Ivanka Trump, who served as an adviser in her father’s White House, will be among the next targets of the January 6 committee.
Chairman Bennie Thompson told reporters on Thursday that the panel would soon issue a request for the voluntary testimony of former President Donald Trump’s eldest daughter. She was the only direct blood relative to work in the White House under her father, and did so with her husband, Jared Kushner. Mr Kushner has yet to be named as a target of interest for the committee.
Ms Trump can refuse the committee’s request, but doing so will likely result in a subpoena from the panel, which has already issued such notices for several members of Mr Trump’s inner circle as it continues its investigation into the hour-by-hour occurrences at the White House on January 6.
According to Mr Thompson’s letter to Ms Trump, released by the committee, lawmakers on the panel have evidence suggesting that Ms Trump fielded requests from other White House staffers for her to intervene and press her father into action, potentially by calling federal agencies and requesting deployment of law enforcement or the National Guard.
“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,” reads Mr Thompson’s request.
But Ms Trump’s statement on the matter, which was given to NBC News minutes after the committee’s request was made public, did not address that issue and instead bizarrely noted that she was not on the speaking list for the rally outside of the White House at which her father urged his supporters to go down the street to the Capitol and “fight like hell” for his false claims about the 2020 election.
“Ivanka Trump just learned that the January 6 Committee issued a public letter asking her to appear. As the Committee already knows, Ivanka did not speak at the January 6 rally,” said a spokesperson for Ms Trump.
“As she publicly stated that day at 3:15pm, ‘any security breach or disrespect to our law enforcement is unacceptable. The violence must stop immediately. Please be peaceful,’” the spokesperson noted.
Mr Thompson specifically mentioned in his letter the late deployment of the National Guard to the scene, which in DC requires an order signed by the Secretary of Defense. The White House’s inaction on requesting a deployment of the guard, as well as the fact that the ex-president waited for hours to go on video and call for his supporters to stop attacking the Capitol, are being examined by the committee, which seeks to understand what occurred during the riot and whether the White House knew violence was likely ahead of the attack.
“The Committee is aware that certain White House staff devoted time during the violent riot to rebutting questions regarding whether the President was attempting to hold up deployment of the guard ... But the Committee has identified no evidence that President Trump issued any order, or took any other action, to deploy the guard that day. Nor does it appear that President Trump made any calls at all to the Department of Justice or any other law enforcement agency to request deployment of their personnel to the Capitol,” he wrote.
It was previously revealed by Rep Liz Cheney, the ranking GOP member on the riot committee, that Ivanka Trump twice asked her father to intervene during the attack but was rebuffed by the president.
“We know his daughter — we have firsthand testimony that his daughter Ivanka went in at least twice to ask him to ‘please stop this violence,’” the congresswoman told ABC News.
“We are learning much more about what former President Trump was doing while the violent assault was underway,” she added in the interview, which took place earlier this month.
The January 6 committee returned to work this month after the holiday break with renewed vigour and has already issued a number of requests for testimony as well as subpoenas; some of the latest targets include former members of Mr Trump’s legal team: Rudy Giuliani, Jenna Ellis, and Sidney Powell.
The panel has also continued to express interest in the command centre set up by Trump loyalists at the Willard Hotel in Washington DC ahead of January 6, where the members of the president’s inner circle strategised and plotted efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
Ms Trump’s post-White House days have been much less public-facing than that of her father or even Donald Trump Jr., the president’s eldest son, who did not serve in the White House directly but has acted as an active booster of his father’s political brand over the years while helping run the Trump Organization.
