Pat Cipollone, the White House counsel to President Donald Trump who repeatedly fought Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 election, has reached a deal to be interviewed before the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack, according to people familiar with the inquiry.
The Associated Press reported that a person briefed on the matter, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the negotiations, said Cipollone will appear before the panel privately Friday.
The agreement is a breakthrough for the panel, which has pressed for weeks for Cipollone to cooperate -- and issued a subpoena to him last week, believing he could provide crucial testimony.
Cipollone was a witness to pivotal moments in Trump's push to invalidate the election results, including discussions about seizing voting machines and sending letters to state officials about election fraud. He was also in the West Wing on Jan. 6 as Trump reacted to the violence at the U.S. Capitol, when dozens of his supporters attacked the building in his name.
People close to Cipollone have repeatedly cautioned that concerns about executive privilege and attorney-client privilege could limit his cooperation. But committee negotiators have pressed to hear from him and from Patrick Philbin, his deputy.
Cipollone will sit for a videotaped, transcribed interview, according to a person familiar with the discussions. He is not expected to testify publicly.
A committee spokesperson declined to comment.
The panel's push to hear from Cipollone intensified after the testimony last week of Cassidy Hutchinson, a former White House aide to the chief of staff, Mark Meadows. Hutchinson described detailed conversations with Cipollone in which she said the counsel had expressed deep concerns about the actions of Trump and Meadows.
Hutchinson portrayed Cipollone as one of the last firewalls blocking Trump's efforts to overturn the election. She testified that on the morning of Jan. 6, he came to her with an urgent request, saying "something to the effect of: 'Please make sure we don't go up to the Capitol, Cassidy. Keep in touch with me.
"We're going to get charged with every crime imaginable if we make that movement happen,'" Cassidy quoted Cipollone.
Some allies of Trump have privately tried to cast doubt on parts of Hutchinson's testimony, which was delivered under oath and was perhaps the committee's most explosive to date.
Trump has tried to invoke executive privilege -- a 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, Cipollone and Philbin both appeared for informal interviews with the House panel on a limited set of topics, according to an agreement reached by their representatives and representatives for Trump.
The agreement, according to an email reviewed by The New York Times, allowed discussions of a meeting with Jeffrey Clark, a Justice Department official who tried to help Trump cling to power; Trump's interactions with John Eastman, the conservative lawyer who drafted a legal strategy for overturning the election; any interactions with members of Congress; and Cipollone's recollections of the events of Jan. 6.
The agreement said the two could not discuss conversations they or others had with Trump, other than one discussion in the Oval Office with Clark in a pivotal meeting on Jan. 3, 2021.
However, both were permitted to discuss the timeline of where they were, who they met with and conversations they had on Jan. 6. Assuming those conditions hold for Cipollone's testimony, they would presumably cover conversations such as ones he may have had with Hutchinson or other officials that day.
ADVOCATED FOR THE LAW
According to Hutchinson, Cipollone urged Meadows to do more to persuade Trump to call off the rioters. She also told investigators that she heard lawyers from the White House Counsel's Office say a plan to put forward pro-Trump electors in states won by Joe Biden was not "legally sound."
Members of the House committee had hoped that Cipollone would testify publicly at a previous hearing, but he declined. They then took their case public.
From the hearing room dais, Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., singled out the former White House counsel 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 personally."
Any damaging account from Cipollone of Trump's postelection actions would be a dramatic change of circumstance from Trump's first impeachment trial, when Cipollone was his chief defender.
Cipollone then accused Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., who served as a prosecutor in that trial and now sits on the Jan. 6 committee, of making false allegations against Trump.
A year later, as Trump pressed on with plans to try to overturn his defeat, Cipollone and other White House lawyers repeatedly threatened to resign if Trump went forward with some of the more extreme proposals urged on him, ultimately persuading him to back off.
Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, also a former White House adviser, told the panel that Cipollone's threats of resignation were frequent, implying that he did not take seriously his concerns and those of other members of the counsel's office about the gravity of Trump's plans.
"Him and the team were always saying, 'Oh, we're going to resign. We're not going to be here if this happens, if that happens,'" Kushner said in videotaped testimony, a clip of which was played during the first public hearing. "So I kind of took it to just be whining."
AN ALLY BUT NOT A PAL
Beyond Hutchinson's testimony, Cipollone has been mentioned often over the past month as various witnesses before the House panel have cited his steady presence in off-the-rail meetings and his sage, though at times unwelcome, legal advice. One witness said Cipollone referred to a proposed letter making false claims about voter fraud as a "murder-suicide pact."
But he has remained invisible to the American public, neither agreeing to sit for taped interviews nor appearing as a live witness at a committee hearing.
A cigar smoker with deep ties in the Federalist Society, Cipollone has kept a relatively low profile since leaving the White House, eschewing high-profile media interviews and public appearances. Though he has been a fairly reliable public ally to Trump, he is not close to the former president, according to multiple people in Trump's orbit.
For all the loyalists Trump surrounded himself with, Cipollone was closer to an apostate in the West Wing. The lawyer repeatedly pushed back against some of Trump's most conspiratorial ideas and told aides he needed to be in some of the meetings with outside advisers in which plans regarding the attempt to overturn the election results were discussed.
Cipollone never agreed with Trump's claims that the election was stolen, according to people who talked with him at the time. And after Jan. 6, he argued against broadly distributed pardons.
Trump often castigated Cipollone, saying in private that he was one of the worst lawyers of all time. He even mocked Cipollone to his face in front of other advisers, saying, "Why do I have the worst lawyer ever?"
Trump yelled that Cipollone always said no to him, according to a former senior administration official. Some former White House officials, however, have criticized the counsel's office for not doing more to push back against Trump.
Information for this article was contributed by Maggie Haberman and Luke Broadwater of The New York Times; by Josh Dawsey of The Washington Post; and by Farnoush Amiri of The Associated Press.