Donald Trump has thrown his own daughter under the bus after she revealed she didn’t think the 2020 presidential election was rigged.
Ivanka Trump’s testimony to the committee investigating the January 6th insurrection saw her back up Trump Attorney General Bill Barr’s assertion that the election wasn’t stolen from her father.
Ivanka, a businesswoman, former fashion model and the daughter of the former US president, made the statement in a 17-second clip of her interview to the committee that was played during a hearing on Thursday.
“I respect Attorney General Barr. So I accepted what he said — was saying,” she said.
The clip was part of the first televised hearing of the committee investigating the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol, in which committee members accused the former president of encouraging the violence.
Five people died in the riot, including a Capitol police officer, with the threat of violence explicit in much of the build up.
Committee chairman Bennie Thompson emphasised in his opening statement that he held Trump personally responsible for the attack.
He accused the then-president of "trying to stop the peaceful transfer of power".
On Friday, Donald Trump responded to say Ivanka was “not involved in looking” at the results of the 2020 election.
"Ivanka Trump was not involved in looking at, or studying, Election results,” he wrote on Truth Social, the network he helped establish after he was banned from Twitter.
He continued to say his daughter had “long since checked out” and in his opinion was “only trying to be respectful to Bill Barr and his position as attorney general (he sucked)”.
It marks a change in tone from Trump, who has long been known to have a close relationship with his daughter - who was seen as his favourite child.
Ivanka served as an advisor in his White House and Trump often said she could one day be president.
It comes after Trump has turned on other advisors who had testified before the panel and refused to back his false claim he won the 2020 election over Joe Biden.
However, it was believed that Ivanka testified before the panel with tacit approval from her father.
The former president made a series of posts on Truth Social, denying that his vice president Mike Pence should be hanged for not supporting his false claim about winning the election.
He went on to repeat his false claims about having won the election and berated lawmakers for not investigating his allegations of election fraud - which had never been proven.
Ivanka Trump spent eight hours in April testifying before the House committee that was investigating the attack on the Capitol.
She was reportedly one of the White House staff who went to the Oval Office multiple times on January 6th and asked her father to tell his supporters to leave the premises.
According to a former book, The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021, by New York Times reporter Peter Baker and New Yorker reporter Susan Glasser, she and her husband Jared Kushner were preparing for their post-White House lives shortly after the election and Trump’s subsequent false claims.
The hearing investigating the shocking January 6th incident has also heard of how the former president’s repeated lies about election fraud and his public effort to stop Joe Biden ’s victory led to the attack and imperilled US democracy.
Footage shown to the hearing included the chilling image of a noose strung up outside the Capitol building.
