Rep. Adam Kinzinger, a member of the House selection committee investigating last year’s Capitol riots, said Sunday that Pat Cipollone, Trump’s White House counsel, has not contradicted previous testimonies from other witnesses and will be charged. mentioned in the final report of the investigation after sitting for a while. transcribed, videotaped interview with the panel last week.
“You’ll see a little bit of what he said in the next few hearings. You’ll definitely see a lot of that in the report,” Kinzinger, R-Ill., ABC “This Week” anchor George Stephanopoulos. “But at no point was there any contradiction with what anyone said.”
Cipollone was recently subpoenaed and spoke to the commission on Friday. The subpoena came after he was repeatedly mentioned last month during a startling testimony by Cassidy Hutchinson, former Trump White House aide.
Hutchinson told the committee under oath during a public hearing that Cipollone had been wary of then-President Donald Trump’s desire to march with his supporters from the Ellipse to the Capitol on January 6, 2021, where Congress was working on the certification. of the 2020 Electoral College results.
“Mr. Cipollone said something along the lines of, ‘Please make sure we don’t go to the Capitol, Cassidy, keep in touch with me. We’ll be charged with every crime imaginable if we make that move possible,’ Hutchinson said.
The Jan. 6 panel had repeatedly referred to Cipollone as opposing Trump’s baseless claims of widespread voter fraud.
Rep. Adam Kinzinger speaks as the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol continues to unveil its findings from a year-long investigation at the Capitol, June 23, 2022.
Jacquelyn Martin/AP, FILE
Both CNN and The New York Times reported that Cipollone was not asked about some of Hutchinson’s details during his own interview on Friday.
Kinzinger was asked on “This Week” about a report that Trump could renounce administrative law for his former adviser Steven Bannon, who was charged with contempt of Congress for dismissing a subpoena related to the Jan. 6 investigation. (Bannon pleaded not guilty.)
“Does the committee want to hear from him?” asked Stephanopoulos.
“I’ll just say, in a high position, anyone who wants to come in, who knows information to talk to the select committee, we welcome them to do that,” Kinzinger said. “We welcome them to do that under oath. And we all know the history of our requests to speak with Steve Bannon. So we’ll see how that plays out.”
Kinzinger said he felt the same about possible testimonies from Stewart Rhodes, the founder of the far-right Oath Keepers. But these examples had something in common, Kinzinger said: “They went from initially saying that this committee was nothing but an afterthought, something that nobody was interested in, to suddenly — ‘oh, yeah, I want to testify publicly for it.'”
Still, Stephanopoulos noted, the committee’s work on the deadly riots “doesn’t seem to be getting through to Republicans,” according to recent polls.
Pat Cipollone, former White House counsel under President Donald Trump, arrives at the Ford House Office Building to answer questions from investigators on the Jan. 6 Select Committee, on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, July 8, 2022.
J. Scott Applewhite/AP
“In the margins, yeah, it’s getting through,” Kinzinger said. “And I think the most important thing is, again, what does history say in five or ten years? Because I can guarantee — well, I can get as close as possible to guarantee that — in about 10 years, there’s no going to be a have been a single Trump supporter that exists all over the country [Richard] Nixon. There were a lot of people who supported Nixon until he was out of office, and then everyone said, ‘No, nobody supported Nixon.'”
Kinzinger said he was unimpressed by the possibility that Republicans would “revise” the panel’s investigation if the GOP retakes the House in November’s midterm elections.
“I welcome them to see the work we’ve done,” Kinzinger said.
The committee will continue its work this week, with a hearing Tuesday on links between Trump’s job and extremist groups such as the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers and another Thursday that Kinzinger said would focus on Trump’s activity. during the uprising itself.