Ivanka Trump told the Democrat-run committee investigating the January 6, 2021 riot on Capitol Hill that she “accepted” former Attorney General Bill Barr’s statement that Donald Trump’s claims of 2020 election fraud were “bulls**t.”
“I respect Attorney General Barr. So I accepted what he was saying,” Trump, who served as an advisor to her father, said in a Thursday video deposition shown by Representative Liz Cheney, a Republican opponent of the ex-president.
A month after the 2020 election, Barr released a statement saying that the US Department of Justice had found no evidence of fraud widespread enough to have swung the vote for Joe Biden. In his testimony to the January 6 Committee, Barr said that he had “made it clear” to Trump in late 2020 that he considered the then-president’s claims “bulls**t,” and that he “did not want to be a part of it.”
Following his daughter’s testimony, Trump posted his response on Truth Social, his own social media platform.
“Ivanka Trump was not involved in looking at, or studying, Election results,” he posted on Friday morning. “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!).”
In the days and weeks after the 2020 election, Trump accused Democrats of “rigging” the 2020 election against him through fraudulent mail-in ballots and pausing counts in several key swing states, before resuming to count late-night pro-Biden ballot “dumps.” While Biden did surge from behind after the “dumps” were counted, multiple lawsuits by the Trump campaign have failed to substantiate his claims of fraud.
Trump again restated these claims of fraud at a speech in Washington, DC on January 6, 2021, immediately before a crowd of his supporters entered the US Capitol, briefly halting the certification of Joe Biden’s electoral victory.
While the stated purpose of the January 6 Committee is to “investigate and report upon the facts, circumstances, and causes” of the riot, its website already describes the affray as a “domestic terrorist attack,” and “one of the darkest days of our democracy,” and several of its members have publicly blamed Trump for the violent protest.
House Republican Conference Chairwoman Elise Stefanik has accused the committee of running a “partisan political witch hunt,” while Trump himself released a statement on Wednesday panning the upcoming hearings.
“The Unselect Committee didn’t spend one minute studying the reason that people went to Washington, DC, in massive numbers, far greater than the Fake News Media is willing to report,” he wrote, calling the committee’s members “political thugs.”
While the hearings have received blanket media coverage thus far, recent polling shows that American voters are more concerned about gas prices and inflation than relitigating January 6. Furthermore, the share of voters blaming Trump for the events of January 6 has continued to decrease, with a recent NBC News poll revealing that 55% of voters now find that the president was only “somewhat” or “not really” responsible for the riot.