House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack

Subterms

    More stories

    • 113 Shares119 Views

      in Elections

      Jan. 6 and the Search for Direct Trump Links

      by

      The House panel investigating the Capitol riot has yet to find a proverbial smoking gun directly connecting the former president to the extremist groups that led the storming of the building. Is there one?The House panel investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol held another blockbuster hearing on Tuesday, which featured previously unseen texts and draft social media posts suggesting that Donald Trump and his aides tried to make the march on the Capitol appear spontaneous even though they knew they were guiding a mob that was likely to turn violent.To better understand the state of the House inquiry and the related Justice Department investigations, I spoke with Alan Feuer, who has been leading The New York Times’s coverage of the prosecutions of the Jan. 6 rioters and has reported extensively on extremist groups and movements. Few journalists know this world better, or have spent more time delving into obscure figures and rank-and-file members of organizations like the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys.Alan wrote most recently about Ray Epps, a lifelong Arizonan who recently left the state, and whose participation in the protest outside the Capitol helped spark a conspiracy theory arguing that the entire day’s events were a black operation by the F.B.I.Our conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity:Have we learned anything significant or new about extremist groups tied to the Capitol riot in these hearings?The short answer is: Not really.In the run-up to Tuesday’s hearing, the committee teased the fact that it was going to show links between extremist groups like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers and people in Donald Trump’s orbit.But what actually emerged at the hearings was something a little different.The committee didn’t break new ground but instead used public court filings and news articles to trace connections between far-right groups and Trump-adjacent figures like Roger Stone, the political adviser, and Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser. The fact that Stone and Flynn have maintained those connections is fairly well known.Moreover, there is no direct evidence — at least not yet — that their ties to extremist groups were put to use in any planning for the violence on Jan. 6.And what are we learning about ties between extremists and Trump or his aides?Well, see above for the committee’s answer to that question — with a single caveat.At a previous committee hearing, there was a brief reference made by Cassidy Hutchinson, who was an aide to Trump’s final chief of staff, Mark Meadows. According to her, on the night before the Capitol attack, Trump asked Meadows to reach out to Stone and Flynn.We don’t know if that outreach ever occurred or, if it did, what was communicated. But it remains a tantalizing question: Why, apparently, did the president seek to open a channel to two people with ties to far-right groups on the eve of the Capitol attack?Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony drew the attention of the Justice Department.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesHutchinson’s testimony seems to have been a turning point in the investigation, and our colleagues have reported that it got the attention of Justice Department prosecutors. Can you help us understand why they might have been taken by surprise? I think most readers would assume that the Justice Department has more resources and a greater ability to compel cooperation than this committee does.While the House committee’s investigation into the events surrounding Jan. 6 and the Justice Department’s inquiry are covering much of the same ground, they operate by different rules.The committee has the power to issue subpoenas to pretty much anyone it wants. Federal prosecutors, however, are bound by rules of evidence that require pointing to some signs that a crime may have been committed before they use invasive techniques to gather evidence.Prosecutors may not have known that Hutchinson had valuable information before she testified in front of the committee because they did not necessarily have a way to compel those around her to give them a sense of what she knew. After her testimony, however, things look significantly different.Based on what we know now, how much can we say that the riot at the Capitol was planned, versus spontaneous?I’ll quibble slightly with the idea of planned vs. spontaneous and substitute a different pair of words: organized vs. spontaneous.What I mean is this: We know through the grueling work of open-source intelligence researchers and members of The New York Times’s stellar visual investigations team — who have pored over thousands and thousands of hours of video from Jan. 6 — that the Proud Boys, for example, were clearly moving in an organized and tactical manner on the ground that day.It’s clear that leaders and members of the group were instrumental in several advances on, and breaches of, the Capitol that were seemingly conducted in a way to make it appear as if other, more ordinary rioters took the lead.That said, we don’t know much about the planning surrounding the use of these tactics yet — or if anyone other than the Proud Boys helped contribute to any plans.We know that the group’s members arranged in advance to avoid wearing their typical uniforms in order to blend into the crowd, and we know that as late as Dec. 30, 2020, dozens of members took part in a virtual meeting where leaders ordered them to avoid antagonizing the police.But at least so far, there is no smoking gun laying out a detailed plot to storm the Capitol.The Justice Department has focused its prosecutions on those who committed violence or vandalism as they breached the Capitol. The narrative of critics of the investigations, including the Republican National Committee, is that the administration is pursuing a “witch hunt” of ordinary citizens who were just swept up in the moment. Is there anything to that critique?While it’s certainly true that the Justice Department’s most prominent cases concern those who had some role in violence or vandalism, many, many, many of the 850 or so people charged so far have been accused solely of petty offenses like trespassing and disorderly conduct.Those, of course, are federal crimes, and the evidence against even these low-level offenders is quite strong, given the incredible amount of video that was taken that day.So is it a “witch hunt” to charge people with clearly definable crimes for which there is abundant evidence?I’ll say this: The large majority of cases in which people merely walked into the Capitol, took a selfie and walked out — and did not brag about their conduct on social media or lie to investigators when they were being interviewed — have not resulted in any jail time whatsoever.What to readFifty-eight percent of American voters — cutting across nearly all demographics and ideologies — believe their system of government needs major reforms or a complete overhaul, according to a New York Times/Siena College poll. Reid Epstein explores the findings.David Sanger and Peter Baker preview President Biden’s trip to the Middle East, a journey freighted with both policy import and political peril for the White House. Follow our live coverage here.Prices rose 9.1 percent in June compared with a year earlier, according to the latest Consumer Price Index. Jeanna Smialek breaks down what it means.For Opinion, Jesse Wegman, a writer, and Damon Winter, a photographer, teamed up to produce “Gerrymander U.S.A.,” a stunning look at how partisan redistricting has shaped and, they would argue, distorted Texas politics. They visited the 13th Congressional District, which is represented by Ronny Jackson, a former White House physician who has campaigned and governed as a hard-line Republican.In case you missed it: Read Jason Zengerle’s New York Times Magazine article on “The Vanishing Moderate Democrat.”— BlakeIs there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More

