Jan. 6. panel calls on Ivanka Trump
House committee reaches out about riot conversations
WASHINGTON — The House committee investigating the U.S. Capitol insurrection is asking Ivanka Trump, daughter of former President Donald Trump, to voluntarily cooperate as lawmakers make their first public attempt to arrange an interview with a Trump family member.
The committee sent a letter Thursday requesting a meeting in February with Ivanka Trump, a White House adviser to her father. In the letter, the committee chairman, Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., said Ivanka Trump was in direct contact with her father during key moments on Jan. 6, 2021, when Trump supporters stormed the Capitol in an effort to halt the congressional certification of Joe Biden’s presidential win.
The riot followed a rally near the White House where Donald Trump had urged his supporters to “fight like hell” as Congress convened to certify the 2020 election results.
The committee says it wants to discuss what Ivanka Trump knew about her father’s efforts, including a telephone call they say she witnessed, to pressure then-Vice President Mike Pence to reject those results, as well as concerns she may have heard from Pence’s staff, members of Congress and the White House counsel’s office about those efforts.
“Ivanka Trump just learned that the January 6 Committee issued a public letter asking her to appear,” her spokesperson said. “As the Committee already knows, Ivanka did not speak at the January 6 rally.”
The committee cited testimony that Ivanka Trump implored her father to quell the violence by his supporters and investigators want to ask about her actions during the insurrection.
“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,” Thompson wrote.
The letter is the committee’s first attempt to seek information from inside the Trump family.
Earlier this week, it issued subpoenas to lawyer Rudy Giuliani and other members of Trump’s legal team who filed meritless court challenges to the election that fueled the lie that the race had been stolen from Trump.
The committee is narrowing in on three requests to Ivanka Trump, starting with a conversation alleged to have taken place between Donald Trump and Pence on the morning of the attack. The committee said Keith Kellogg, a retired lieutenant general who was Pence’s national security adviser, was also in the room and testified to investigators that Donald Trump questioned whether Pence had the courage to delay the congressional counting of the electoral votes.
The Constitution makes clear that a vice president’s role is largely ceremonial in the certification process, and Pence had issued a statement before the congressional session that laid out his conclusion that a vice president could not claim “unilateral authority” to reject states’ electoral votes.
“You were present in the Oval Office and observed at least one side of that telephone conversation,” the letter to Ivanka Trump said, adding that the committee “wishes to discuss the part of the conversation you observed” between the then-president and Pence.
“The committee has information suggesting that President Trump’s White House counsel may have concluded that the actions President Trump directed Vice President Pence to take would violate the Constitution or would be otherwise illegal,” Thompson wrote. “Did you discuss those issues with any member of the White House Counsel’s Office?”
In the letter, Thompson also wrote that investigators had received information from Kellogg about Donald Trump’s refusal to condemn the violence, despite White House officials and even Republican members of Congress urging him to do so.
Kellogg testified that Donald Trump had rejected entreaties by him as well as Mark Meadows, his chief of staff, and Kayleigh McEnany, the White House press secretary. Kellogg then appealed to Ivanka Trump to intervene.
The letter also mentioned a message, in the days before the scheduled vote certification between an unidentified member of the House Freedom Caucus to Meadows with an explicit warning: “If POTUS allows this to occur ... we’re driving a stake in the heart of the federal republic.”
POTUS is an abbreviation for president of the United States.
The other requests in the letter to Ivanka Trump concern conversations after Donald Trump’s tweeted, “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution.”
The panel also revealed that Kellogg told investigators he had recommended “very strongly” against the president speaking on live television because his “press conferences tend to get out of control.”
The panel says it has interviewed nearly 400 people and issued dozens of subpoenas as it prepares a report for release before the midterm elections.