Former White House legal counsel Pat Cipollone said he vehemently opposed then-President Donald Trump’s draft executive order that would have seized voting machines, as well as election lawyer Sidney Powell’s strategy as Trump battled the results of the 2020 election.
The segments of Cipollone’s interview that the House Jan. 6 committee showed at the seventh hearing on Tuesday corroborated the evidence offered by other witnesses. Interest in his view of the events leading up to the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot was roused after former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson said in the previous hearing that he told her that going to the Capitol that day would result in Trump being charged with “every crime imaginable.”
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Cipollone said in testimony recorded in an eight-hour interview last Friday that a proposed executive order backed by Powell that would seize Dominion voting machines was a “terrible idea.”
“Particularly when the attorney general has reached the conclusion that it wasn’t sufficient election fraud to change the outcome of the election, when other people have suggested that there was, what is it? At some point, you have to put up or shut up, that was my view,” he said. “Removing Dominion voting machines was a terrible idea. That’s not how we do things in the United States.”
Cipollone also testified that he expected the president eventually to abide by various court decisions in over 60 election fraud lawsuits that were thrown out for lack of evidence.
“Of course, everyone is obligated to abide by the courts,” Cipollone said.
As for Powell’s continued involvement in the effort to prove Trump won the election, Cipollone said he “was vehemently opposed.” The former Trump White House counsel said he didn’t “think she should have been appointed to anything.”
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The lawyer also testified that he knew that Trump should concede at some point, and he could see that the president was dragging out the inevitable.
“I was the White House counsel,” he said. “Those decisions are political. So, to the extent that the question is that I can see the election is, did I believe he should concede the election at that point in time? Yes, I did.”
This hearing is focused on showing how Trump inflamed his supporters into rioting and demonstrating that he himself was the source of the fraud claims and was not manipulated by others in his strategy.
