Jan. 6 committee subpoenas Pat Cipollone, former White House counsel

The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection issued a subpoena Wednesday to former White House Counsel Pat Cipollone, who previous witnesses have testified was in meetings in which lawyers debated strategies to overturn former President Trump’s election loss.

The committee said that it required Cipollone’s testimony after obtaining other evidence about which he was “uniquely positioned to testify.”

Cipollone, who was Trump’s top White House lawyer, is said to have raised concerns at the time about the president’s efforts to overturn his 2020 election defeat and at one point threatened to resign. The committee said he could have information about several efforts by Trump allies to subvert the electoral college vote, including organizing slates of fake “alternate electors” in states Biden won and trying to appoint a Trump loyalist as attorney general who pushed false theories of voter fraud.

The subpoena came one day after former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson provided new details about Trump’s behavior on Jan. 6, 2021, when thousands of his supporters marched on the U.S. Capitol in a deadly attack on police as they broke inside to disrupt the certification of his loss to President Biden.

Hutchinson said Cipollone warned prior to Jan. 6 that there would be “serious legal consequences” if Trump went to the Capitol with the protesters expected to rally outside.

The morning of Jan. 6, she testified, Cipollone restated his concerns that if Trump did go to the Capitol to try to intervene in the certification of the election, “we’re going to get charged with every crime imaginable.”

Reps. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) and Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), the chair and vice chair of the committee, respectively, said in their letter to Cipollone that while he had previously given the committee an “informal interview” on April 13, his refusal to provide on-the-record testimony made their subpoena necessary.