Trump turns on daughter Ivanka after damning report on Capitol riots

Donald Trump has rounded on his daughter over her video testimony, saying she had ‘checked out’ of his administration by election night.

Then-US president Donald Trump with his daughter and senior White House adviser Ivanka.

Donald Trump turned on his daughter Ivanka as he furiously denied claims that he had orchestrated an attempted coup during the riot at the US Capitol last year.

At Thursday night’s televised hearing from the congressional committee investigating the January 6 riot damning evidence suggesting that the then president led a criminal conspiracy in an attempt to overturn his 2020 election defeat and cling on to power was presented.

In a barrage of posts on his Truth Social platform, Trump even dismissed the video testimony from his daughter shown on Thursday evening. Ivanka, a senior White House adviser, told the committee that she “accepted” and “respected” the verdict of Bill Barr, Trump’s attorney-general, that her father had lost the 2020 election and there was “zero evidence” for his claims of voter fraud.

Trump rounded on both yesterday, dismissing his daughter’s testimony and claiming she had “checked out” of his administration by election night, when his defeat became clear and he made the claim that the vote had been rigged against him.

“Ivanka Trump was not involved in looking at, or studying, election results. She had long since checked out and was, in my opinion, only trying to be respectful to Bill Barr and his position as attorney general (he sucked!),” Trump wrote yesterday, even though his daughter had been at his side for the rally outside the White House on January 6. The riot erupted hours after the rally.

Barr, the most senior White House official to give evidence to the committee, was shown saying that he had told Trump bluntly that his claims that the election was stolen through voter fraud were “bullshit”. “I didn’t want to be a part of it,” said Barr, a former loyalist who resigned in December 2020 as Trump refused to accept the result.

Ivanka Trump testifies during a hearing by the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Thursday night’s revelations included testimony that Trump said Mike Pence, his vice-president, “deserved” to be killed for refusing to block certification of Joe Biden’s victory.

The next hearing on Monday is set to look deeper into the evidence that the former president knew he had lost the election but pressed on with claims that the vote was stolen.

Whipping up his supporters, Trump set in motion the events that led directly to the deadly assault on the Capitol, the committee said. “In our second hearing, you will see that Donald Trump and his advisers knew that he had, in fact, lost the election,” said the committee’s Republican vice-chairwoman Liz Cheney, who has been exiled from the party for her work with the Democrat-led panel.

“Despite this, President Trump engaged in a massive effort to spread false and fraudulent information - to convince huge portions of the US population that fraud had stolen the election from him. This was not true.”

The committee presented testimony from Trump White House staff that they knew the election was lost and that no evidence of fraud could be found. A clip of Jason Miller, Trump’s senior adviser in his re-election campaign, was shown, describing a meeting in the Oval Office at which a member of the data team told “the president in pretty blunt terms that he was going to lose”.

The third hearing, on Wednesday, promises to present evidence that Trump and his associates then planned to sack Barr, installing loyalists to senior posts in the justice department to promote his false claim he had been robbed of victory.

Lawyers were pressured to submit letters claiming that the department had “identified significant concerns that may have impacted the outcome of the election” in key swing states won by Biden. In another extraordinary video clip, expected to be broadcast in full next week, Richard Donoghue, the acting deputy attorney-general, was shown voicing his horror at the plan. “What you’re proposing is nothing less than the Department of Justice meddling in the outcome of a presidential election,” Donoghue said.

In a deluge of posts yesterday, Trump denied the claims, dismissing Barr as “a coward” who had cut a deal with Democrats and the January 6 committee.

Trump lashed out at the testimony, released by Cheney, that at the height of the violence on January 6, as his supporters stormed the Capitol chanting “Hang Mike Pence”, he had said of the threats to kill his vice-president: “Maybe our supporters have the right idea. Mike Pence deserves it.”

“I NEVER said, or even thought of saying, ‘Hang Mike Pence’. This is either a made up story by somebody looking to become a star, or FAKE NEWS!” Trump said yesterday.

Denouncing the committee as a “one sided, totally partisan, POLITICAL WITCH HUNT!” Trump again denied responsibility for the riot, repeating his claim that the 2020 election had been stolen.

“The so-called ‘Rush on the Capitol’ was not caused by me, it was caused by a Rigged and Stolen Election!” he wrote.

Loyal Trump lieutenants leapt to his defence yesterday, as the former president braced for more shocking revelations next week, building towards the riot itself. The fourth hearing on Thursday will focus on Trump’s efforts to bully Pence into blocking Congress from certifying Biden’s election victory. The committee has promised an hour-by-hour breakdown of the events of January 6, and Trump’s actions on the day, in the sixth and final hearing.

Elise Stefanik, the House Republican Conference chairwoman, said that the hearing was “shameless” and a “political circus”.

“Look no further than the fact that they ran [the hearing] during prime-time hours. As you and I both know, a typical serious congressional hearing starts during the day, typically starting at 10am,” she said.

The Times