house, they were there the final days of the trump administration and pushed back on efrforts to overturn the 2020 election so they re important witnesses in what led up to the january 6th attack on the u.s. capitol. they also spent weeks wrangling with the justice department over potential executive privilege issues, what questions they would be willing to answer, what questions they were not likely to answer and of course we don t know the answer to any of that, what they decided to answer before the grand jury because those proceedings are secret. so both cipollone and philbin did both previously testify to the house select committee where they did decline to answer some questions because of executive privilege as you said. what s different, though, speaking to a congressional committee versus testifying before a grand jury? what s different is that this is a criminal investigation and so there are just narrower opportunities to be able to assert privileges, including things lik
2020 election and opposed the proposal to replace the attorney general with someone willing to look into false claims of election fraud. so how damning who you think their grand jury testimony potentially could be for the former president? well, i think they have a lot of knowledge. they certainly have knowledge of the scheme to replace the attorney general with a pliant lower level department of justice assistant attorney general. they have knowledge of the fake elector scheme. they have knowledge, i think, of the eastman memo that was used with pence. they have knowledge of the insurrection and what the president was doing that day. so they re knowledgeable. the question is they withheld their statements or conversations with trump before the january 6th committee. that may or may not be something they had to testify to in front of the grand jury. the grand jury can resolve these issues very quickly. the threat for the january 6th committee was having to litigate
going to learn more. and we re going to learn more about the january 6th insurrection and point toward the president of the united states embracing sedition. was he a seditious president? this is going to be up to the voters. and there s an awful lot of evidence that might convince a majority of voters and more than a majority, because you can even win the presidency without a majority of the voters, but trump has targeted and his people have targeted various states where they think they can win even without a majority and it is with these beliefs that biden called undemocratic. it could happen. so yes, is pennsylvania a precursor? if you look at who is running for the senate and what the message of dr. oz has been in pennsylvania, yeah, it is. and look at what s happened in
this weekend. do you think this is a precursor to a biden/trump 2024 rematch? well, i think that donald trump would like to make it that way. some of that will depend on the grand jury. some of that will depend on the justice department. some of that will depend on what the press does with the information that we now know about what trump did with these records, with these national security secrets, and we re going to learn more. and we re going to learn more about the january 6th insurrection and point toward the president of the united states embracing sedition. was he a seditious president? this is going to be up to the voters. and there s an awful lot of evidence that might convince a majority of voters and more than a majority, because you can even win the presidency without a majority of the voters, but
it. here it gets litigated before the grand jury. you go to the chief judge who opens his courtroom just for this hearing and he will resolve it right there. they didn t want to do that. so they re walking the line between attorney/client when it was attorney/client, when it was executive privilege, and how much they could say in that line. that s what the negotiations obviously were with the department of justice that were preagreed to and that s apparently there was no effort to go to the chief judge to do to deal with any privileges. talk to me more about that, though. talk to me about why in a grand jury proceeding executive privilege specifically wouldn t be necessarily as protective if cipollone and philbin didn t want to talk? the reason is called u.s. versus nixon. richard nixon claimed executive