Capitol assault investigation seeks Ivanka Trump’s cooperation

Congressional committee investigating january 6 riots 2021 at the U.S. Capitol on Thursday asked one of former President Donald Trump’s daughters to voluntarily cooperate with the investigation.

In a letter to Ivanka Trump, committee chairman Bennie Thompson said the panel wants her to tell them what she knows about her father’s efforts to thwart congressional ratification that he had lost the November 2020 election. They also want to know what he was doing as his supporters swept Capitol Hill while lawmakers were in the early stages of certifying Democrat Joe Biden as the new president.

It was not immediately known whether he would cooperate with the investigation.

Thompson said the committee wants to meet with Ivanka Trump, an adviser to her father in the White House, because she was in direct contact with him at key moments on Jan. 6, 2021, two weeks before Biden assumed the presidency and Donald Trump left Washington.

Thompson explained that the committee wants to know about the former president’s efforts to pressure then-Vice President Mike Pence to block congressional certification of election results in key states where Biden beat Trump.

“One of the president’s conversations with the vice president occurred by telephone on the morning of January 6,” Thompson wrote in the letter to Ivanka Trump. “He was present in the Oval Office and observed at least one side of that telephone conversation.”

The committee also said it wanted to know about Ivanka Trump’s efforts to have her father call protesters to order after they stormed the Capitol. At an earlier rally near the White House that day, then-President Trump insisted on his unsubstantiated claims. of voter fraud and urged his supporters to go to Capitol Hill and “fight like hell” to prevent Biden from being declared the winner of the 2020 election.

“Testimony obtained by the committee indicates that White House staff members requested his assistance on multiple occasions to intervene in an attempt to persuade President Trump to address the ongoing lawlessness and violence on Capitol Hill,” Thompson wrote.

Then-President Trump remained publicly silent for more than three hours about the rampage by hundreds of his supporters on Capitol Hill, but late in the afternoon, he released a brief video urging them to leave.

As he continues to do to this day, Donald Trump mentioned in the video the false conspiracy theory about him winning the election and said, “I know your pain; I know you’re hurting. We had an election that was stolen from us. It was a landslide election, and everybody knows it. Especially the other side. But you have to go home now. We have to have peace.”

After the Capitol was cleared of protesters, Congress ratified Biden’s electoral victory. in the early hours of January 7. More than 700 protesters have been charged with a range of criminal offenses, some as minor as trespassing and others as serious as attacking police and vandalizing the Capitol.

At a political rally last Saturday, Donald Trump called the arrests “an appalling persecution of political prisoners.”

The investigative committee interviewed more than 300 witnesses and issued subpoenas to dozens more. This week, they included Rudy Giuliani and other members of Trump’s legal team who filed lawsuits before the 2020 election backing up the former president’s false claim that he had been swindled for a second term.

U.S. Supreme Court. rejected on Wednesday the former president’s attempt to prevent the National Archives from sending the investigative panel hundreds of his documents to the White House related to the election and the day of the riots.