https://ift.tt/wEcZxH congressional committee investigating the January 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol on Thursday asked former President Donald Trump’s daughter to voluntarily cooperate with its probe.
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 certification that he lost the November 2020 election. They also want to know what he was doing as his supporters rampaged through the Capitol while lawmakers were in the initial stages of certifying Democrat Joe Biden as the new president.
It was not immediately known whether the former first daughter would cooperate with the investigation.
Thompson said the committee wants to meet with Ivanka Trump, a White House adviser to her father, because she was in direct contact with him at key moments on January 6, 2021, two weeks before Biden was inaugurated and Donald Trump left Washington.
Thompson said 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 outpolled Trump.
“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 had stormed into the Capitol. At an earlier rally near the White House that day, then-President Trump urged supporters to go the Capitol and “fight like hell” to stop Biden from being declared the winner of the 2020 election.
“Testimony obtained by the committee indicates that members of the White House staff requested your 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.