    • 175 Shares199 Views

      in Elections

      Jan. 6 Panel Will Turn Over Evidence on Fake Electors to the Justice Dept.

      by

      The department has asked the House committee investigating the Capitol attack to share transcripts regarding the false electors scheme, the only topic it has broached with the panel.WASHINGTON — The Justice Department has asked the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol for evidence it has accumulated about the scheme by former President Donald J. Trump and his allies to put forward false slates of pro-Trump electors in battleground states won by Joseph R. Biden Jr. in 2020.Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi and the chairman of the committee, disclosed the request to reporters on Capitol Hill on Wednesday, and a person familiar with the panel’s work said discussions with the Justice Department about the false elector scheme were ongoing. Those talks suggest that the department is sharpening its focus on that aspect of Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the election, one with a direct line to the former president.Mr. Thompson said the committee was working with federal prosecutors to allow them to review the transcripts of interviews the panel has done with people who served as so-called alternate electors for Mr. Trump. Mr. Thompson said the Justice Department’s investigation into “fraudulent electors” was the only specific topic the agency had broached with the committee.A Justice Department official said the agency maintained its position that it was requesting copies of all transcripts of witness interviews.For weeks, the Justice Department has been negotiating with the Jan. 6 panel about turning over transcripts of its interviews to federal prosecutors. The agency has asked the committee for copies of every transcript of each of its more than 1,000 interviews, while the committee has pushed back, requesting that the department narrow its request.Mr. Thompson’s comments Wednesday were the clearest indication yet of what the Justice Department is looking for.“We’re in the process of negotiating how that information will be viewed,” Mr. Thompson said, adding that he believed Justice Department officials would make an appointment with the committee to review the transcripts in person. “We’re engaging.”The Justice Department has been investigating the scheme to put forward fake electors for months and has issued subpoenas to top Trump lawyers who worked on the plan.Last month, the committee tied Mr. Trump directly to the scheme and presented fresh details on how the former president sought to bully, cajole and bluff his way into invalidating his 2020 defeat in states around the country.The committee presented evidence that Mr. Trump sought to persuade lawmakers in battleground states won by Mr. Biden to create the slates of alternate electors supporting him, hoping that Vice President Mike Pence would use them to subvert the normal democratic process when he oversaw Congress’s official count of electoral votes on Jan. 6.Key Revelations From the Jan. 6 HearingsCard 1 of 8Making a case against Trump. More

