The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol attack issued a subpoena on Wednesday to Pat Cipollone, who served as White House counsel during the Trump administration.
This comes after Cassidy Hutchinson, an aide to former President Donald Trump's final White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, testified publicly before the committee on Tuesday that Cipollone pleaded with her on the morning of Jan. 6 to keep Trump away from the Capitol. "We're going to get charged with every crime imaginable if we make that movement happen," Hutchinson said Cipollone told her.
The committee's chairman, Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), wrote in a letter to Cipollone that while he sat for an informal interview on April 13, in the weeks since he has "declined to cooperate with us further, including by providing on-the-record testimony. We are left with no choice but to issue you this subpoena."
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In a statement, Thompson and the committee's vice chair, Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), said the panel has received evidence that "Mr. Cipollone repeatedly raised legal and other concerns about President Trump's activities on Jan. 6th and in the days that preceded." Early Wednesday morning, Cheney tweeted that it is "time for Mr. Cipollone to testify on the record. Any concerns he has about the institutional interests of his prior office are outweighed by the need for his testimony."
One person involved with the Jan. 6 investigation told The Washington Post that Tuesday's surprise hearing with Hutchinson was designed, in part, to get resistant witnesses like Cipollone to testify. "He can probably give the best overview of how Meadows, [former Trump lawyer Rudy] Giuliani, and Trump were told what they were doing might be illegal," another person familiar with the investigation told the Post.
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