Former President Donald J. Trump’s eldest daughter has yet to commit to an interview, but investigators regard her as an important witness to what he was doing and saying during the riot.
Ivanka Trump has not agreed on a date when she might talk with the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
WASHINGTON — Ivanka Trump, former President Donald J. Trump’s eldest daughter who served as one of his senior advisers, is in talks with the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol about the possibility of cooperating with the panel, according to two people familiar with the discussions.
It was not immediately clear whether the negotiations, which aides described as preliminary, would result in Ms. Trump providing substantive information to the committee or whether they were simply a stalling tactic, as some committee aides fear. But it was the latest example of the panel trying to reach into the former president’s inner circle to ascertain what he was doing and saying as rioters stormed the Capitol in his name.
Ms. Trump was one of several aides who tried and failed to persuade Mr. Trump that day to call off the violence that ultimately injured more than 150 police officers and sent lawmakers and the vice president, Mike Pence, fleeing for their lives.
Ms. Trump’s lawyers have been in talks with the committee since January, when the panel sent her a letter requesting that she give voluntary testimony, according to a person familiar with the discussions.
She has yet to agree on a date when she might talk with the committee’s investigators, and the panel has made no threat of an imminent subpoena, the people familiar with the discussions say. Those close to Ms. Trump said she was hoping to avoid a subpoena and had no intention of going down the road taken by her father’s ally Stephen K. Bannon, who refused to cooperate with the committee and then was indicted on contempt of Congress charges.
“Ivanka Trump is in discussions with the committee to voluntarily appear for an interview,” a spokeswoman for Ms. Trump confirmed in a statement on Wednesday.
Mr. Trump has not requested that his daughter defy the committee’s requests, as he has done with his other former top aides. And Ms. Trump would be unlikely to take any step that Mr. Trump did not know about and approve of, people familiar with her thinking said.
Instead, the former president has portrayed his adult children as victims of an investigation he has dismissed as illegitimate.
ImageThe committee has emphasized that its questions will be limited to events directly related to the attack on the Capitol.Credit…Kenny Holston for The New York Times
“It’s a very unfair situation for my children,” Mr. Trump told The Washington Examiner last month. “Very, very unfair.”
Ms. Trump’s private discussions with the committee come as lawyers for the panel are also in talks with another potentially key witness: Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, who helped lead the effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
During those discussions, Mr. Giuliani’s lawyer has made clear to the committee that the former New York mayor does not intend to provide information against Mr. Trump, under the argument that it would violate attorney-client privilege and Mr. Trump’s claims of executive privilege, but he is considering providing information about his dealings with members of Congress, according to a person familiar with the talks.
As the Capitol was under siege, both he and Mr. Trump called lawmakers in an attempt to delay the certification of Mr. Biden’s victory.
The committee thus far has treated Ms. Trump with deference, seeking only her voluntary cooperation, insisting that its members respect her privacy and emphasizing that its questions would be limited to events directly related to the Jan. 6 attack.
That is in part because members of the panel view her as a central witness in their inquiry and worry about a public backlash if it is seen as too aggressive with the former president’s family members. The committee has been reluctant to use its subpoena power against members of Mr. Trump’s family, the news media and members of Congress.
The committee has already obtained some testimony about Ms. Trump’s interactions with her father concerning the Jan. 6 attack and the events that led to the violence.
In a Jan. 20 letter to Ms. Trump, the committee said it had heard from Keith Kellogg, a retired lieutenant general who was Mr. Pence’s national security adviser, about Mr. Trump’s refusal to condemn the violence as the mob engulfed the Capitol, despite White House officials — including Ms. Trump, at least twice — urging him to do so.
Capitol Riot’s Aftermath: Key Developments
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Civil lawsuits. A federal judge in Washington has ruled that three civil suits against Donald J. Trump related to the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol can move forward. The ruling means the plaintiffs could seek information from the former president over his role in the events.
Classified information. The National Archives said that it had uncovered classified information among documents that Mr. Trump had taken from the White House with him when he left office. The discovery casts new doubts on the former president’s handling of government records.
Phone logs. President Biden ordered the National Archives to turn over White House visitor logs to the House committee, rejecting Mr. Trump’s claim of executive privilege. The panel had previously discovered gaps in White House telephone logs, complicating efforts to recreate what Mr. Trump was doing during the attack.
Mr. Kellogg testified that Mr. Trump had rejected entreaties by him as well as Mark Meadows, his chief of staff, and Kayleigh McEnany, the White House press secretary. Mr. Kellogg then appealed to Ms. Trump to intervene.
“She went back in, because Ivanka can be pretty tenacious,” Mr. Kellogg testified.
ImageVice President Mike Pence on Jan. 6, 2021, after Congress certified the electoral college votes for the presidential election.Credit…Anna Moneymaker for The New York Times
Mr. Kellogg also testified that he and Ms. Trump witnessed a telephone call in the Oval Office on the morning of Jan. 6 in which Mr. Trump pressured Mr. Pence to go along with a plan to throw out electoral votes for Joseph R. Biden Jr. when Congress met to make its official count of the results, thus invalidating the 2020 election and allowing Mr. Trump to stay in office.
Mr. Kellogg told the committee that the president had 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 investigation threatens to turn an unwelcome spotlight on Ms. Trump, who has all but vanished from the public eye since the tumultuous end to her father’s presidency. During her four years in the Trump administration, she worked to establish a political brand in her own right, focusing on issues of women in the work force and presenting herself as a more polished Trump, without the mean tweets and erratic behavior.
She delivered a prime-time speech at the Republican National Convention and became one of the biggest draws at fund-raisers and as a surrogate on the campaign trail, both for her father and for other Republican candidates.
Mr. Trump liked to float the idea that she might run for president herself one day, and after leaving the White House, there was speculation that Ms. Trump might challenge Senator Marco Rubio for his seat in Florida, where she moved with her family after Mr. Trump’s term ended.
Instead, Ms. Trump has gone mostly dark, surprising even some longtime confidantes. On the social media feeds she spent years curating, she has posted three pictures of herself in the past 13 months: two photo ops of her getting her vaccine shots and one delivering food boxes.
She remains in demand for Republican candidates in the midterm elections, but so far she has stayed off the campaign trail and out of the endorsement game. Instead, she has been leading a private life in Miami, a few hours away from her father’s complex at Mar-a-Lago, where she is still a subject of fascination for the tabloids.
Alan Feuer contributed reporting.
Source: nytimes.com