    • 163 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

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

      by

      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

    • 125 Shares139 Views

      in Elections

      Raskin Brings Expertise on Right-Wing Extremism to Jan. 6 Inquiry

      by

      The Democrat from Maryland has been delving into the rising threat of white nationalism and white supremacy for five years. He will lead the inquiry’s hearing on the subject on Tuesday.WASHINGTON — When Representative Jamie Raskin enters a Capitol Hill hearing room on Tuesday to lay out what the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack has uncovered about the role of domestic extremists in the riot, it will be his latest — and potentially most important — step in a five-year effort to crush a dangerous movement.Long before the Jan. 6, 2021, assault, Mr. Raskin, Democrat of Maryland, had thrown himself into stamping out the rise of white nationalism and domestic extremism in America. He trained his focus on the issue after the deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va., five years ago. Since then, he has held teach-ins, led a multipart House investigation that exposed the lackluster federal effort to confront the threat, released intelligence assessments indicating that white supremacists have infiltrated law enforcement and strategized about ways to crack down on paramilitary groups.Now, with millions of Americans expected to tune in, Mr. Raskin — along with Representative Stephanie Murphy, Democrat of Florida — is set to take a leading role in a hearing that promises to dig deeply into how far-right groups helped to orchestrate and carry out the Jan. 6 assault at the Capitol — and how they were brought together, incited and empowered by President Donald J. Trump.“Charlottesville was a rude awakening for the country,” Mr. Raskin, 59, said in an interview, rattling off a list of deadly hate crimes that had taken place in the years before the siege on the Capitol. “There is a real pattern of young, white men getting hyped up on racist provocation and incitement.”Tuesday’s session, set for 1 p.m., is expected to document how, after Mr. Trump’s many efforts to overturn the 2020 election had failed, he and his allies turned to violent far-right extremist groups whose support Mr. Trump had long cultivated, who in turn began assembling a mob to pressure Congress to reject the will of the voters.Supporters of President Donald J. Trump at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.Jason Andrew for The New York Times“There were Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, Three Percenters, the QAnon network, Boogaloo Boys, militia men and other assorted extremist and religious cults that assembled under the banner of ‘Stop The Steal,’ ” Mr. Raskin said, referring to the movement that spread Mr. Trump’s lie that the 2020 election had been stolen from him. “This was quite a coming-out party for a lot of extremist, antigovernment groups and white nationalist groups that had never worked together before.”It has long been known that the mob was energized by Mr. Trump’s Twitter post on Dec. 19, 2020, in which he called for his supporters to come to Washington for a rally on Jan. 6 that would “be wild.” Mr. Raskin and Ms. Murphy plan to detail a clear “call and response” between the president and his extreme supporters.“There’s no doubt that Donald Trump’s tweet urging everyone to descend upon Washington for a wild protest on Jan. 6 succeeded in galvanizing and unifying the dangerous extremists of the country,” Mr. Raskin said.Mr. Raskin has hinted at disclosing evidence of more direct ties between Mr. Trump and far-right groups, though he has declined to preview any. The panel plans to detail known links between the political operative Roger Stone, a longtime ally of Mr. Trump’s, the former national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, and the extremist groups.Key Revelations From the Jan. 6 HearingsCard 1 of 7Making a case against Trump. More

