WASHINGTON --
The Home committee investigating the U.S. Capitol revolt is asking Ivanka Trump, daughter of former president Donald Trump, to voluntarily cooperate as lawmakers make their first public try to rearrange an interview with a Trump member of the family.
The committee despatched a letter Thursday requesting a gathering in February with Ivanka Trump, a White Home adviser to her father. Within the letter, the committee chairman, Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., mentioned Ivanka Trump was in direct contact together with her father throughout key moments on Jan. 6, 2021, when Trump supporters stormed the Capitol in an effort to halt the congressional certification of Joe Biden's presidential win.
The riot adopted a rally close to the White Home the place Donald Trump had urged his supporters to "struggle like hell" as Congress convened to certify the 2020 election outcomes.
The committee says it needs to debate what Ivanka Trump knew about her father's efforts, together with a phone name they are saying she witnessed, to stress then-Vice President Mike Pence to reject these outcomes, in addition to issues she might have heard from Pence's workers, members of Congress and the White Home counsel's workplace about these efforts.
"Ivanka Trump simply realized that the January 6 Committee issued a public letter asking her to look," her spokesperson mentioned. "Because the Committee already is aware of, Ivanka didn't communicate on the January 6 rally."
The committee cited testimony that Ivanka Trump implored her father to quell the violence by his supporters and investigators need to ask about her actions whereas the revolt was underway.
"Testimony obtained by the Committee signifies that members of the White Home workers requested your help on a number of events to intervene in an try to steer President Trump to deal with the continued lawlessness and violence on Capitol Hill," Thompson wrote.
The letter is the committee's first try to hunt info from contained in the Trump household. Earlier this week, it issued subpoenas to lawyer Rudy Giuliani and different members of Trump's authorized staff who filed meritless court docket challenges to the election that fueled the lie that the race had been stolen from Trump.
The committee is narrowing in on three requests to Ivanka Trump, beginning with a dialog alleged to have taken place between Donald Trump and Pence on the morning of the assault. The committee mentioned Keith Kellogg, who was Pence's nationwide safety adviser, was additionally within the room and testified to investigators that Trump questioned whether or not Pence had the braveness to delay the congressional counting of the electoral votes.
The Structure makes clear that a vp's position is essentially ceremonial within the certification course of, and Pence had issued a press release earlier than the congressional session that laid out his conclusion that a vp couldn't declare "unilateral authority" to reject states' electoral votes.
"You have been current within the Oval Workplace and noticed no less than one aspect of that phone dialog," the letter to Ivanka Trump mentioned, including that the committee "needs to debate the a part of the dialog you noticed" between the then-president and Pence.
The letter additionally talked about a message, within the days earlier than the scheduled vote certification on Jan. 6, 2021, between an unidentified member of the Home Freedom Caucus to then-White Home chief of workers Mark Meadows with an specific warning: "If POTUS permits this to happen ... we're driving a stake within the coronary heart of the federal republic." POTUS is an abbreviation for president of the US.
The opposite requests within the letter to Ivanka Trump concern conversations after Donald Trump's tweeted, "Mike Pence did not have the braveness to do what ought to have been carried out to guard our Nation and our Structure." The committee mentioned White Home workers and even members of Congress requested Ivanka Trump's assist in attempting to persuade her father that he ought to tackle the violence and inform rioters to go residence.
"We're notably on this query: Why did not White Home workers merely ask the President to stroll to the briefing room and seem on stay tv -- to ask the gang to go away the capital?"
Apart from the subpoenas issued this week, the committee had a victory Wednesday when the Supreme Court docket rejected a bid by Trump to dam the discharge of White Home data sought by lawmakers.
The Nationwide Archives started to show over the a whole bunch of pages of data to the nine-member committee nearly instantly. They embrace presidential diaries, customer logs, speech drafts and handwritten notes coping with Jan. 6 from the Meadows' information.
The committee's investigation has touched practically each nook of Trump's orbit within the practically seven months because it was created, from strategist Steve Bannon to media firms resembling Twitter, Meta and Reddit.
The committee says it has interviewed practically 400 individuals and issued dozens of subpoenas because it prepares a report set for launch earlier than the November elections. Nonetheless, the committee has run into roadblocks from a few of Trump's allies, together with Bannon and Meadows, who've refused to completely cooperate. Their resistance has led the committee to file fees of contempt of Congress.
The seven Democrats and two Republicans on the committee have additionally confronted defiance from fellow lawmakers. Home Minority Chief Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., and GOP Reps. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania and Jim Jordan of Ohio have denied the committee's requests for voluntary cooperation.
Whereas the committee has thought of subpoenaing fellow lawmakers, that will be a unprecedented transfer and will run up towards authorized and political challenges.
The committee says the extraordinary trove of fabric it has collected -- 35,000 pages of data thus far, together with texts, emails and telephone data from individuals near Trump -- is fleshing out vital particulars of the worst assault on the Capitol in two centuries.
The following section of the investigation will embrace a sequence of public hearings within the coming months.
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Related Press author Darlene Superville contributed to this report.
Ivanka Trump speaks to introduce President Donald Trump from the South Garden of the White Home on the fourth day of the Republican Nationwide Conference, Thursday, Aug. 27, 2020, in Washington. (AP Photograph/Evan Vucci)
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