By Farnoush Amiri | Associated Press
The extraordinary moment — fully detailed for the first time in the latest federal indictment against Trump unsealed last week — vividly illustrates the extent to which the former president’s final weeks in office were consumed by a struggle over the law, with two determined groups of attorneys fighting it out as the future of American democracy hung in the balance.
As a result, prosecutors were able to obtain extraordinary new details that were used in the indictment of the former president. And Cipollone and Philbin seem likely to become important witnesses in Trump’s upcoming trial.The breakdown of the relationship between Trump and his White House counsel — a lawyer-president arrangement that dates back to Franklin D. Roosevelt — began in the weeks after the 2020 presidential election.
“It was being brought to the president by people who I don’t believe had his best interest in mind,” Cipollone told lawmakers in June 2022. “They were doing the country and the president, both in his capacity as president and his personal capacity, a disservice.” Three days before Jan. 6, Philbin told Jeffrey Clark, a Justice Department lawyer, that if Trump remained in office despite no evidence of fraud there would be “riots in every major city in the United States.”