(Washington) Ivanka Trump, the daughter of the former American president, testified on Tuesday, a week after her husband Jared Kushner, before the parliamentary committee which seeks to shed light on the role played by Donald Trump in the attack on the 6 January 2021 against the Capitol.
Posted at 6:14 p.m.
His hearing was “still ongoing” in the afternoon, commission chairman Bennie Thompson confirmed to CNN.
“She answers questions. I mean, without elaborating, but she responds, ”he said, adding that he did not know if she had at any time invoked her right to remain silent.
“She came on her own, that has significant value,” he continued.
Close adviser to her father Donald Trump when he was in the White House, Ivanka Trump was not subpoenaed. She had been invited in January to speak before this committee of the House of Representatives, composed mostly of elected Democrats.
They then claimed to have evidence showing that she had tried to convince her father to call for an end to the violence when a crowd of his supporters violently entered Congress on January 6, 2021, to prevent parliamentarians to certify the victory of Joe Biden.
The elected officials are interested in “any conversation” which she would have witnessed or in which she would have participated, in particular a telephone call from Donald Trump on the morning of January 6.
He would then have tried to force his vice-president Mike Pence to stop the counting of the votes of the electors who were to record the victory of Democrat Joe Biden in the November 2020 election.
“You were present in the Oval Office and observed at least part of this telephone conversation,” Bennie Thompson said in his invitation letter.
The commission has already heard from nearly 800 witnesses, including Jared Kushner last week during six hours of video conferencing. Mr. Kushner, husband of Ivanka Trump, was also a close adviser to Donald Trump.
His testimony had been “useful” to the commission, according to one of its members, Elaine Luria.
These testimonies come after several revelations in the press on the months preceding the assault, which had shaken American democracy.
Virginia Thomas, a conservative activist and wife of Dean Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, for example, sent more than 20 messages between November 2020 and January 2021 to Mark Meadows, Donald Trump’s chief of staff, imploring him to block the victory. by Joe Biden.
Jared Kushner’s name appears in one, sent November 13.
The American press also brought to light a gap of almost eight hours in the telephone calls made by Donald Trump from the White House on January 6, 2021, in particular during the period during which the demonstrators forced the entrance of the Capitol.
According to the commission, Mr. Trump could have used unofficial channels, such as hard-to-trace prepaid phones, which the former president strongly denied.
The commission is nearing the conclusion of its investigation and plans to hold public hearings in the spring. She desperately wants to finish her job before the midterm elections in November. If the Democrats lose control of the House on the ballot, it risks being dissolved by the Republicans.