Ivanka Trump wanted her father to continue fighting the 2020 election result well into December, new documentary footage shows, contradicting her testimony in the recent 6 January hearings that she quickly accepted Donald Trump’s election loss.
The former president’s daughter wanted Mr Trump to “continue to fight until every legal remedy is exhausted,” she told a film crew in mid-December, as part of a yet-to-be-released documentary.
“As the president has said, every single vote needs to be counted and needs to be heard, and he campaigned for the voiceless,” Ms Trump said in an interview for the forthcoming series Unprecendented, according to footage obtained by CNN.
“I think a lot of Americans feel very, very disenfranchised right now, and really, question the sanctity of our elections, and that’s not right, it’s not acceptable,” she added, according to unseen excerpts of the interview reported by The New York Times.
This support for the former president’s election challenge runs counter to Ms Trump’s testimony earlier this month in Congress, that she endorsed Trump administration attorney general Bill Barr’s finding that no meaningful election fraud had occured and Joe Biden’s win was legitimate.
“It affected my perspective,” Ms Trump told the special 6 January committee in her recorded testimony. “I respected Attorney General Barr, and accepted what he was saying.”
The Independent has reached out to Ms Trump for comment.
According to futher reporting by CNN, citing an anonymous source close the Trumps, the president’s daughter didn’t actually believe in Donald Trump’s election challenges, but wanted to support him publicly anyway.
“She didn’t really believe what she said,” according to CNN reporter Pamela Brown. “She didn’t want to contradict her dad. That is why she said what she said.”
The Trumps agreed to be in the documentary, according to the source, because they thought it would be a “puff-puff-puff” piece.
The interview is part of a tranche of recordings from filmmaker Alex Holder, which have been turned over to the congressional committee investigating the events of 6 January.
Mr Holder interviewed Donald, Ivanka, and Eric Trump, as well as Jared Kusher and vice-president Mike Pence in the days surrounding the end of the 2020 election, according to conversations which will be released in a forthcoming series on streamer Discovery+ this summer.
During this month’s 6 January hearings, Ivanka Trump has distanced herself from Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
She told the committee about how her father bashed Mike Pence in a “heated” phone call on 6 January itself.
Julie Radford, a former chief of staff to Ms Trump said she told her that “her dad had just had an upsetting conversation with the vice president”.
Ms Radford said Ms Trump said her father called Mr Pence “the P-word”.
Mr Trump, for his part, has dismissed his daughter’s testimony about the fevered post-election season.
“Ivanka Trump was not involved in looking at, or studying, election results. She had long since checked out and was, in my opinion, only trying to be respectful to Bill Barr and his position as Attorney General (he sucked!),” the former president wrote on his social network Truth Social on Friday.
Earlier this year, an eyewitness testified to the 6 January committee that Ms Trump twice urged her father to “stop the violence” on 6 January itself.
