Ivanka Trump, former U.S. President Donald Trump’s eldest daughter and one of his senior advisers, testified Tuesday before the House of Representatives committee investigating the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Her testimony, given remotely, came days after her husband, Jared Kushner, another former senior White House adviser, testified virtually before the committee.
The nine lawmakers investigating the attack — seven Democrats and two Republicans — have been intrigued by the role Ivanka Trump played at the White House as her father made last-minute pleas to then-Vice President Mike Pence to try to block lawmakers from certifying Joe Biden’s presidential win.
After hundreds of his supporters stormed the Capitol, President Trump was widely reported to have rebuffed pleas from his aides, including at least two from Ivanka, to call off the rioters. Later in the afternoon that day, he released a video urging the throng to leave the Capitol.
“So, go home. We love you. You’re very special,” he told the rioters, adding, “I know your pain. I know you’re hurt. We had an election that was stolen from us. It was a landslide election, and everyone knows it. Especially the other side. But you have to go home now. We have to have peace.”
The former president continues to spread the false conspiracy theory that he won the election.
Committee chairman Bennie Thompson called Kushner’s testimony “valuable” and “helpful.”
“There were some things revealed, but we’ll just share that a little later,” Thompson told reporters.
Several key Trump and Pence aides have been among the more than 800 witnesses who have testified before the investigative panel. Other aides have refused to testify, forcing the committee to pursue contempt of Congress charges against them.
More than 775 protesters have been charged with an array of criminal offenses in the riot ranging from minor trespassing allegations to charges that they attacked one or more of the 140 police officers injured during the riot.
In pursuing Ivanka Trump’s testimony, Thompson said the committee wants to know about the former president’s efforts to pressure Pence to block congressional certification of election results in key states where Biden edged Trump in the popular vote and thus claimed all of the electoral votes in those states.
“One of the president’s discussions with the vice president occurred by phone on the morning of January 6th,” Thompson wrote in the letter to Ivanka Trump. “You were present in the Oval Office and observed at least one side of that telephone conversation.”
The committee also said it wanted to learn about Ivanka Trump’s efforts to get her father to call off rioters after they stormed the Capitol. At an earlier rally near the White House that day, the former president urged supporters to go to the Capitol and “fight like hell” to stop Biden from being certified the winner of the 2020 election.
Hundreds of his supporters smashed windows and doors, ransacked offices and scuffled with police. Five people died that day or in the immediate aftermath, with one Trump protester fatally shot by a Capitol Police officer.
To date, more than 200 people have pleaded guilty or been convicted of criminal charges. Many have received sentences of a few weeks in jail, although some facing assault charges have been sentenced to more than four years. The rest of the cases remain unresolved as investigators pore through vast video footage of the mayhem to identify the rioters.