House Jan. 6 panel shows Ivanka Trump opposing claims of 2020 election fraud, in contrast to former President Donald Trump
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WASHINGTON – Ivanka Trump, former President Donald Trump’s daughter and senior adviser, said she accepted the Justice Department’s finding of no fraud sufficient to overturn the 2020 in a video played at a congressional hearing on the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.
Her conclusion stands in contrast to her father’s continued baseless claims the election was stolen.
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Ivanka Trump told the House committee investigating the Capitol attack Jan. 6, 2021, she trusted the finding because she respected then-Attorney General William Barr, who said he resigned in part rather than fight to overturn the election.
“It affected my perspective,” Ivanka Trump said in a videotaped deposition. “I respect Attorney General Barr, so I accepted what he was saying.”
Her husband, Jared Kushner, another senior adviser to Trump, told the committee he was aware White House counsel Pat Cipollone threatened to resign over Trump’s strategy to overturn the election.
Former Senior Advisor to former US President Donald Trump, Jared Kushner appears on screen during a House Select Committee hearing to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the US Capitol, in the Cannon House Office Building on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC on June 9, 2022.
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“I know that him and the team were always saying, `Oh, we’re gonna resign. We’re not gonna be here if this happens, if that happens,'” Kushner said in a videotaped deposition. “So, I kind of took it up to just be whining, to be honest with you.”
The committee interviewed Ivanka Trump and Kushner for details inside the White House during the period leading up to the Capitol attack Jan. 6, 2021, and for more information about what happened that day.
A committee member, Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., has called Trump’s slow reaction to the riot a supreme dereliction of duty. She played the Ivanka Trump and Kushner statements during her opening speech at a Thursday hearing.
More is expected. Retired Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg, former Vice President Mike Pence’s national security adviser, told the committee he urged Ivanka Trump to speak with her father about calming down the crowd. She met with her father at least twice, according to Kellogg.
President Donald Trump, Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump Jr. make their way to board Air Force One before departing from Dobbins Air Reserve Base in Marietta, Georgia on Jan. 4, 2021.
In requesting its interview with Ivanka Trump, the committee wanted to ask what she knew about Trump’s pressure on Pence to reject state electors and about whether to deploy the National Guard as reinforcements to Capitol Police.
“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,” the committee chairman, Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., said in requesting her testimony.
Kushner distanced himself from Trump’s efforts to fight the election results and began planning to relocate to Miami two days after the election, according to a forthcoming book by New York Times’ Peter Baker and New Yorker’s Susan Glasser. Kushner worked with Biden aides on the transition between administrations.
Kushner avoided working with Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, according to the book. “Look, when Rudy got involved, I stopped being involved,” Kushner told Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff, Marc Short.
Kushner believed Trump’s denial of election results was “mainly a way of soothing a wounded ego and explaining defeat,” according to a report.
“We’ll get through it, bear with us,” Kushner told the chief of staff of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky. “We’ve got a couple of challenges that have some merit, we’ll see how they go, but there’s a pretty good chance we come up short.”
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Jan. 6 panel: Ivanka Trump respects DOJ finding no 2020 election fraud