Former White House counsel Pat Cipollone and his top deputy were expected to testify Friday to a federal grand jury investigating former President Donald Trump’s effort to overturn his election loss, as first reported by ABC News.
Cipollone was the top White House lawyer at the end of the Trump administration as Trump and outside allies pressed for ways to overturn the Republican’s loss to Democrat Joe Biden, culminating in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.
The pair already testified to the congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack and attempts to subvert the election. Their answers were truncated because the panel agreed they could invoke executive privilege to avoid discussing direct discussions with Trump.
The grand jury appearances underscore how quickly the Justice Department probe into overturning the election is moving.
Federal prosecutors appear to be closely examining a scheme by Trump allies to create slates of fake pro-Trump electors in key battleground states won by Biden.
They recently issued subpoenas to several state Republican Party chairmen, some of whom signed official forms suggesting that the phony electors were real.
The probe is not related to the investigation by a Georgia state prosecutor into Trump’s efforts to bully officials into “finding” enough votes to flip the Peach State. It’s also separate from the bombshell probe over Trump’s mishandling of classified documents he stashed at his Mar-a-Lago estate.
Even though he is a Trump loyalist, Cipollone recalled vigorously pushing back on the former president’s idea to issue an executive order calling for the seizure of voting machines.
“To have the federal government seize voting machines? That’s a terrible idea,” Cipollone testified.
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