- Donald Trump’s daughter Ivanka Trump and son-in-law Jared Kushner served as White House advisers.
- Ivanka Trump met with her father to encourage a public statement to calm Jan. 6 violence.
- The couple is among more than 1,000 witnesses who cooperated with the House Jan. 6 investigation.
WASHINGTON – Ivanka Trump, former President Donald Trump’s daughter and senior adviser, said she accepted the Justice Department’s finding of no fraud sufficient to overturn the 2020 in a video played at a congressional hearing on the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.
Her conclusion stands in contrast to her father’s continued baseless claims the election was stolen.
Ivanka Trump told the House committee investigating the Capitol attack Jan. 6, 2021, she trusted the finding because she respected then-Attorney General William Barr, who said he resigned in part rather than fight to overturn the election.
“It affected my perspective,” Ivanka Trump said in a videotaped deposition. “I respect Attorney General Barr, so I accepted what he was saying.”
Her husband, Jared Kushner, another senior adviser to Trump, told the committee he was aware White House counsel Pat Cipollone threatened to resign over Trump’s strategy to overturn the election.
Live updates:Jan. 6 committee says probe reveals Trump led and directed effort to overturn 2020 election
“I know that him and the team were always saying, `Oh, we’re gonna resign. We’re not gonna be here if this happens, if that happens,'” Kushner said in a videotaped deposition. “So, I kind of took it up to just be whining, to be honest with you.”
The committee interviewed Ivanka Trump and Kushner for details inside the White House during the period leading up to the Capitol attack Jan. 6, 2021, and for more information about what happened that day.
A committee member, Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., has called Trump’s slow reaction to the riot a supreme dereliction of duty. She played the Ivanka Trump and Kushner statements during her opening speech at a Thursday hearing.
More is expected. Retired Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg, former Vice President Mike Pence’s national security adviser, told the committee he urged Ivanka Trump to speak with her father about calming down the crowd. She met with her father de ella at least twice, according to Kellogg.
In requesting his interview with Ivanka Trumpthe committee wanted to ask what she knew about Trump’s pressure on Pence to reject state voters and about whether to deploy the National Guard as reinforcements to Capitol Police.
“Testimony obtained by the committee indicates that members of the White House staff requested your assistance on multiple occasions to intervene in an attempt to persuade President Trump to address the ongoing lawlessness and violence on Capitol Hill,” the committee chairman, Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., said in requesting her testimony.
Kushner distanced himself from Trump’s efforts to fight the election results and began planning to relocate to Miami two days after the election, according to a forthcoming book by New York Times’ Peter Baker and New Yorker’s Susan Glasser. Kushner worked with Biden aides on the transition between administrations.
Kushner avoided working with Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, according to the book. “Look, when Rudy got involved, I stopped being involved,” Kushner told Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff, Marc Short.
Kushner believed Trump’s denial of election results was “mainly a way of soothing a wounded ego and explaining defeat,” according to a report.
“We’ll get through it, bear with us,” Kushner told the chief of staff of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky. “We’ve got a couple of challenges that have some merit, we’ll see how they go, but there’s a pretty good chance we come up short.”
www.usatoday.com
George is Digismak’s reported cum editor with 13 years of experience in Journalism