January 6 hearing includes testimony from Ivanka Trump, Bill Barr
The House committee investigating the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol included testimony from Bill Barr, Ivanka Trump and Capitol police.
Damien Henderson, Associated Press
Ivanka Trump, former President Donald Trump’s daughter and adviser, could play a pivotal role in the House Jan. 6 committee’s public hearings.
Ivanka Trump testified under oath to the Jan. 6 committee for eight hours behind closed doors. Some of that videotaped footage has now been made public by the committee, making headlines and suggesting more could be ahead.
Thursday night’s hearing set the stage for the series of hearings over the coming week as the committee seeks to lay out a timeline of what was happening in the White House as the Capitol attack unfolded.
At that inaugural Thursday hearing, the committee played a brief clip from Ivanka Trump’s testimony in which she said she “accepted” the Justice Department’s findings that there was no fraud in the 2020 election.
Family feud, Trump style
On Friday, Trump posted on his Twitter alternative, Truth Social, disparaging his daughter, saying she was “not involved in looking at, or studying, Election results. She had long since checked out.”
He claimed Ivanka Trump accepted the election results only out of respect for former Attorney General Bill Barr, who explicitly said there was no evidence of voter fraud in the election.
According to a report from The New York Times, Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, started distancing themselves from Trump before the election was even called for now-President Joe Biden. The rift in the Trump family started to take hold once the two “were already washing their hands of the Trump presidency,” the Times said.
If the committee airs more of Ivanka Trump’s testimony, Trump could go further to discredit his daughter in an attempt to play down her knowledge of what happened in the lead-up to the Capitol attack.
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Senior adviser and close confidant
But multiple reports since the attack have revealed Ivanka Trump was close to the former president as rioters breached the Capitol. Former Vice President Mike Pence’s national security adviser, Keith Kellogg, told the Jan. 6 committee that Ivanka Trump met with her father at least twice.
In the book “I Alone Can Fix It” by Washington Post reporters Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker, Ivanka Trump is described repeatedly following Trump around and urging him to stop the rioters.
“I’m going down to my dad. This has to stop,” she reportedly told her aides.
Trump’s chief of staff at the time, Mark Meadows, also hoped Ivanka Trump could get her father to stop the attack. The book described Meadows shooing aides out of the Oval Office and saying, “I only want Ivanka, myself and the president in here.”
The Associated Press reported that Ivanka Trump praised Pence earlier that morning for refusing to reject the Electoral College votes, as her father demanded of him. She told Kellogg that “Mike Pence is a good man.”
Key to the committee’s goals is proving Trump genuinely knew he lost the election to Biden. Ivanka Trump’s testimony could help do that.
Takeaways from the January 6 hearing: A ‘sophisticated’ 7-part plan. ‘Slipping in people’s blood’
The hearings will present in chronological order the events leading up to the Capitol attack, starting with Trump’s repeated claims of election fraud. Ivanka Trump’s testimony could be used to show Trump’s closest inner circle – and Trump himself – knew he lost the election.
For example, Ivanka Trump was a frequent campaign surrogate for her father, headlining events as part of his reelection campaign.
And in a January letter asking for Ivanka Trump to cooperate voluntarily with the panel, committee chair Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., suggested she could have such information.
“The Committee has information suggesting that White House staff and others were attempting to persuade President Trump to halt his statements regarding a ‘stolen election’ and were working directly with other supporters outside the White House in an effort to persuade President Trump to do so,” he wrote in the letter.
In other hearings, the committee will try to prove not only that Trump was complicit in the Capitol attack but also why the attack happened in the first place.
Other mysteries remain, such as the unexplained 7½-hour gap in Trump’s phone records from that day.
At Monday’s hearing, the committee played a snippet of Ivanka Trump’s testimony in which she said she did not tell her father to declare victory or concede on election night as votes were still being counted.
“I don’t know that I had a firm view as to what he should say in that circumstance,” she said.
The next hearing is scheduled for Wednesday at 10 a.m. EDT.
Trump knew: Jan. 6 committee uses voices of those close to him to make its case of ‘an attempted coup’
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