Jan. 6 hearing revelation: Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump said they privately accepted Donald Trump’s loss In testimony to the congressional investigation of the deadly Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection, Donald Trump’s Jewish daughter and son-in-law made clear how much they had distanced themselves from the former president.
Their statements, which reinforce the U.S. House of Representatives Select Committee’s depiction of a president determined to hold onto power by whatever means possible, underscore how far the couple has strayed from the influence they enjoyed over Trump during most of his presidency.
The previously unreported statements by the couple with influential roles in the Trump administration were revealed Thursday during the Jan. 6 Committee’s prime-time broadcast of its findings, the first in a series.
Jared Kushner, in a video excerpt, said he was too busy organizing presidential pardons to pay attention to threats by the White House counsel, Pat Cipollone, and others to resign because of Trump’s efforts to stay in power based on his false claims he won the election.
“Like I said,” Kushner said, “my interest at that time was on trying to get as many pardons done. Him and the team were always saying, ‘Oh we are going to resign, we are not going to be there if this happens, if that happens.’ So I kind of took it up to just be whining, to be honest with you.”
Kushner was the lead official vetting the pardon requests. Trump’s pardons in his final days drew scrutiny because they disproportionately favored his supporters and others who were close to him. A number of them were close to Kushner, including Kushner’s father Charles and Ken Kurson, who worked for Kushner when he owned the New York Observer. Kushner’s failure to include people favored by other Trump acolytes created tensions in the Trump camp.
In another brief excerpt shown, Ivanka Trump said she was convinced her father lost the election as early as Dec. 1, 2020, when the then-attorney general, William Barr, told the president as much.
“It affected my perspective. I respect Attorney General Barr, so I accepted what he was saying,” she said.
But Ivanka Trump continued to publicly back her father’s efforts to overturn the election through the courts. On Jan. 6, when the insurrectionists sought to stop Congress’s certification of Joe Biden’s election as president, she reportedly tried to get him to call off the mob attacking the Capitol.
Her declaration of respect for Barr was notable: Tensions between Trump and Barr over the election led to Barr’s resignation that December, and the two have lacerated each other in public statements since then.
Trump, in a posting Friday on his social media site, said his daughter “was not involved in looking at or studying election results. She had long since checked out and was, in my opinion, only trying to be respectful to Bill Barr and his position as attorney general (he sucked!)”...............
https://www.jta.org/2022/06/10/politics/jan-6-hearing-revelation-jared-kushner-and-ivanka-trump-said-they-privately-accepted-donald-trumps-loss
