New Delhi: Members of former US President Donald Trump's inner circle – including his daughter Ivanka Trump – have cast doubt on his claims of a stolen election as the first public hearing of the January 6 House committee takes place on Thursday. According to the Guardian, former White House adviser Ivanka Trump told the congressional panel investigating the insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, that she does not believe her father’s false claims of voting fraud in the 2020 Presidential election.
As per the report, Ivanka Trump's statement was shown in a video deposition to the public for the first time during the first hearing of the House panel. She stated that her perspective was changed after hearing that Bill Barr, Trump’s attorney general for most of 2020, had told her father repeatedly that he had lost the election.
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“I respect Attorney General Barr. So I accepted what he was saying,” Ivanka Trump told congressional investigators, as quoted by the Guardian.
The committee also showed a video of Bill Barr’s appearance the before panel wherein he called the fraud claims by his former boss as “bullshit”. He said that he had “repeatedly told the president in no uncertain terms that I did not see evidence of fraud that would have affected the outcome of the election. And frankly, a year and a half later, I still haven’t”, the Guardian reported.
He further stated that he told the president at the time that there was “zero basis” for his allegations that the presidential election was rigged against him.
According to Barr, he spoke to Donald Trump shortly after the November 2020 result, and “I made it clear to him that I did not agree with the idea of saying the election was stolen, and putting out this stuff, which I told the president was bullshit, and I didn’t want to be a part of it.”
Meanwhile, January 6 committee also aired violent, previously unseen footage of rioters beating US capitol police and smashing way into the building.
With never-seen videos, new audio, and a mass of evidence, the House committee investigating the Jan 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol attempts to show the “harrowing story” of the deadly violence that erupted that day and also a chilling backstory as the defeated president, Donald Trump, tried to overturn Joe Biden's election victory.
Thursday's prime-time hearing features the committee's accounts from Trump's aides and family members, interviewed behind closed doors, of the deadly siege that Democrats and others say put U.S. democracy at risk.
The committee's investigation with 1,000 interviews is intended to stand as a public record for history. A final report aims to provide an accounting of the most violent attack on the Capitol since the British set fire to it in 1814.