Trump Impeachment Trial Turns Spotlight On White House Lawyer Cipollone

Franco Ordoñez

December 23, 2019 / 2:00 am

President Trump has often surrounded himself with lawyers whom he sees as being good on television. But Pat Cipollone, the attorney who will play a leading role in Trump's Senate impeachment trial defense, is better known for working behind the scenes.

Even as an architect of the White House's fight against impeachment, Cipollone has performed his most prominent work from behind his desk, writing strongly worded letters rebuffing congressional subpoenas and instructing other White House aides not to cooperate.

Trump has lauded him as "the strong, silent type." But that silence is expected to end with the Senate impeachment trial. Jay Sekulow, another one of Trump's attorneys in what he said would likely be a "multifaceted" legal team, said Cipollone is ready for the spotlight.

"He's a really great lawyer, but he also understands the political side of this — and especially an impeachment proceeding," Sekulow said in an interview. "You have dual issues: the legal issues and the political issues. And it's not every lawyer that gets both. And Pat clearly does."

The son of Italian immigrants, Cipollone grew up in the Bronx. He went to Covington Catholic High School in Kentucky and worked part time at a McDonald's.

He was valedictorian of his college class at Fordham University and then went to law school in Chicago on a full scholarship.

Melanie Sloan, a friend and law school classmate, said the University of Chicago was where Cipollone became immersed in conservative legal thought.

"My friends tended to be in the Progressive Law Students Association and were on the liberal side of the spectrum, and Pat and the crowd he hung out with were on the more conservative side of the spectrum, including people who are often now shortlisted for the Supreme Court in the Trump administration," said Sloan.

Sloan, who is now senior adviser to the liberal watchdog group American Oversight, told NPR she thinks "incredibly highly" of Cipollone. "He is a very warm, friendly person who would go out of his way for anybody, and I have the highest regard for him, despite how strongly I disagree with the positions the White House is taking on impeachment."

Other former classmates have a different view. Nearly two dozen signed a letter stating that his position on impeachment "distorts the law and the Constitution."

"We are sorry to see how your letter to the congressional leadership flouts the traditions of rigor and intellectual honesty that we learned together," wrote the members of the class of 1991 at the University of Chicago Law School.

Cipollone was managing editor for the law review. He worked closely with Eugene Scalia, son of conservative icon Justice Antonin Scalia. Eugene Scalia is now Trump's labor secretary.

Other friends of Cipollone went on to become prominent judges and have been touted as future candidates for the Supreme Court, including Allison Eid and Thomas Lee, who is the brother of Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah. Cipollone clerked for federal Judge Danny Boggs, known for giving new hires a famously difficult trivia exam. "Pat is a very smart, very competent lawyer and a great guy," Boggs told NPR.

Boggs' 64-question test for Cipollone included questions like "How many chromosome pairs are there in a human genome?" and "Give the number and popular name of any Beethoven symphony."

"That is in and of itself a badge of distinction among lawyers," said Mike Lee. "It's well known that you can't clerk for — you can't even interview for — Judge Boggs without passing with a pretty high score."

Lee told NPR that Cipollone's wide-ranging base of knowledge has served him well in his job as White House counsel.

His Catholic faith is another big influence in Cipollone's life and career.

"One of the many things I like about Pat is this: Faith is a big deal to him," said Bill Nettles, a former U.S. attorney for South Carolina in the Obama administration, who has worked with Cipollone.

"But I live in a part of the world where people routinely wear it on their sleeve. And Pat is not like that. ... He doesn't use it as a vehicle to judge other people," Nettles told NPR.

Cipollone, 53, has 10 children. He is among a group of elite conservative Catholics who serve as close confidants to Trump — including Attorney General William Barr and Leonard Leo of the Federalist Society, who has helped Trump pick judges, including for the Supreme Court.

Cipollone, Barr and Leo have served on the board of directors of the Catholic Information Center, an organization for powerful Washington Catholics. The center is affiliated with the conservative Opus Dei movement.

John Allen, a veteran Vatican reporter and author of the book Opus Dei: An Objective Look Behind the Myths and Reality of the Most Controversial Force in the Catholic Church, called the Catholic Information Center a premier place for conservative Catholic movers and shakers in D.C.

"Cipollone is part of this broader sort of spectrum of conservative Catholic thought and activism that, in some way, is dedicated to the idea of trying to translate the kind of conservative reading of the Catholic Church's social agenda," Allen said in an interview.

The White House declined to make Cipollone available for an interview.

Before joining the administration, Cipollone was a partner at two prestigious law firms with a wide range of clients.

One very high-profile case was when his firm represented the woman known as "Jackie" who was featured in a 2014 article in Rolling Stone magazine. The article, about a gang rape at the University of Virginia, was later retracted and became the subject of lawsuits. But even then, Cipollone worked behind the scenes helping supervise the lawyers at his firm leading Jackie's defense.

Cipollone also worked a stint in the public sector. Early in his career, he joined the Justice Department working for Attorney General William Barr during George H.W. Bush's administration.

Like Barr, Cipollone has argued that the president wields broad executive powers. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has described Cipollone's arguments as outrageous.

"That letter that came from the White House was a joke, beneath the dignity of the presidency of the United States, in defiance of our Constitution. Shame on them," Pelosi said this year.

Critics say Cipollone is twisting the law to serve the president's benefit. Kimberly Wehle was formerly an assistant U.S. attorney and associate independent counsel in the Whitewater investigation led by special prosecutor Ken Starr. She said impeachment can't be unconstitutional when several provisions in the Constitution say otherwise.

"He's serving the president at the expense of the Constitution, at the expense of his true client, the American people, because he's operating to create a mega-presidency that has more power than the other two branches," she said. "And that's dangerous."

Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker and an informal adviser to Trump, pushed back against that criticism and said Cipollone has been a stabilizing force in Trump's White House.

"You're in a fight over executive power," said Gingrich, who has also worked with Cipollone. "And I think in that sense that the Trump administration, across the board, sees itself as an active force for transformation."