Donald Trump’s niece Mary Trump said in an interview that she believes the ex-president was accusing Ivanka Trump of “perjury” after he raged at his daughter following the airing of her testimony to the panel investigating the January 6 riot last week.
On Thursday, the House select committee held their first public hearing on the probe into the events that led to the violent attack on the Capitol in January 2021 and during the proceedings the committee members aired recorded testimony from the former president’s daughter where she relayed how she didn’t support his false claims that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen from him.
Following the prime-time hearing, the one-term president took to his social media platform Truth Social to downplay his daughter’s shocking admission, in which she stated that sided with former Attorney General Bill Barr’s pronouncement that her father’s claims of election fraud were “bulls***”.
“Ivanka Trump was not involved in looking at, or studying, Election results. She has 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 twice-impeached president wrote on his Truth Social account.
When asked by MSNBC anchor Alex Witt what she made of her uncle’s remarks and cousin’s testimony, the former president’s niece noted that her close relatives behaved in a manner that was “exactly what I’d expect from both of them”.
“Ivanka walked a very fine line,” Mary Trump began. “She didn’t say anything necessarily incendiary, but, as we thought would happen, she decided she needed to come down on the side of what the facts support, which is of course that the election was not stolen.”
For her uncle, however, the psychologist noted that while he didn’t “entirely throw her under the bus” he did ultimately, in her assessment, slander his daughter’s name with a rather serious accusation.
“The fact that he said she’d checked out, although that’s kind of rude, isn’t really the issue,” Mary Trump said. “He’s accusing her of perjury, really.”
In the days since the first and second hearing on Monday were aired, Mr Trump has continued to air his grievances against the panel investigating his role in the violent insurrection against the Capitol, a group of lawmakers that he has affectionately labelled the “Unselect House committee”.
Just hours after Monday’s congressional committee heard scathing testimonies that levelled accusations at the ex-president of lying to his supporters, Mr Trump lashed out and slammed the findings from the panel for being “pitiful”.
“The January 6th Unselect Committee is disgracing everything we hold sacred about our Constitution. If they had any real evidence, they’d hold real hearings with equal representation,” Mr Trump wrote in a lengthy statement on Monday. “They don’t, so they use the illegally-constituted committee to put on a smoke and mirrors show for the American people, in a pitiful last-ditch effort to deceive the American public…again.”
Mr Trump unleashed similar attacks against the committee after his daughter, son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and Mr Barr – all of whom were at one point or another considered to be among Trump’s closest advisors and supporters in the White House – provided some of the most explosive revelations in video snippets of their testimonies screened last week.
“Bill Barr was a weak and frightened Attorney General who was always being ‘played’ and threatened by the Democrats and was scared stiff of being impeached,” Mr Trump wrote last week.
Mary Trump conceded during the Sunday interview with MSNBC that she doesn’t believe that these testimonies will greatly impact the relationship between Ivanka and her father. She noted that “there’s probably been some strain there for a long time” which she said has been evidenced by both Mr Kushner and his wife remaining out of the “spotlight” in recent months.
“Their relationship, whether they seem close or not, is entirely transactional,” she said. “Once one or both of them come to the conclusion that there’s nothing in it for them, then they will move on.”
