i ve been in the room when difficult decisions are being made. i don t want the federal government involved in that at all. i want to put the best ideas forward to states can decide for themselves. yes, ladies, you your doctor and maybe your town council person can all come to a consensus on your uterus. just an example how republicans are struggling to avoid saying what they really plan to do about abortion. and extreme voices in the republican party. chief of staff mark meadows is ordered to testify as legal pressure mounts on trump s inner circle to tell what they know about the plot to overturn the 2020 election. we begin the reidout. you thrive as a presidential candidate despite bragging about violating woman and being credibly accused of acting on it. you thrive as an ohio senate candidate despite telling women they should stay in violent marriages. you thrive as an ohio house candidate despite facing allegations of hitting a former girlfriend. in today s repub
battleground goes bionic? the lead starts right now. one of the most anticipated debates of the year. john fetterman versus mehmet oz as this political season kicks into overdrive for candidates nationwide. plus, distraction for democrats. the anger and outrage over a letter to president biden now retracted. and moscow shuts down an appeal to release brittney griner from a russian prison. is there any hope left to bring the wnba star home? welcome to the lead. we ll get to the midterms in just a moment. first, a significant step for the justice department and its investigation into the january 6th attack. sources tell cnn the doj is trying to force the testimony of pat cipollony and patrick philbin, the top two lawyers from donald trump s white house, and hear about their conversations with the former president. this is exclusive new reporting, so let s get right to cnn s sarah murray. this is an attempt to break through a firewall of sorts trump has used to avoid scr
lawyers were weak and treasonness and unwilling to fight for him. instead, they laid out this elaborate plan to commandeer the department of homeland security to go around the country and seize voting machines. this was illegal. plainly, illegal. and in the view of the white house lawyers, deranged. but this all sort of culminated in this oval office meeting on december the 18th, which was a shouting match, almost became a fistfight, as i laid out in the reporting, between michael flynn, sidney powell, this very interesting character patrick burn, pat cipollony, eric hirshman. it was this truly bizarre meeting that went over the course of four or five hours and
memos to tile about conclusions in which trump was clearly breaking the law. i keep thinking about if your staffer pence s chief of staff provided documents and testimony. if you are a staffer for pence you are des pat for the white house counsel s office to give your boss some legal cover for doing something that s politically catastrophic for him, which is defy trump s request to overturn the will american people. the idea there is something in writing from the white house counsel s office seems at least plausible. it does seem plausible. and let me just be let me geek out one more time on this and say the exact language of this letter is that we have information that pat cipollony may have concluded that this was unconstitutional and illegal. right? so may have concluded. so they have information that such a record may exist. and zoe lofgren just sort of gave us a hinted there under
communicating directly with the vice president s lawyer and saying, you brought this upon yourself. this is your fault. other great reporting in our series shows that eastman and a series of other people were pressing pence through his aides to please give up the ghost and let donald trump hold onto power by rejecting these electors. the problem is, of course, that their legal theories were bunk. their legal theories were immediately discarded. there is a moment that we reveal in our series in which several people who are on trump s side explain this is not true, this does not hold. eastman concludes and admits to pat cipollony, the white house counsel, that he doesn t really think his legal theory will work. pat cipollony, the white house counsel explodes, you have been arguing this to the president,