    • 113 Shares159 Views

      in Elections

      Stephen Bannon Agrees to Testify to Jan. 6 Panel

      by

      Stephen K. Bannon, the former Trump campaign manager and White House adviser, made the abrupt about-face after the former president authorized him to talk to investigators.WASHINGTON — With his criminal trial for contempt of Congress approaching, Stephen K. Bannon, an ally of former President Donald J. Trump’s who was involved in his plans to overturn the 2020 election, has informed the House committee investigating the Capitol attack that he is now willing to testify, according to two letters obtained by The New York Times.His decision is a remarkable about-face for Mr. Bannon, who until Saturday had been among the most obstinate and defiant of the committee’s potential witnesses. He had promised to turn the criminal case against him into the “misdemeanor from hell” for the Justice Department.But with the possibility of two years in jail and large fines looming on the horizon, Mr. Bannon has been authorized to testify by Mr. Trump, his lawyer told the committee late on Saturday in a letter, which was reported earlier by The Guardian.The former president had previously instructed Mr. Bannon and other associates not to cooperate with the panel, claiming that executive privilege — a president’s power to withhold certain internal executive branch information, especially confidential communications involving him or his top aides — compelled them to stay silent. But in recent days, as several witnesses have come forward to offer the House panel damning testimony about his conduct, Mr. Trump has grown frustrated that one of his fiercest defenders has not yet appeared before the committee, people close to him said.“Mr. Bannon is willing to, and indeed prefers, to testify at your public hearing,” Robert J. Costello, Mr. Bannon’s lawyer, wrote to Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi and the chairman of the committee.Key Revelations From the Jan. 6 HearingsCard 1 of 7Making a case against Trump. More

    • 125 Shares139 Views

      in Elections

      Cassidy Hutchinson: Why the Jan. 6 Committee Rushed Her Testimony

      by

      Sequestered with family and security, Ms. Hutchinson, 26, has in the process developed an unlikely bond with Representative Liz Cheney, the panel’s vice chairwoman.WASHINGTON — The day before Cassidy Hutchinson was deposed for a fourth time by the Jan. 6 committee, the former Trump White House aide received a phone message that would dramatically change the plans of the panel and write a new chapter in American politics.On that day in June, the caller told Ms. Hutchinson, as Liz Cheney, the committee’s vice chairwoman, later disclosed: A person “let me know you have your deposition tomorrow. He wants me to let you know he’s thinking about you. He knows you’re loyal. And you’re going to do the right thing when you go in for your deposition.”At Ms. Hutchinson’s deposition the next day, committee members investigating the attack on the Capitol were so alarmed by what they considered a clear case of witness tampering — not to mention Ms. Hutchinson’s shocking account of President Donald J. Trump’s behavior on Jan. 6, 2021 — that they decided in a meeting on June 24, a Friday, to hold an emergency public hearing with Ms. Hutchinson as the surprise witness the following Tuesday.The speed, people close to the committee said, was for two crucial reasons: Ms. Hutchinson was under intense pressure from Trump World, and panel members believed that getting her story out in public would make her less vulnerable, attract powerful allies and be its own kind of protection. The committee also had to move fast, the people said, to avoid leaks of some of the most explosive testimony ever heard on Capitol Hill.In the two weeks since, Ms. Hutchinson’s account of an unhinged president who urged his armed supporters to march to the Capitol, lashed out at his Secret Service detail and hurled his lunch against a wall has turned her into a figure of both admiration and scorn — lauded by Trump critics as a 21st-century John Dean and attacked by Mr. Trump as a “total phony.”Ms. Hutchinson’s testimony also pushed the committee to redouble its efforts to interview Pat A. Cipollone, Mr. Trump’s White House counsel, who appeared in private before the panel on Friday. His videotaped testimony is expected to be shown at the committee’s next public hearing on Tuesday.Ms. Hutchinson and Representative Liz Cheney, the vice chairwoman of the Jan. 6 committee, have developed an unlikely bond.Doug Mills/The New York TimesNow unemployed and sequestered with family and a security detail, Ms. Hutchinson, 26, has developed an unlikely bond with Ms. Cheney, a Wyoming Republican and onetime aide to former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell during the George W. Bush administration — a crisis environment of another era when she learned to work among competing male egos. More recently, as someone ostracized by her party and stripped of her leadership post for her denunciations of Mr. Trump, Ms. Cheney admires the younger woman’s willingness to risk her alliances and professional standing by recounting what she saw in the final days of the Trump White House, friends say.“I have been incredibly moved by young women that I have met and that have come forward to testify in the Jan. 6 committee,” Ms. Cheney said in concluding a recent speech at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, Calif.When she mentioned Ms. Hutchinson’s name, the audience erupted in applause.Influence Beyond Her YearsThe path that led a young Trump loyalist to become a star witness against the former president was not exactly prefigured by Ms. Hutchinson’s biography.Key Revelations From the Jan. 6 HearingsCard 1 of 7Making a case against Trump. More

    • 138 Shares129 Views

      in Elections

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

      by

      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