Trump’s plan to name Sidney Powell special counsel on election fraud alarmed Cipollone

WASHINGTON — Former White House Counsel Pat Cipollone told the Jan. 6 committee he was adamantly against a plan to have then-President Donald Trump appoint Dallas attorney Sidney Powell as special counsel so she could pursue the false narrative of a stolen election.

The power to seize voting machines and bring criminal charges would have been given to Powell, according to the committee.

“I was vehemently opposed,” Cipollone said in a video clip played Tuesday during the panel’s latest hearing. “I didn’t think she should be appointed to anything.”

The committee is investigating efforts by Trump and some of his allies to overturn the 2020 election results, efforts that resulted in the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol.

The hearings have been tightly scripted productions weaving together multimedia presentations and clips of witness interviews with live testimony to make the case that Trump knew full well election fraud claims were bogus even as he recklessly pressed forward with a campaign that culminated in the violence of Jan. 6.

The committee has raised concerns about potential witness tampering attempted by Trump allies.

Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, one of only two Republicans on the panel, said Tuesday that Trump himself had reached out to someone talking to the committee. The committee passed the information along to the Justice Department, she said.

Tuesday’s hearing brought other striking revelations, including texts sent after the riot by Trump’s former campaign manager, Brad Parscale, a former San Antonio marketing manager, lamenting that the president’s rhetoric had led directly to bloodshed.

“This is about Trump pushing for uncertainty in our country. A sitting president asking for civil war. … This week I feel guilty for helping him win,” Parscale said in a series of messages to Katrina Pierson that night.

Pierson, a Dallas-area tea party activist who’d run for Congress and served as national spokeswoman for Trump’s campaign had helped to organize the Jan. 6 rally.

A week earlier, she had exchanged texts with another rally organizer complaining that speaking slots were going to “very suspect” people such as Infowars conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and Ali Alexander, founder of the “stop the steal” movement.

Trump “likes the crazies,” she told the committee in prerecorded testimony played at Tuesday’s hearing. “He loves people who … would be very, very vicious in publicly defending him.”

One of the day’s star witnesses was Cipollone, the White House counsel at the end of Trump’s term.

In an interview with the committee only last week, Cipollone declared that Vice President Mike Pence was a national hero for resisting pressure from the president and the mob to unlawfully overturn the election.

“I thought that the vice president did not have the authority to do what was being suggested under a proper reading of the law,” he testified. “I’m a lawyer, this is my legal opinion. … I think the vice president did the right thing. I think he did the courageous thing. … I think he did a great service to this country. … He should be given the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his actions.”

The first hour of Tuesday’s hearing heavily featured Powell, particularly her involvement in a contentious, hourslong Dec. 18 meeting during which she and other outside advisers clashed with Cipollone and other White House officials over the outsiders’ baseless claims of widespread election fraud and conspiracies.

The State Bar of Texas has sought sanctions against her for filing allegedly frivolous lawsuits claiming voter fraud.

A trial date of Oct. 17 has been set for the bar complaint in Dallas County.

A member of the committee, Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., detailed how Powell and the other outsiders arrived at the White House on Dec. 18, days after electors in states across the country had voted to make Joe Biden the president-elect and ended any viable legal avenues for contesting the election.

The group had a draft executive order, Raskin said, that would have directed the secretary of defense to immediately seize voting machines and called for Trump to appoint a special counsel with the power to seize voting machines and charge people with crimes.

“The specific plan was to name Sidney Powell as special counsel, the Trump lawyer who had spent the post-election period making outlandish claims about Venezuelan and Chinese interference in the election,” Raskin said.

In his interview with the committee, Cipollone denounced the plan for seizing voting machines, noting then-Attorney General Bill Barr had already determined there was not sufficient evidence of widespread fraud to overturn the election.

“That’s a terrible idea,” Cipollone said of seizing voting machines. “That’s not how we do things in the United States. There’s no legal authority to do that.”

The committee has spoken to half a dozen participants in the Dec. 18 meeting, which stretched on for hours as it moved through different parts of the White House and included profane screaming.

The committee played clips of a Powell deposition during which she could be seen sipping from a can of Dr Pepper.

