Former President Donald Trump’s White House counsel Pat Cipollone is expected to testify on Friday before the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, a person familiar with the matter told NBC News on Wednesday.
The panel had issued a subpoena to Cipollone last week, saying it has obtained evidence that he “repeatedly raised legal and other concerns about President Trump’s activities on January 6th and in the days that preceded.”
Cipollone is expected to meet with the committee under subpoena for a transcribed interview, NBC reported.
A spokesman for the select panel did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.
The committee had openly called on Cipollone, who was at the White House for key moments before and during the riot, to cooperate with investigators.
“Trump does not want Mr. Cipollone to testify here” because the evidence shows that he and his office “tried to do what was right,” the committee’s vice chair, Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., said last month.
Cheney issued that call during one of the committee’s public hearings laying out the initial findings from its yearlong investigation into the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S Capitol by a violent mob of Trump’s supporters.
The panel’s next public hearing, its seventh so far, is scheduled for July 12 at 10 a.m. ET.
Cipollone featured prominently in last week’s bombshell testimony from Cassidy Hutchinson, a former aide to Trump’s White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows.
Hutchinson said in sworn public testimony that Cipollone warned her before Jan. 6 that “we’re going to get charged with every crime imaginable” if Trump followed through on plans to go to the Capitol while Congress had convened to confirm President Joe Biden’s electoral victory.
If Trump went to the Capitol — as he said he would do during a rally near the White House that shortly preceded the riot — then “it would look like we were obstructing justice,” Cipollone said, according to Hutchinson.
Trump ultimately returned to the White House after the rally. As the riot unfolded, Cipollone urged Meadows to act to get Trump to quell the attack, Hutchinson testified.
“I remember Pat saying something to the effect of, ‘Mark, we need to do something more. They’re literally calling for the vice president to be effing hung,'” Hutchinson said.
“Mark had responded something to the effect of, ‘You heard him, Pat. He thinks Mike [Pence] deserves it. He doesn’t think they’re doing anything wrong,'” she said.
