The panel’s letter to Ms. Trump is the latest step it has taken to obtain information from the former president’s family about the Capitol riot.
Ivanka Trump, the daughter of former President Donald J. Trump, served as one of his senior advisers.
WASHINGTON — The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol sent a letter on Thursday to Ivanka Trump, the daughter of former President Donald J. Trump, seeking her cooperation with its inquiry.
The letter to Ms. Trump, who served as one of the president’s senior advisers, comes after Representative Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming and the vice chairwoman of the Jan. 6 select committee, said the panel had gathered evidence that Ms. Trump had implored her father to call off the violence as a mob of his supporters stormed the Capitol.
“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,” Ms. Cheney said in an interview on ABC News this month.
In the committee’s letter, Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi and the panel’s chairman, said that investigators had received information from Keith Kellogg, a retired lieutenant general who was Vice President Mike Pence’s national security adviser. Mr. Kellogg said that he and Ms. Trump were in the Oval Office on the morning of Jan. 6 when Mr. Trump pressured Mr. Pence in a phone call to go along with a plan to throw out electoral votes for Joseph R. Biden Jr. in an effort to keep Mr. Trump in office.
Mr. Kellogg told the committee that the president accused Mr. Pence of not being “tough enough” to overturn the election.
Ms. Trump then turned to Mr. Kellogg and said, “Mike Pence is a good man,” Mr. Kellogg testified.
“The committee has information suggesting that President Trump’s White House counsel may have concluded that the actions President Trump directed Vice President Pence to take would violate the Constitution or would be otherwise illegal,” Mr. Thompson wrote. “Did you discuss those issues with any member of the White House Counsel’s Office?”
The letter also revealed that an unidentified member of the House Freedom Caucus who was aware of Mr. Trump’s plans warned Mark Meadows, the former White House chief of staff, in a text message that “if POTUS allows this to occur … we’re driving a stake in the heart of the federal republic.”
The letter is the latest step that the committee has taken to obtain information from Mr. Trump’s family about the events that led up to the Capitol riot. The panel has also sought logs of phone calls and text messages between the former president’s son Eric Trump and Kimberly Guilfoyle, the girlfriend of another son, Donald Trump Jr., according to CNN.
The panel won a major victory on Wednesday evening, when the Supreme Court refused a request from the former president to block the release of White House records concerning the Jan. 6 attack, effectively rejecting Mr. Trump’s claim of executive privilege and clearing the way for the House committee to start receiving the documents.
Within hours of the decision, the National Archives began the process of turning over hundreds of pages of documents to the committee. A spokesman for the panel said on Thursday that the committee had received some of the documents and expected the rest to be delivered as quickly as the archives could produce them.
Source: nytimes.com
