Donald Trump’s former White House legal adviser Pat Cipollone is coming under mounting pressure to testify before the committee investigating last year’s attack on the US Capitol after he emerged as a key figure in bombshell testimony from a former aide on Tuesday.
Liz Cheney, the committee’s Republican vice-chair, called again on Wednesday for Cipollone to testify, a day after the committee heard he had told a colleague they would get “charged with every crime imaginable” if they had let Trump join his supporters outside Congress.
Cheney has made similar calls before, but her words have been given greater urgency since Tuesday’s testimony from Cassidy Hutchinson, a White House aide who depicted Cipollone as central to the events of January 6, 2021.
Cipollone is a former commercial lawyer who counted Trump as a client until the then president brought him into his administration in 2018 as White House counsel.
He came to public attention during Trump’s first impeachment when he refused to co-operate with the inquiry, calling it “unfair” and “completely baseless”. He went on to serve as head of Trump’s legal team in the subsequent congressional hearings.
The recent series of public hearings into the US Capitol attack, however, has depicted Cipollone as one of the few people inside the White House who were willing to stand up to Trump.
Hutchinson told the committee that Cipollone had resisted Meadows’ suggestion that Trump travel to the Capitol to join his supporters. According to her testimony, Cipollone said: “We’re going to get charged with every crime imaginable if we make that movement happen.”
