The New York TimesIn April, Mr. Cipollone and Patrick F. Philbin, who was his deputy, met separately with the panel, two people familiar with the sessions said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to disclose the meetings.At the time, the two men were not under oath, and their interviews were not transcribed. Since then, Mr. Cipollone has resisted testifying publicly, despite calls from the committee for him to do so.“Our committee is certain that Donald Trump does not want Mr. Cipollone to testify here. But we think the American people deserve to hear from Mr. Cipollone personally,” Ms. Cheney announced from the dais at a hearing last week. “He should appear before this committee, and we are working to secure his testimony.”At a hearing on Tuesday, the committee heard testimony from a former White House aide, Cassidy Hutchinson, who described Mr. Cipollone’s pivotal role during the events of Jan. 6.“Mark, we need to do something more,” Ms. Hutchinson said she heard Mr. Cipollone tell Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, on Jan. 6 as Mr. Trump’s supporters entered the Capitol. “They’re literally calling for the vice president to be f-ing hung.”Key Revelations From the Jan. 6 HearingsCard 1 of 7Making a case against Trump. More