Donald Trump Jr., the son of former President Donald Trump, will speak with investigators of the House select committee investigating the January 6, 2021, attack on the U. S. Capitol building sometime in the near future, sources told ABC News on Thursday.
The former president’s eldest son is set to meet with the January 6 committee sometime “in the coming days,” the news agency said. He is reportedly meeting with investigators voluntarily to share what he knows about the day of the attack, and will likely also discuss text messages he sent to members of the Trump White House in November 2020, encouraging them to disregard the results of the 2020 presidential election.
Trump Jr. will be the third Trump family member to speak with the committee — Trump Sr.’s daughter, Ivanka Trump, and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner (both of whom served in official capacities within the White House during Trump’s term in office) have also spoken with the commission investigating the Capitol attack. Trump Jr.’s fiancee, Kimberly Guilfoyle, who worked on the Trump campaign and spoke in front of the crowd of Trump loyalists on January 6, also spoke to the committee earlier this week, though she was subpoenaed to do so.
Earlier this month, it was reported that Trump Jr. had sent a number of text messages to officials in his father’s administration, including to former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows, in the wake of his father’s loss to now-President Joe Biden. Trump Jr. will likely face questions regarding those messages, which committee vice-chair Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyoming) has described as leaving “no doubt” that the White House “knew exactly what was happening” during the Capitol attack.
On November 5, 2020, for example, just two days after Election Day (and a couple of days before Biden was officially declared the winner), Trump Jr. urged Meadows to use “operational control” within the executive branch of the federal government to ensure that his father would win the election. “POTUS must start 2nd term now,” Trump Jr. said.
Trump Jr. also pushed a scheme (which was attempted but ultimately unsuccessful) to put forward a slate of false electors in several states that his father had lost in order to disrupt the outcome of the Electoral College. Through either counting these fake electors as legitimate or by causing confusion in the official count, Trump Jr. told Meadows, the election could still be won by Trump Sr.
“We either have a vote WE control and WE win OR it gets kicked to Congress” where state delegations within the House of Representatives, which Republicans controlled a majority of, would decide the outcome, Trump Jr. said.
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