In early 2020, Pat Cipollone, former President Donald Trump’s second White House counsel, stepped into the spotlight as a lead member of Trump’s defense team during his first impeachment trial. “Put simply, you seek to overturn the results of the 2016 election and deprive the American people of the President they have freely chosen,” Cipollone had written to House Democratic leaders in October 2019. “Your highly partisan and unconstitutional effort threatens grave and lasting damage to our democratic institutions, to our system of free elections, and to the American people.”
Before 2020 was out, Cipollone was on the outs with the president who’d once called him “Mr. Attorney.” By the time a mob of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, he was reportedly in open revolt against the president in his bid to defend the presidency. When Trump wanted to go to the Capitol with his supporters after his incendiary speech that day, Cipollone argued against it. “We’re going to get charged with every crime imaginable,” Cipollone said, according to the testimony of Cassidy Hutchinson, a former senior White House aide-turned-star Jan. 6 committee witness. Hutchinson also testified that Cipollone thought it was “effing crazy” that Trump wasn’t calling off the mob as it ransacked the Capitol.
Cipollone’s journey has led him to testify behind closed doors to the House Jan. 6 committee on Friday. Instead of taking the meandering route, one that saw him spend months refusing to cooperate with the committee, he should have walked that path much faster.
That Cipollone is complying with a congressional subpoena at all is a mild shock to anyone watching who’d watched him denigrate similar demands during Trump’s first impeachment saga. He was happy to act then as a shield against the accusations that Trump had abused his office to try to bully Ukraine and undercut Joe Biden’s presidential bid. And Cipollone did so using rhetoric about overturning elections that would become steeped in irony in just over a year.
When he appeared before the Senate to rebut the impeachment case against Trump, Cipollone, in a performance in which he painted himself as an aggrieved defender of the sanctity of elections, said, “It’s too much to listen to almost, the hypocrisy of the whole thing.” If the Senate had voted to remove Trump, then he would both been removed from office and barred from running for another term. Thus, Cippolone said of Democrats, “they’re not here to steal one election. They’re here to steal two elections.”
Who knows, maybe Cipollone really believed what he was saying in 2020.
Who knows, maybe Cipollone really believed what he was saying in 2020. Despite the clear evidence that Trump had pressured Ukraine’s government for corrupt purposes, maybe he actually thought he was trying to avert a congressional coup d’état. Maybe he saw the impeachment as an unwarranted attempt to override the will of the American voters.
I’m only willing to entertain that possibility because of the way Cipollone reportedly blocked some of the most extreme tactics that Trump’s most delusional advisers were pushing after the 2020 election. When Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark wanted to send a letter giving credence to Trump’s conspiracies to the states, Cipollone reportedly described it as “a murder-suicide pact” that would “damage everyone who touches it.”
The question, though, is why Cipollone was still at the White House. He’d seen Trump laying the groundwork for his claims that the election would be stolen from him. Attorney General William Barr, for whom Cipollone had worked as a speechwriter in the George H.W. Bush administration, had already resigned because of Trump’s continued election fraud lies. Cipollone may have feared that if he resigned, Trump would replace him with someone even worse, but before that point, he had already proven himself all too willing to provide cover for Trump’s extralegal activities. The only difference between Cipollone and the likes of Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani is the degree of blatant lie they were willing to entertain.
Yes, Cipollone is doing the right thing now by appearing before the committee. Video from his answers will surely be folded into the final two public hearings the panel will hold this summer. But he doesn’t deserve the same hero treatment that has been (deservedly) bestowed on Hutchinson or (undeservedly) bestowed on former Vice President Mike Pence.
Cipollone fought to keep Trump in office in 2020, warning of an attack on America’s democracy. It turns out the attack was coming from inside the White House the whole time.
