January 6th Committee just gained another crucial inside witness against Donald Trump

| 10:34 pm EDT April 12, 2022
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Rachel Maddow is back on MSNBC, albeit with a modified schedule, and having her back on the air is good news in and of itself. But during her show tonight she delivered a different kind of good news when she announced that Trump White House Counsel Pat Cipollone has agreed to testify to the January 6th Committee tomorrow. Why is this so important?

It was always going to be tricky for the committee to get useful testimony out of people who helped Trump commit his crimes. These people have to worry about being criminally charged, and if they tell the committee about what they and Trump did in relation to January 6th, they’re making it very easy for the Feds to nail them. Oftentimes they’re facing potential charges that are more severe than contempt. So given a choice, they may decide to just say nothing and get nailed for contempt, rather than testifying and getting themselves nailed for crimes with longer prison sentences.

The most useful witnesses for the committee are the people who were in the room and witnessed the crimes that were committed, but who don’t have any criminal exposure of their own. In such case all they have to do is give cooperative testimony to the committee, and they get to go move on with their lives. They weren’t going to get indicted for their underlying January 6th crimes to begin with, and by testifying they ensure they’re not going to get indicted for contempt either.

So far this month we’ve seen the likes of Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner decide to go ahead and testify to the January 6th Committee, and we’ve since seen committee members publicly confirm that they both gave helpful testimony. Neither of them appears to have any criminal liability specific to January 6th, so it was an easy decision for them to sell out others in order to avoid getting indicted for contempt.

It’s the same thing with Trump White House Counsel Pat Cipollone. He was right there with Trump before, during, and after January 6th, and he knows everything that happened – but he doesn’t appear to have gotten his own hands dirty. This means he just has to give everyone else up, and he gets to go on with his life. Other than personal loyalty, there would be no reason for Cipollone to get himself indicted for contempt just to protect Trump – and if Cipollone were going that route, he’d be trying to stall by invoking imaginary privilege instead of just testifying.

There can always be last minute surprises. If the January 6th Committee publicly states after his testimony that he wasn’t cooperative after all, then he’ll get rung up for contempt, and that’ll be that. But we keep seeing witnesses with no underlying criminal liability being willing to give cooperative testimony because they don’t want to go down for contempt, and it’s likely Cipollone will follow in that path. While Cipollone doesn’t have the name recognition of Ivanka or Jared, he could turn out to be an even more valuable witness, given that Cipollone probably spent all of January 2020 privately advising Trump not to do certain illegal things that he then witnessed Trump going on to do anyway.

In that sense the committee looks even smarter for having started out its proceedings by subpoenaing Steve Bannon, knowing he wouldn’t testify, so it could get him indicted for contempt and make an example out of him. People like Cipollone have surely looked at the fact that Bannon is about to go on criminal trial for contempt, and decided that testifying is a much smarter move.