Capitol investigation committee requests interview with Ivanka Trump
20 January 2022, 18:44
It says it wants to discuss what she knew about her father’s efforts to pressure then-vice president Mike Pence to reject the 2020 election result.
The committee investigating the US Capitol insurrection is asking Ivanka Trump, daughter of former president Donald Trump, to voluntarily co-operate with its probe.
The committee sent a letter on Thursday requesting a meeting with Ms Trump, who served as an adviser to her father, in early February.
In the letter, committee chairman Bennie Thompson says she was in direct contact with her father during key moments on January 6, 2021, when Trump supporters stormed the Capitol in an effort to halt certification of Joe Biden’s presidential win.
The committee says it wants to discuss what Ivanka Trump knew about her father’s efforts to pressure then-vice president Mike Pence to reject the 2020 election results, including a telephone call they say she witnessed.
They also want to discuss concerns that she may have heard from Pence’s staff, members of Congress and the White House counsel’s office about those plans.
The panel cited testimony that Ms Trump implored her father to quell the violence by his supporters and said it wants to ask about her actions while the insurrection was under way.
“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,” Mr Thompson writes.
The letter is the committee’s latest attempt to seek information from inside the Trump family as it has broadened its investigation.
Earlier this week, it issued subpoenas to Rudy Giuliani and other members of Trump’s legal team who filed bogus legal challenges to the 2020 election that fuelled the lie that the election had been stolen from the former president.
The committee also received a major win Wednesday when the Supreme Court rejected a bid by Trump to block the release of White House records sought by the committee, clearing the way for their release.
The National Archives began to turn over the hundreds of pages of records to the nine-member panel almost immediately.
They include presidential diaries, visitor logs, speech drafts and handwritten notes dealing with January 6 from the files of former chief of staff Mark Meadows.
The House committee’s investigation has touched nearly every corner of Trump’s orbit in the nearly seven months since it was created.
The panel says it has interviewed nearly 400 people and issued dozens of subpoenas as it prepares a report set for release before the November midterm elections.
The committee says the extraordinary trove of material it has collected – 35,000 pages of records so far, including texts, emails and phone records from people close to Trump – is fleshing out critical details of the worst attack on the Capitol in two centuries, which played out on live television.
The next phase of the investigation will be more public-facing, starting with a series of public hearings in the coming months.
