Trump’s expansive view of executive power gets a post-impeachment surge
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Trump’s expansive view of executive power gets a post-impeachment surge
President Donald Trump. | Alex Brandon/AP Photo
Pat Cipollone took only a short post-impeachment break.
The White House’s top attorney and other members of President Donald Trump’s legal team attended a private party at the Trump International Hotel to celebrate, just hours after the Senate voted largely along party lines to acquit the president.
Then Cipollone and his team of roughly 40 lawyers returned to their routine business — much of which had been put on pause as the top lawyers defended the president from an effort to oust him from office.
The counsel’s office had hoped Trump would move on, too, after the Senate trial and the president would focus on reelection, the economy or the business of governing, now that he no longer faced the intense pressure of impeachment and the sense that Democrats were out to hurt him and his family.
But Trump had his own ideas. In the days since that acquittal he has engaged in a full-bore revenge victory lap. Now the lawyers, who helped to secure that big victory, are watching the emboldened president push the boundaries of their profession in ways that could reshape the office of the presidency for decades to come.
Trump has fired or pushed out White House staffers who testified against him in the House proceedings, while elevating or re-hiring key aides who he views as loyal. He reminded the attorney general over Twitter that he believes he has the right to interfere in judicial matters — an awkward situation for Cipollone, who remains close to Bill Barr. Trump said in a radio interview he may stop the longstanding practice of having aides listen in on phone calls with foreign leaders since he distrusts so much of his national security staff.
Trump’s expansive view of executive power, long supported by conservatives like Cipollone, is now being put to the test. Trump survived both the Mueller probe and impeachment. He has received almost no pushback from Republican lawmakers. And the White House’s stonewalling of congressional investigations has proven to be politically effective.
“It is beyond anything the presidency has achieved yet and beyond anything Nixon could have imagined,” said Michael Gerhardt, a professor of jurisprudence at the University of North Carolina School of Law whose work centers on constitutional conflicts between presidents and Congress. “There is literally no way to hold the president accountable in Pat Cipollone’s worldview.”
Allies of Cipollone’s say the arguments laid out during Trump’s impeachment trial only maintained the view of executive authority that was also present under President Barack Obama.
“Frankly, we remained faithful to previous precedents, including precedents established by the administrations of both political parties,” said one person close to the legal team. “We would not view it as an expansion of executive power.”
“We defended the president, the presidency and the Constitution,” the person added.
Trump was happy with the outcome of his acquittal but still views it as just a single step toward further vindication, according to several senior administration officials and Republicans close to the White House.
In meetings with senior staff in recent weeks, Trump has asked repeatedly for updates on the Durham investigation into pre-election federal probes of Trump and has expressed frustration it’s not moving along at a faster clip. He wants anyone associated with the origins of the Mueller investigation to be brought to justice.
Some of the questions raised by the impeachment proceedings about the scope of executive authority remain undecided — and will be heard by the courts this spring. “In the short term, the acquittal was a win for presidential power. It strengthened the hand of the presidency and showed you can stonewall and not turn over anything, but that doesn’t mean it will hold,” said one former senior administration official. “So much of it will end up getting sorted out in the courts.”
Cipollone’s “lasting legacy will be getting his client through impeachment and not messing it up,” said Neil Eggleston, Obama’s White House counsel from 2014 to 2017. “He had a jury that was entirely not going to convict the president, so his goal was to get through it and sound credible.”
Cipollone supported the Trump candidacy early on during the 2016 election. But he first came to the attention of Trumpworld late in the cycle when he helped the candidate prepare for debates. The Trump transition also considered him for the job of deputy attorney general under Jeff Sessions, a position that never materialized because Sessions instead wanted to install career prosecutor Rod Rosenstein.
In the fall of 2018, Cipollone left a lucrative partnership in private practice to take the job of White House counsel because he liked Trump’s policy positions and felt he wanted to serve the country that had welcomed his Italian immigrant parents. “The latter may sound hokey but it’s how he feels,” said Laura Ingraham, a Fox News host and close friend of Cipollone’s.
Inside the White House, Cipollone quickly established himself as the opposite of Trump’s first White House counsel, Don McGahn — standing out as an affable presence who enjoyed spending time in the Oval Office and who tried to help implement the president’s wishes as much as he could.
Whereas McGahn focused intently on judicial nominations and deregulation during his time leading the counsel’s office, Cipollone did not enter the job with set policy preferences.
Instead, he followed the president’s lead. Cipollone helped develop the rationale for an emergency declaration that allowed the president to shift money around to fund the border wall. He worked with the president to prepare tariffs on Mexico until the U.S. and Mexico cut a deal to avoid them, and he led the counsel’s office through multiple investigations and eventually the all-consuming Senate impeachment trial.
Cipollone’s allies say he runs the counsel’s office — the “most important law firm in the world” — as an affable leader who is a good listener, said Alan Dershowitz, a friend of the president’s and member of his legal team. “He takes everyone seriously. It was a pleasure to watch.”
Republicans close to the White House say the counsel’s office functions like a tight-knit team.
Inside the broader White House, however, Cipollone has clashed with acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney over the sharing of information and the best person to lead the White House impeachment strategy. Several staffers from other key offices came to view Cipollone as territorial and overly secretive with information — and ill-equipped to handle the political dimensions of an impeachment trial.
His allies argue that keeping tight control over information is typical behavior for any good lawyer, especially one who wants to keep the strategy secret in a White House known for leaks. “Everyone had the info they needed to do their job,” said a second person familiar with the legal team.
During the impeachment proceedings, the president’s relationship with Cipollone had ups and downs. Trump was angry with Cipollone at one point during the House proceedings in December when several administration officials testified as witnesses, said a Republican close to the White House.
Yet during the Senate trial, Trump was pleased with Cipollone’s made-for-TV performance including his emotional and tough exchange at one point with House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler on the Senate floor. During his post-impeachment speech in the East Room, Cipollone was one of the first people Trump singled out for praise.
On the legal team, Cipollone functioned like the “anti-Giuliani,” said one Republican close to the White House, who said Cipollone remained calm, rational and under the radar even while facing intense scrutiny.
“It is highly ironic that the guy who is OK with no one recognizing him or knowing who he is, is front and center on every channel in the world,” said Jonathan Missner, Cipollone’s former partner at the law firm of Stein Mitchell Beato & Missner.
Post-impeachment, several friends and allies of Cipollone’s say he is likely to remain at the White House through the end of the first term. No one knows exactly what he will do after November, be it return to private practice or continue to work for the president if he wins reelection.
Friends say Cipollone often lets his faith guide major career decisions. Allies say he does not think much about his career legacy, and it’s hard to know whether the impeachment and acquittal will end up being the capstone of his time in the White House.
“If you go back to the Clinton impeachment, no one remembers who the White House lawyers are,” one Republican attorney said.
Instead, Cipollone’s legacy may be staying in the president’s good graces for an extended period of time. Maintaining a good and consistent relationship with the president inside the White House has bedeviled other top staffers — including former chief of staff John Kelly, former national security adviser John Bolton and Cipollone’s predecessor, McGahn, who liked to call Trump “King Kong” behind his back.
“Pat has skills that many people do not have,” said Missner, his former law partner. “Whenever everyone else says, ‘You can’t do it this way,’ Pat doesn’t think in those terms. He finds them to be silly. Just follow the path of how he helped to lead the strategy of what you just watched on impeachment. Every pundit said, ‘You can’t do this.’ But it worked.”
Daniel Lippman contributed to this report.
