WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Donald Trump’s daughter and adviser Ivanka Trump told a congressional panel investigating the U.S. Capitol attack that even she does not believe the former president’s false claims that his 2020 election defeat resulted from widespread voting fraud.
Ivanka Trump, one of her father’s most trusted allies during his four years in the White House, appeared in a video deposition shown during the first in a series of congressional hearings by a House of Representatives select committee investigating the deadly Jan. 6, 2021, attack.
“I respect Attorney General (William) Barr. So I accepted what he was saying,” Ivanka Trump told congressional investigators.
And what Barr was saying, Ivanka testified, was that his Justice Department had discovered no significant fraud to support President Trump’s claim – one the former president is still making – that massive voter fraud in several key states caused the 2020 election to be “stolen” from him.
The committee showed a video of Barr’s appearance before panel investigators. In that video, Barr called his former boss’ fraud claims “bullshit”
The former president has been more successful in persuading Republican voters of this view. A Reuters/Ipsos poll completed on Wednesday found that 58% of Republicans viewed the outcome of the 2020 election to be the result of fraud.
Also shown testifying was Ivanka husband, Jared Kushner, another of the former president’s top aides. In the video, the president’s son-in-law mentioned “whining,” referring to top Trump aides threatening to resign because of the Jan. 6 attack.
The Jan. 6, 2021, riot followed shortly after Trump gave an incendiary speech to thousands of supporters outside the White House, repeating his false claims of a stolen 2020 election and urging them to march on the Capitol and “fight like hell.”
Former US President Donald Trump orchestrated last year’s Capitol riot in an “attempted coup”, a congressional inquiry has heard as a prime-time hearing opened into the raid.
Liz Cheney, the Republican vice-chair of the committee, said Mr Trump had “lit the flame of this attack”.
Bennie Thompson, a Democrat, said the riot endangered American democracy.
Democratic committee chief Thompson accused Trump of being “at the center of this conspiracy.”
“January 6 was the culmination of an attempted coup – a brazen attempt, as one rioter put it shortly after January 6 – to overthrow the government. The violence was no accident,” he said.
Rioters acted “at the encouragement of the president of the United States,” to march on Congress and block the formal transfer of power by lawmakers to Biden, he added.
And there was an audible gasp in the committee room as Ms Cheney read an account that claimed Mr Trump, when told the rioters were chanting for Vice President Mike Pence to be hanged for refusing to block the election results, suggested that he “deserves it”.
The former president has been publicly hinting about another White House run in 2024. He continues to peddle unsubstantiated claims that the last election was rigged by mass voter fraud.
The congressional committee is led by Democrats, who formed the panel after Republicans blocked attempts to set up a full independent inquiry. Just two Republicans – the staunchly anti-Trump Reps Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney – are taking part.
The goal of the committee is to provide a comprehensive account of not only the 6 January riot but the “coordinated, multi-step effort” to “overturn” the results of the 2020 presidential election.
Members plan to produce a report and possibly hold another hearing in September to outline their findings and offer suggestions for reforms to the US electoral process.
