Former Homeland Security official Cuccinelli talks to January 6 committee

By CNN Newsource

Published December 16, 2021 2:23 PM

By Zachary Cohen, CNN

The House select committee investigating the January 6 riot interviewed former Department of Homeland Security official Ken Cuccinelli last week, he told CNN on Thursday.

Cuccinelli said his interview lasted roughly four-and-a-half hours.

The committee spent about 30 minutes asking Cuccinelli about what occurred on January 6, he said, and another 30 minutes asking him about DHS preparations for that day. But the rest of the interview was not related to what took place on January 6, Cuccinelli added, making clear the amount of time spent on each topic was a rough estimate based on memory.

“It was striking how little time was spent on January 6,” he told CNN in an email.

The committee did ask Cuccinelli about conversations he had with former President Donald Trump, Cuccinelli told CNN. He said he identified topics that were discussed but declined to answer more detailed questions about those discussions.

Investigators also inquired about Cuccinelli’s discussions with former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, he said.

The committee declined to comment when asked about its interview with Cuccinelli.

CNN previously reported that the committee had reached out to Cuccinelli and Chad Wolf, two top officials from the Trump-era Department of Homeland Security, asking that they voluntarily speak with the panel.

Cuccinelli was a consistent presence in Oval Office meetings where various plans to challenge presidential election results in key states were discussed, according to documents released by the Senate Judiciary Committee.

At one point in late December, Trump floated the idea of installing Cuccinelli as a “special counsel” to investigate election fraud, according to testimony provided to the Senate panel by former Department of Justice official Richard Donoghue.

Trump told a group of officials “something to the effect of, ‘I think Ken Cuccinelli would be a great special counsel,'” according to the Senate committee’s report.

In December 2020, The New York Times first reported that Trump’s former attorney Rudy Giuliani called Cuccinelli, second in command at DHS at the time, and asked him whether the department could seize voting machines in certain states to be reexamined for evidence of widespread voter fraud.

Cuccinelli told CNN in October that he did tell Giuliani the department had no legal authority to seize voting machines or interfere with state-run elections. Cuccinelli also said that “no one at any level pushed us to do anything outside of our existing mission sets.”