New York, (Asian independent) Senate Committee Vice Chair and Republican Rep. Liz Cheney has said that Donald Trump’s White House counsel Pat Cipollone’s testimony that the former President should have conceded elections, and that there was no widespread election fraud as claimed by Trump has more or less met the expectations.
The Wyoming Republican, at the center of the party’s ire and fighting for her lone seat from the state to Trump-backed Ms Hagemann, said the recent testimony former White House Counsel Cipollone gave to the House select committee investigating the January 6 insurrection “met” their expectations. “If you’ve watched these hearings, you’ve heard us call Mr. Cipollone to come forward to testify. He did, and Mr. Cipollone’s testimony met our expectations,” she said during the house select committee’s seventh public hearing.
On queue, the House panel then aired several clips of Cipollone’s sworn testimony at the start of their seventh hearing as part of a push to further show that then-President Donald Trump’s aides disagreed with his push to try to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Cipollone told the January 6 committee that he agreed Trump should concede the 2020 election and that he lost to Democratic nominee Joe Biden fair and square. He also cited Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s floor remarks where he congratulated Biden and said that the process was “done”.
“That would be in line with my thinking on these things,” Cipollone testified.
The committee later played a clip where Cipollone was asked if Trump would need to heed the court rulings that had come down since he lost the 2020 election; Cipollone replied, “Of course, Everybody is obliged to abide by the rules.”
When Cheney was asked whether the former President had “a particular obligation” to ensure US laws are “faithfully executed”, the former White House counsel responded, “That is one of the President’s obligations, correct.”
Legal experts have previously told Business Insider that Cipollone’s testimony could potentially heighten Trump’s legal exposure in several investigations into the former President. His testimony could provide more insight into Trump’s state of mind during the January 6 insurrection and whether he intended to commit a crime.
“The most important and compelling witnesses in a real trial, where the rules of evidence apply, could be people who spoke directly to the former President and can tell a jury what he said and thus what he intended. That could be someone like Pat Cipollone. It could be any number of people. We just don’t yet know,” Chuck Rosenberg, a former federal prosecutor, previously said.
Cipollone’s first-hand account of what Trump did and said on January 6 has become an important part of the January 6 committee’s investigation. It came after former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson testified that Cipollone expressed concerns about the criminal charges they could face if Trump planned to go to the US Capitol building with his supporters on January 6. During an earlier January 6 committee hearing, Hutchinson recalled Cipollone saying at the time, “We’re going to get charges of every crime imaginable if we make that move”.
