JAN. 6 COMMITTEE EYES IVANKA TRUMP
Seeks cooperation in probe of attempt to overturn election
The House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, riot on Thursday requested cooperation from Ivanka Trump as it revealed pieces of what it has learned about a scramble inside the White House that day to get former President Donald Trump to denounce and call off the mob that was laying siege to the Capitol.
In a letter to Ivanka Trump, the former president’s eldest daughter who served as one of his senior advisers, the committee said it had obtained evidence that multiple White House officials — including Ivanka Trump, at least twice — had implored Donald Trump to call off the violence, only to be rebuffed. But aides at the time were also worried about Donald Trump issuing anything other than a scripted statement during the mayhem.
“Apparently, certain White House staff believed that a live, unscripted press appearance by the president in the midst of the Capitol Hill violence could have made the situation worse,” wrote Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., the panel’s chair.
The summoning of Ivanka Trump suggested that the committee was delving deeper into the question of what Donald Trump was doing and saying while the attack unfolded, as it seeks to determine his intentions and state of mind during the assault. The letter also made clear that the panel has already
uncovered substantial evidence about those critical hours inside the White House from key players who were present that day.
In the letter, Thompson wrote that investigators had received information from Keith Kellogg, a retired lieutenant general who was Vice President Mike Pence’s national security adviser, about Donald Trump’s refusal to condemn the violence, despite White House officials 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.
“She went back in, because Ivanka can be pretty tenacious,” Kellogg testified.
He also told investigators that he had recommended “very strongly” against the president speaking on live television because his “press conferences tend to get out of control.”
The committee also revealed that Kellogg testified that he and Ivanka Trump witnessed a telephone call in the Oval Office on the morning of Jan. 6 in which Donald Trump pressured Pence to go along with a plan to throw out electoral votes for Joe Biden when Congress met to make its official count of the results, thus invalidating the 2020 election and allowing Trump to stay in office.
Kellogg told the committee that the president had accused Pence of not being
“tough enough” to overturn the election.
Ivanka Trump then turned to Kellogg and said, “Mike Pence is a good man,” Kellogg testified.
“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 to Ivanka Trump. “Did you discuss those issues with any member of the White House Counsel’s Office?”
A spokesperson for Ivanka Trump said Thursday that she had “just learned” that the committee “issued a public letter asking her to appear.”
“As the committee already knows, Ivanka did not speak at the Jan. 6 rally,” the spokesperson said in a statement. “As she publicly stated that day at 3:15 p.m.: ‘Any security breach or disrespect to our law enforcement is unacceptable. The violence must stop immediately. Please be peaceful.’”
The request for Ivanka Trump’s cooperation came the day after the panel won a major victory when the Supreme Court refused a request from the former president to block the release of White House records concerning the Jan. 6 attack, effectively rejecting Donald Trump’s claim of executive privilege and clearing the way for the House committee to start receiving the documents.
Within hours of that decision Wednesday night, the National Archives began the process of turning over hundreds of pages of documents to the committee. A spokesperson for the panel said Thursday that it had received some of the documents and expected the rest to be delivered as quickly as the archives could produce them.
Thompson told reporters on Capitol Hill on Thursday that the committee would consider posting the documents publicly — including any fake electoral certificates for Trump that it obtains — after its investigators review the documents.