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- Former White House Counsel Pat Cipollone testified before the January 6 committee last Friday.
- The committee showed clips of his deposition during Tuesday's hearing.
- Cipollone described how he saw former Trump lawyer Sidney Powell as unqualified.
Former White House Counsel Pat Cipollone gave a frank assessment of Sidney Powell, one of former President Donald Trump's most notorious personal attorneys.
In previously unseen footage from his deposition to the House Select Committee last Friday, Cipollone unloaded on Powell as Trump's pick to be special counsel for the Department of Justice to investigate repeatedly disproven widespread voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election.
"I was vehemently opposed," Cipollone said when asked about Trump's special counsel idea, which was first reported by The New York Times in December 2020. "I didn't think she should've been appointed to anything."
The former White House counsel also addressed the plan from Trump's legal team to have the US military seize voting machines.
"There was a real question in my mind and a real concern, particularly after the attorney general had reached the conclusion that there wasn't sufficient sufficient election fraud to change the outcome of the election, when other people kept suggesting there was, the answer is 'what is it,' and at some point you have to put up or shut up," Cipollone said.
"To have the federal government seize voting machines?" he continued. "That's a terrible idea for the country."
Powell promised to "release the Kraken" of evidence showing Trump really won the 2020 election, referring to the mythological sea monster and mascot for Seattle's NHL hockey team.
She later backed off of many of her voter fraud claims in the wake of defamation lawsuits, instead placing the responsibility on Trump's voters.
"Millions of Americans believe the central contentions of the complaint to be true, and perhaps they are," Powell wrote to an appeals court while trying to defend her law license.
In addition to supporting the seizing of voting machines, Powell suggested the late Venezuelan ruler Hugo Chavez was behind efforts to rig the election.
Cipollone emphasized in his closed-door sworn deposition that there was no constitutional authority to seize voting machines.
"That's not how we do things in the United States, there's no legal authority to do that, and there is a way to contest elections, that happens all the time, but the idea that the federal government could come in and seize election machines?" Cipollone said. "No, that, I don't even understand why we even have to tell you why that's a bad idea for the country, it's a terrible idea."
source https://www.businessinsider.com/january-6-hearings-pat-cipollone-testimony-deposition-sidney-powell-quote-2022-7