Powell said in her deposition that after arriving at the White House and making their way to the Oval Office, members of her group had only 10 to 15 minutes alone with the president before official White House aides came running to intervene.

“I bet Pat Cipollone set a new land speed record,” Powell said.

Still, in that short period Powell indicated Trump was very interested in hearing what her group had to say.

Cipollone said the outside advisers attacked him verbally even as he and other White House lawyers kept asking in vain one simple question: Where was the evidence of this fraud?

He said they got a variety of responses that came down to a disregard of the need to back up their provocative claims with actual facts.

Powell told the committee that Cipollone and the others showed “nothing but contempt and disdain” toward Trump.

“If it had been me sitting in his chair, I would have fired all of them that night and had them escorted out of the building,” Powell said in one clip.

Powell told the committee that Trump asked Cipollone if he had authority to name her special counsel and grant her security clearance – and the White House counsel said yes to both.

According to Powell, Trump then said he was doing both, which prompted the White House attorneys to respond, “You can name her whatever you want to name her and no one’s going to pay any attention to it.”

Powell said the president’s response to that was to say: “You see what I deal with. I deal with this all the time.”

Cipollone told the committee that in his opinion Powell was not actually appointed given the lack of paperwork or other formal actions, but said Powell, Trump and others might have a different view.

The meeting broke up late that night but was followed before long by a Trump tweet promoting a big protest in D.C. on Jan. 6.

“Be there, will be wild!” Trump wrote.

Not spontaneous

The committee used Pierson’s appearance as a vehicle to shore up allegations that Trump intended for an angry mob to storm the Capitol, revealing an email she sent other rally organizers on Jan. 2.

“POTUS expectations are to have something intimate at the ellipse, and call on everyone to march to the capitol,” she wrote.

That jibed with a text message sent by Kylie Kremer, co-founder of “Women for America First Save America,” which urged “boots on the ground” on Jan. 6 to help Trump thwart Congress from affirming Joe Biden’s victory.

In a text to Trump confidant Mike Lindell, CEO of My Pillow, she said Trump wanted the post-rally march on the Capitol to appear spontaneous, but it would not be.

“POTUS is going to call for it `unexpectedly’” she wrote.

The committee revealed a draft tweet from the National Archives, never sent but stamped “president has seen,” that would have had Trump announcing his Jan. 6 speech with “massive crowds expected” and “march to the Capitol after. Stop the Steal!!”

“The evidence confirms this was not a spontaneous call to action,” said Rep. Stephanie Murphy, D-Fla., a member of the Jan. 6 committee, leading that part of the hearing.

Previous testimony has revealed that Trump threw a fit when his Secret Service detail refused to drive him to the Capitol after his speech to the throngs that would soon interrupt Congress, returning him instead to the White House.

‘Red flags’

On Jan. 2, Pierson texted White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, telling him that “things have gotten crazy” with the Jan. 6 event and asking for direction. Meadows called eight minutes later, according to phone records.

Pierson recounted the conversation and “why I raised red flags.”

“There were a bunch of entities coming in. Some were very suspect,” she said, elaborating that she was referring to Jones and Alexander – “some of the rhetoric that they were doing.”

Two months earlier, both had led a group of protesters into the Georgia state Capitol.

The committee showed footage of Jones leading a crowd in chants tying their cause to that of the American Revolution, in language seen as code for armed uprising: “It’s 1776! 1776! 1776!”

“I want them to know that 1776 is always an option! These degenerates …are going to give us what we want or we are going to shut this country down,” Alexander told a crowd on the eve of the riot.

Responding to Parscale’s lament about the deadly violence, Pierson texted reassurance that “you did what you felt right at the time and therefore it was right.”

“Yeah. But a woman is dead,” he wrote.

At that point, the only known fatality was a woman in the mob, Ashli Babbitt, who’d been shot by Capitol police as she tried to climb through a broken window into the secure lobby next to the House chamber.

“You do realize this was going to happen,” Pierson wrote.

“If I was Trump, and knew my rhetoric killed someone,” Parscale wrote back.

She responded: “It wasn’t the rhetoric.”

“Katrina. Yes, it was,” he wrote.