Pat A. Cipollone, White House Counsel to President Donald J. Trump, who has repeatedly opposed Mr. Trump’s efforts to cancel the 2020 election, reached an agreement 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 commission, which for weeks had urged Mr. Cipollone to cooperate — and issued him a subpoena last week — believing he could give crucial testimony.
Mr. Cipollone witnessed key moments in Mr. Trump’s push to overturn the election results, including discussions of confiscating voting machines and sending fake letters to government officials about election fraud. He was also in the West Wing on Jan. 6, 2021, when Mr. Trump responded to violence at the Capitol when his supporters attacked the building in his name.
People close to Mr. Cipollone have repeatedly warned that concerns about executive privilege and attorney-client privilege could limit his cooperation.
But committee negotiators insisted on hearing from Mr. Cipollone and Patrick F. Philbin, who was his White House deputy.
Mr. Cipollone will sit down for a videotaped, transcribed interview, according to a person familiar with the discussions. He is not expected to testify publicly.
A spokesman for the commission declined to comment.
The panel’s push to hear from Mr. Cipollone intensified after testimony last week from Cassidy Hutchinson, a former White House aide to chief of staff Mark Meadows. Ms. Hutchinson described detailed conversations with Mr. Cipollone in which she said the lawyer expressed deep concern about the actions of Mr. Trump and Mr. Meadows.
Some allies of Mr. Trump have privately sought to cast doubt on parts of Ms. Hutchinson’s testimony, the most explosive of the committee’s testimony so far, given under oath.
Mr Trump has sought to invoke executive privilege – the 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 appeared for informal interviews with the group on a limited range of topics, according to an agreement reached by their representatives and representatives of Mr. Trump.
The agreement, according to an email reviewed by The New York Times, allowed for discussion 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 devised a legal strategy to overturn the election; any interactions with members of Congress; and Mr. Cipollone’s recollections of the events of Jan. 6.
The agreement says the two men cannot discuss conversations they or others have had with Mr Trump, other than an Oval Office discussion with Mr Clark at a key meeting on January 3, 2021.
However, both were allowed to discuss the chronology of where they were, who they met and the conversations they had on January 6. Assuming these conditions are met for Mr. Cipollone’s upcoming testimony, it will likely cover conversations such as those he may have had with Ms. Hutchinson or other officials that day.
Ms. Hutchinson told the panel that she recalled Mr. Cipollone on Jan. 6 objecting to suggestions that Mr. Trump would join a mob at the Capitol demanding the annulment of the election results.
“We’re going to be charged with every crime we can imagine,” Ms. Hutchinson recalled Mr. Cipollone saying.
People familiar with the White House adviser’s Jan. 6, 2021, schedule say he arrived late at the White House, though it’s not clear exactly when.
According to Ms. Hutchinson, Mr. Cipollone urged Mr. Meadows to do more to persuade Mr. Trump to cancel the insurgency. Ms. Hutchinson also told investigators that she had heard lawyers from the White House Counsel’s Office say that a plan to turn out pro-Trump voters in states that Joseph R. Biden Jr. won was not “legally tenable “.
Members of the House committee had hoped Mr. Cipollone would testify publicly at an earlier hearing, but he declined. They then took their case public. From the podium in the hearing room, Representative Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming, referred to the former White House adviser 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 in person.
Key takeaways from the January 6 hearings
Any damaging account by Mr. Cipollone of Mr. Trump’s post-election actions would be a significant change in circumstances from the president’s first impeachment trial, when Mr. Cipollone was his lead defense attorney.
During the first impeachment, Mr. Cipollone accused Rep. Adam B. Schiff, the California Democrat who was a prosecutor in that trial and has been a member of the committee since Jan. 6, of making false accusations against Mr. Trump.
A year later, as the president pressed ahead with plans to try to overturn his defeat, Mr. Cipollone and other White House lawyers repeatedly threatened to resign if Mr. Trump pressed ahead with some of the more extreme proposals, such as eventually they convinced him to give it up.
Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law and a former White House adviser, told the panel that Mr. Cipollone’s threats to resign were frequent, implying that he did not take his concerns and those of other members seriously. attorney’s office about the seriousness of Mr. Trump’s plans.
“He and the team always said, ‘Oh, we’re going to resign. We won’t be here if that happens, if that happens,” Mr. Kushner said in videotaped testimony, a clip of which was played during the first public hearing. “So I kind of took it for whining.”
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