The House committee investigating the riots on the US Capitol is asking Ivanka Trump, daughter of former US President Donald Trump, to voluntarily cooperate with the committee.
According to The Associated Press, the committee sent a letter on Thursday requesting a meeting in February with Trump, who served a White House adviser to her father.
In the letter, the committee chairman, Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS), said Ivanka Trump was in direct contact with her father during key moments on January 6, 2021, when Trump supporters stormed the Capitol in an effort to halt the congressional certification of Joe Biden's presidential win.
The committee says it wants to discuss what Ivanka Trump knew about her father's efforts, including a telephone call they say she witnessed, to pressure then-Vice President Mike Pence to reject those results, as well as concerns she may have heard from Pence's staff, members of Congress and the White House counsel's office about those efforts.
“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 to Ivanka Trump, according to AP.
The committee is narrowing in on three requests to Ivanka Trump, starting with a conversation alleged to have taken place between her father and Pence on the morning of the attack. The committee said Keith Kellogg, who was Pence's national security adviser, was also in the room and testified to investigators that Trump questioned whether Pence had the courage to delay the congressional counting of the electoral votes.
“You were present in the Oval Office and observed at least one side of that telephone conversation,” the letter to Ivanka Trump said, adding that the committee “wishes to discuss the part of the conversation you observed” between the then-president and Pence.
The other requests in the letter to Ivanka Trump concern conversations after her father tweeted, “Mike Pence didn't have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution.” The committee said White House staff and even members of Congress requested Ivanka Trump's help in trying to convince her father that he should address the violence and tell rioters to go home.
“We are particularly interested in this question: Why didn't White House staff simply ask the President to walk to the briefing room and appear on live television - to ask the crowd to leave the capital?” the letter says.
The committee has so far subpoenaed a host of Trump allies, most recently his former lawyers Rudy Giuliani, Jenna Ellis and Sidney Powell who were summoned on Tuesday.
The House has already voted to hold two Trump associates - former White House senior advisor Steve Bannon and former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows - in contempt of Congress for noncompliance with the subpoena.