Trump White House Lawyers Headed To Jan. 6 Committee For A Little Chitchat

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Pat Cipollone (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

Former White House Counsel Pat Cipollone and his deputy Patrick Philbin will sit down this week for an informal chitchat with members of the January 6 Select Committee, Politico reports. The conversation will not be under oath, but is seen as a potential precursor to formal, transcribed testimony at a later date.

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It’s not clear whether Cipollone and Philbin will be asserting executive privilege, or, if so, over which communications. As White House Counsel, Cipollone took a maximalist approach to presidential privilege and sneered at congressional oversight authority. It would seem odd for a devotee of the unitary executive theory to do a full 180 and start spilling his guts about conversations with his former boss.

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On the other hand, Trump hasn’t been screaming bloody murder about Cipollone and Philbin on his mommyblog — so maybe his former lawyers’ low-key coffee date has so far escaped his attention.

As Politico points out, the substance of Cipollone and Philbin’s role in stomping the brakes on the the plot to overturn the election is already in the public record. They joined with Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen and his deputy Richard Donoghue in threatening to quit if Trump put deputy AG Jeffrey Clark in charge of the Justice Department so he could announce investigation of non-existent fraud in swing states as a pretext for legislatures to claw back electoral votes and recast them for Trump.

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We know that Cipollone participated in a December 17, 2020 meeting at the White House in which Sidney Powell tried to get herself appointed Special Counsel to investigate the supposed electoral fraud, despite the fact that Our Girl Sid didn’t even have a security clearance. And we know that he told the president in no uncertain terms that it would be totally illegal to send in the National Guard to seize every voting machine in America — as demanded by Powell and her buddies Mike Flynn and Patrick Byrne (AKA “The Overstock Weirdo”).

We also know that everybody in DC, including Sean Hannity, was aware of Cipollone’s vehement opposition to John Eastman’s cockamamie plan for Vice President Pence to unilaterally reject electoral college votes, thanks to the Fox host’s text to Mark Meadows warning that “WH counsel will leave.” If there was any privilege to be asserted here — and the presence of civilians like Powell certainly suggest that there wasn’t — arguably it’s been waived by Trump flapping his yap to all and sundry about it.

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If they are making a full disclosure, Cipollone and Philbin, who represented Trump in his first impeachment trial, will be able to give a detailed account of their boss’s participation in the plan to foment an electoral coup. Guess we’ll have to wait for the Committee’s final report to see if these guys spill the beans. Or maybe it will leak before close of business tomorrow.

Yeah, probably that second one.

Top Trump White House lawyers scheduled for Jan. 6 interview [Politico]

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Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.

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Government, January 6th, liz dye, Pat Cipollone, Patrick Philbin