Ivanka Trump is in talks with the January 6 House select committee about potentially cooperating with the panel, according to multiple US media reports.
“Ivanka Trump is in discussions with the Committee to voluntarily appear for an interview,” a spokesperson for the daughter of former President Donald Trump said in a statement on Wednesday, CNN reported.
According to the New York Times, which first reported the discussions, it remains unclear whether the preliminary negotiations would result in Trump actually providing substantial information to the committee.
Earlier this month, the Guardian reported that the committee was considering issuing a subpoena to Trump to force her cooperation with the inquiry into the former president’s efforts to return himself to power on 6 January 2021.
Any move to subpoena Trump and, for the first time, force a member of Donald Trump’s own family to testify against him, would mark a dramatic escalation in the January 6 inquiry that would amount to a treacherous legal and political moment for the former president.
In January, the committee released a public letter addressed to Ivanka Trump in which committee members called upon her to provide “voluntary cooperation with our investigation”.
“We write to request your voluntary cooperation with our investigation on a range of critical topics … We respect your privacy, and our questions will be limited to issues relating to January 6th, the activities that contributed to or influenced events on January 6th, and your role in the White House during that period,” the letter said.
Sources familiar with the discussions told the New York Times that Trump had not yet agreed on a date for when she might speak with the committee and that the panel had not made any subpoena threats.
Trump reportedly does not plan to follow in the steps of Steve Bannon, a staunch ally of her father who refused to cooperate with the panel and was later indicted for contempt of Congress. The sources added that Donald Trump had not requested his daughter refuse the committee’s requests.
In the letter addressed to Ivanka Trump last month, the committee revealed new details about attempts to urge Donald Trump to condemn the violence on 6 January 2021.
According to Keith Kellogg, a retired lieutenant general and the former vice-president Mike Pence’s national security adviser, Ivanka Trump and White House officials urged the president twice to condemn the violence.
Donald Trump allegedly said no to aides, including his chief of staff, Mark Meadows, and the White House press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany. Kellogg then asked Ivanka Trump to speak to the president, saying: “She went back in, because Ivanka can be pretty tenacious.”
In an interview with the Washington Examiner last month, the former president criticized the committee’s investigation into his children, saying, “It’s a very unfair situation for my children … Very, very unfair.”
