Former President Donald J. Trump’s eldest daughter has yet to commit to an interview, but investigators regard her as an important witness to what he was doing and saying during the riot.
Ivanka Trump, former President Donald J. Trump’s eldest daughter who served as one of his senior advisers, is in talks with the House committee investigating the Jan.6 attack on the Capitol about the possibility of cooperating with the panel, according to two people familiar with the discussions. It was not immediately clear whether the negotiations, which aides described as preliminary, would result in Ms. Trump providing substantive information to the committee or whether they were simply a stalling tactic, as some committee aides fear. But it was the latest example of the panel trying to reach into the former president’s inner circle to ascertain what he was doing and saying as rioters stormed the Capitol in his name. Ms. Trump was one of several aides who tried and failed to persuade Mr. Trump that day to call off the violence that ultimately injured more than 150 police officers and sent lawmakers and the vice president, Mike Pence, fleeing for their lives. Ms. Trump’s lawyers have been in talks with the committee since January, when the panel sent her a letter requesting that she give voluntary testimony, according to a person familiar with the discussions. She has yet to agree on a date when she might talk with the committee’s investigators, and the panel has made no threat of an imminent subpoena, the people familiar with the discussions say. Those close to Ms. Trump said she was hoping to avoid a subpoena and had no intention of going down the road taken by her father’s ally Stephen K. Bannon, who refused to cooperate with the committee and then was indicted on contempt of Congress charges. “Ivanka Trump is in discussions with the committee to voluntarily appear for an interview,” a spokeswoman for Ms. Trump confirmed in a statement on Wednesday. Mr. Trump has not requested that his daughter defy the committee’s requests, as he has done with his other former top aides. And Ms. Trump would be unlikely to take any step that Mr. Trump did not know about and approve of, people familiar with her thinking said. Instead, the former president has portrayed his adult children as victims of an investigation he has dismissed as illegitimate.
