In a letter sent to Bennie Thompson, the Mississippi Democrat who chairs the House committee, Bannon’s lawyer said “circumstances have now changed.” “Mr. Bannon is willing, and prefers, to testify at your public hearing,” Robert Costello wrote Saturday. The decision comes after Trump wrote to Bannon this weekend, informing him that he was relinquishing executive privilege for his former top aide. Trump said this would allow Bannon to “come in and testify honestly and fairly.” Both the congressional committee and federal prosecutors argued that Bannon was never protected by the protection, which gives the president and other members of the executive branch the power to withhold the disclosure of certain confidential records. Bannon was charged in federal court with contempt of Congress last year after he previously failed to comply with a subpoena to appear for testimony or produce documents related to the deadly insurgency, which sought to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential victory. Bannon left the administration in 2017, well before the 2021 attack on Capitol Hill. He had served as Trump’s chief political strategist during the 2016 campaign. The letter indicating Bannon’s willingness to testify as well as Trump’s were first reported by the Guardian. “We wanted him to testify,” Rep. Zoe Lofgren of California, who sits on the committee, told CNN. “I expect we will hear from him. And there are many questions we have about him.” The committee is wrapping up its weeks-long hearings that featured dramatic testimony from people who worked directly with Trump. One of Trump’s junior aides, Cassidy Hutchinson, detailed the former president’s clashes with US intelligence as he tried to head to Capitol Hill on January 6 to join a mob of supporters, even after being told that they carried weapons, among other revelations. .

Former Trump White House adviser Pat Cipollone, who was subpoenaed and met with committee members for more than eight hours on Friday, provided “a lot of information that fits into this larger puzzle,” according to the Democratic spokeswoman and member of the Stephanie Murphy Committee. “She claimed privilege in conversations that involved advice that she provided directly to the president or conversations with the president,” she said in an interview with NBC on Sunday. “But I think we still have a lot of relevant information from him, and it gives us another perspective on what was going on in the White House in those weeks leading up to Jan. 6 that were so critical.”