Ivanka Trump testifies to panel probing Jan. 6
WASHINGTON » Ivanka Trump, former President Donald Trump’s eldest daughter, who served as one of his senior advisers, testified for about eight hours Tuesday before the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, according to people familiar with the matter.
It was not immediately clear how revelatory her testimony was for the committee, but those familiar with the interview said Trump did not seek to invoke any privilege — such as executive privilege or the Fifth Amendment, as other witnesses have done — and broadly, if not garrulously, answered the panel’s questions.
Ivanka Trump was one of several aides who tried to persuade the president to call off the violence that ultimately injured more than 150 police officers and sent lawmakers and Vice President Mike Pence fleeing for safety, according to evidence gathered by the committee. She is not known to have been associated with the more extreme supporters of the former president who spread lies about widespread fraud after the 2020 election and planned efforts to try to keep him in power.
Her testimony came days after her husband, Jared Kushner, who was also a top adviser to Trump, sat for an interview and provided what one member of the panel described as “valuable” and “helpful” information.
Ivanka Trump and Kushner are among the highest-ranking Trump White House officials to testify before the committee.
Ivanka Trump’s lawyers have been in talks with the committee since January, when it sent her a letter requesting voluntary testimony. In the letter, dated Jan. 20, the committee said it had heard from Keith Kellogg, a retired lieutenant general who was Pence’s national security adviser. Kellogg had described Donald Trump’s refusal to condemn the violence as the mob engulfed the Capitol, despite White House officials urging him to do so, the letter said.
Kellogg testified that the president had rejected entreaties from him as well as from 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.
Kellogg also testified that he and Ivanka Trump had 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 certify the Electoral College results. The call to Pence was part of an effort to invalidate the 2020 election and give Trump a chance to stay in office.
Also on Tuesday, the committee said it had received 101 documents that conservative lawyer John Eastman had tried to withhold, arguing that they were covered by attorney-client privilege. In an explosive court ruling that found Trump and Eastman “likely” committed federal crimes as they fought the 2020 election results, a federal judge in California ordered Eastman last week to turn over the documents.