From WNYC Studios, it's Brian Lair, a daily politics podcast. It's Wednesday, July 6th.

Former White House counsel to Donald Trump, Pat Cipollone, has now agreed to a recorded interview with the January 6th

Commission will be videotaped, which means they can play it during one of the televised sessions,

but he's not going to testify live in person. Reports are that it will be transcribed and

videotaped, so as I say, excerpts could show up in future public hearings. And joining me to talk for a few minutes on the significant of this development, I'm joined by Kyle Cheney, senior legal affairs reporter for Politico. Hey, Kyle, thanks for jumping on on very short notice. Welcome back to WNYC. Of course. Good to be with you, Brian. Thank for having me. Remind everybody, why do we care about Pat Cipollone's testimony so much?

For a lot of reasons, he was essentially the ubiquitous witness to almost all of the

machinations that Donald Trump and his closest allies were undertaking in the weeks before

January 6th in the attack on the Capitol.

And so he weighed in on a lot of the efforts, you know, appoints false electors to sort of create

a controversy where there wasn't one to strategize around pressuring Mike Pence to try to overturn

the election on January 6th.

And he was in a lot of those meetings and advocated against them in many cases.

He was there, at least for part of the day on January 6 is our understanding.

And according to the star witness, Cassidy Hutchinson's testimony was very concerned about the legality

of a potential march to the Capitol that Donald Trump wanted to do.

So for so many reasons, passed up alone is a crucial witness.

And as I understand it, he was subpoenaed last week following the testimony of Cassidy Hutchinson,

the former aide to Trump, Chief of Staff, Mark Meadows, young woman who gave such dramatic testimony, probably because of what

she said in this 25-second clip. Mr. Sibleini said something to the effect of, please make sure

we don't go up to the Capitol Cassidy. Keep in touch with me. We're going to get charges

every crime imaginable if we make that movement happen.

And do you remember which crimes Mr. Cipollone was concerned with?

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