Former President Donald Trump derided the House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack over its request to speak with his daughter and former White House adviser, Ivanka Trump.
The request from the January 6 commission is voluntary, and Ivanka Trump has not yet been served with a subpoena order requiring her to speak.
Nevertheless, Trump described the situation as “very unfair,” and said the commission consisted of “vicious people” for daring to ask his daughter to speak with them.
Ivanka Trump, who served in an official role as an aide to her father while he was president, was in the White House the day that the Capitol was attacked by a mob of Trump loyalists, shortly after the former president gave an incendiary speech telling them to “fight like hell” or they “[wouldn’t] have a country anymore.”
The select committee wants to speak with Ivanka Trump about an Electoral College scheme that the Donald Trump campaign purportedly wanted to use and the former president’s actions during the Capitol breach.
“Given Ms. Trump’s presence in the White House on January 6th, the Select Committee is seeking her knowledge about the former President’s actions related to the deployment of the National Guard to respond to the violence,” according to a press release from the commission.
Commission chair Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Mississippi) elaborated on the request, stating they wanted to know whether Trump impeded or ignored requests to quell the attack.
“The Committee has identified no evidence that President Trump issued any order, or took any other action, to deploy the guard that day,” Thompson said in his letter to Ivanka Trump. “Nor does it appear that President Trump made any calls at all to the Department of Justice or any other law enforcement agency to request deployment of their personnel to the Capitol.”
The committee also wants to speak with Ivanka about her father’s “state of mind” during the attack, Thompson added.
Notably, the former president has not been as protective of the adult children of his opponents. In October 2020, two weeks before Election Day, Trump demanded that Attorney General William Barr investigate Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, over allegations made in a heavily disputed story that was published in The New York Post at the time.
“We have got to get the attorney general to act. He’s got to act, and he’s got to act fast,” Trump said.
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