I have a column on the home page about the Justice Department’s subpoenaing of Pat Cipollone, the former Trump White House counsel, into one of the grand juries that is investigating potential crimes arising out of the Capitol riot.
This afternoon, CNN has reported that Patrick Philbin, Cipollone’s deputy in the Trump White House counsel’s office, also has been subpoenaed. The CNN report relies on two unidentified “sources familiar with the matter.”
As my column relates, the Biden Justice Department is clearly weighing whether to indict former President Donald Trump and a circle of advisers — mainly, Trump’s private lawyers (i.e., not White House lawyers) — who developed half-baked schemes to reverse the presidential election and maintain Trump in office. Testimony and documentary evidence in various probes of the riot, and events over the two months leading up to it, have indicated that Cipollone, Philbin, and other White House officials had relevant conversations with the then-president and his private advisers, and witnessed key events. The White House lawyers appear to have been pushing against the private advisers and trying, without success, to nudge Trump into accepting his defeat.
The subpoenas of former White House lawyers raise questions about executive privilege and attorney–client privilege. As I explain in the column, the fact that the Justice Department is in the position of trying to pierce the president’s confidentiality protections, rather than its usual position of trying to uphold them, does not bode well for the viability of those privileges if there is an effort to invoke them.