IVANKA TURNS AGAINST TRUMP
Daughter tells inquiry she didn’t believe her father’s claim election was rigged
DONALD Trump hit back at his own daughter last night after she told the committee investigating the storming of the US Capitol she didn’t believe his claims that the 2020 election was rigged.
The former president said that Ivanka Trump, considered his ‘favourite daughter’, had ‘long since checked out’ when the results showed he had lost to Joe Biden.
Mr Trump said Ivanka was ‘not involved in looking at, or studying, election results’ in a rebuke following her testimony on the committee’s opening hearing shown on prime time TV in the US. The Democrat-heavy panel has been collecting accounts of the January 6 insurrection behind closed doors for more than a year. In events being shown on every major US news channel, except Trump’s favoured Fox News, they began bringing their evidence to the public.
The first of six two-hour broadcasts was billed as a ‘blockbuster investigative special’ into the events that saw hundreds of Trump supporters – after attending a rally with the then-president outside the White House – storm the seat of US politics in a bid to overturn his election loss to Joe Biden.
The former first daughter, and a senior adviser in the Trump White House, annoyed her father by saying she accepted the word of his then Attorney General, Bill Barr, who said Mr Trump’s claims of widescale election fraud were ‘bulls***’.
Her comments were made in a video-taped interview she gave in April that was shown to the committee, and millions watching at home.
Miss Trump, 40, said Mr Barr’s comments ‘affected my perspective’. She added: ‘I respect Attorney General Barr, so I accepted what he was saying.’
In his own video testimony, Mr Barr said he had three conversations with the embittered president about the 2020 election, where he made clear the result was legitimate.
He said he told Mr Trump that his claims of a ‘stolen election’ were ‘b ******* ’ and that he ‘didn’t want to be any part of it’. Mr Barr resigned
‘He’s at the centre of this conspiracy’
AND EX-PRESIDENT’S WITHERING REPLY: Ivanka Trump was not involved in looking at election results. She’d long since checked out
from the Justice Department after conflicts with Trump about the outcome. Mr Trump posted his response on Truth Social, his own social media platform. He wrote: ‘Ivanka Trump was not involved in looking at, or studying, Election results.
‘She had long since checked out and was, in my opinion, only trying to be respectful to Bill Barr and his position as Attorney General (he sucked!)’
Another former alliance that is also broken is that of Mr Trump and his former vice president, Mike Pence.
Among the evidence presented was a claim Mr Trump said that his number two ‘deserves’ to be hanged for his lack of support.
Mr Pence was overseeing the ratification of the election results in the Capitol building when it was stormed and, with colleagues, had to flee.
The Republican vice chairman of the House of Representatives committee, Liz Cheney, told the hearing that Mr Trump spoke approvingly of the mob’s chants to ‘hang Mike Pence’.
She said in her opening speech: ‘You will hear that President Trump was yelling and, “really angry” at advisers who told him he needed to be doing something more [to quell the riot].
‘And, aware of the rioters’ chants to “hang Mike Pence,” the president responded with this sentiment: “Maybe our supporters have the right idea,” Mike Pence, quote, “deserves it.’’’ Mr Trump last night said he ‘never said or even thought of saying’ such a thing.
Video packages accompanied the speeches and testimony, showing the mob swarming the building, police officers being beaten and a noose for Mr Pence hanging with the Capitol in the background.
The hearings aim to show how the 45th president was ‘central’ to a conspiracy to remain in power.
Rep Bennie Thompson, the Democrat co-chairman of the committee, said that January 6 was the ‘culmination of an attempted coup’.
He said it was a ‘brazen attempt to overthrow the government’ and was Mr Trump’s ‘most desperate last stand’.
Rep Thompson said: ‘Donald Trump had his days in court to challenge the results.
‘He was within his rights to seek those judgments. In the United States, law-abiding citizens have
those tools for pursuing justice. He lost in the courts just as he did at the ballot box.
‘And in this country, that’s the end of the line.
‘But for Donald Trump, that was only the beginning of what became a sprawling, multi-step conspiracy aimed at overturning the presidential election aimed at throwing out the votes of millions of Americans and replacing the will of the American people with his will to remain in power after his term ended.
‘Donald Trump was at the centre of this conspiracy.’
Miss Cheney’s role on the committee has turned her into a pariah in her own party and she may well lose a challenge from within to her Wyoming seat in August.
But she had a warning to her colleagues.
She said: ‘Tonight, I say this to my Republican colleagues who are defending the indefensible: there will come a day when Donald Trump is gone, but your dishonour will remain.’
Mr Trump, however, remained defiant as he said yesterday: ‘January 6th was not simply a protest, it represented the greatest movement in the history of our Country to Make America Great Again.’