Ivanka Trump in talks with Jan. 6 panel about cooperating in inquiry

WASHINGTON — Ivanka Trump, former President Donald Trump's eldest daughter who served as one of his senior advisers, is in talks with the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol about the possibility of cooperating with the panel, according to two people familiar with the discussions.

It was not immediately clear whether the negotiations, which aides described as preliminary, would result in Ivanka Trump providing substantive information to the panel or whether they were simply a stalling tactic, as some committee aides fear. But it was the latest example of the panel trying to reach into the former president's inner circle to ascertain what he was doing and saying as rioters stormed the Capitol in his name.

Ivanka Trump was one of several aides who tried and failed to persuade Donald Trump to call off the violence that ultimately injured more than 150 police officers and sent lawmakers and the vice president, Mike Pence, fleeing for their lives.

Ivanka Trump's lawyers have been in talks with the committee since January, when the panel sent her a letter requesting that she give voluntary testimony, according to a person familiar with the discussions.

She has yet to agree on a date when she might talk with the committee's investigators, and the panel has made no threat of an imminent subpoena, the people familiar with the discussions said. Those close to Trump said she had no intention of going down the road taken by her father's ally Steve Bannon, who refused to cooperate with the committee and then was indicted on contempt of Congress charges.

"Ivanka Trump is in discussions with the committee to voluntarily appear for an interview," a spokesperson for her confirmed in a statement Wednesday.

Donald Trump has not requested that his daughter defy the committee's requests as he has done with his other former top aides. And Ivanka Trump would be unlikely to take any step that Donald Trump did not know about and approve of, people familiar with her thinking said.

Instead, the former president has portrayed his adult children as victims of an investigation that he has dismissed as illegitimate.

"It's a very unfair situation for my children," Trump told The Washington Examiner last month. "Very, very unfair."

Ivanka Trump's private discussions with the committee come as lawyers for the panel are also in talks with another potentially key witness: Donald Trump's personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, who helped lead the effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

During those discussions, Giuliani's lawyer has made clear to the committee that the former New York mayor does not intend to provide information against Trump, under the argument that it would violate attorney-client privilege and Trump's claims of executive privilege, but he is considering providing information about his dealings with members of Congress, according to a person familiar with the talks.

As the Capitol was under siege, both Giuliani and Trump called lawmakers in an attempt to delay the certification of Joe Biden's victory.

The committee thus far has treated Ivanka Trump with deference, seeking only her voluntary cooperation, insisting that its members respect her privacy and emphasizing that its questions would be limited to events directly related to the Jan. 6 attack.

That is in part because members of the panel view her as a central witness in their inquiry and worry about a public backlash if it is seen as too aggressive with the former president's family members. The committee has been reluctant to use its subpoena power against members of Donald Trump's family, the news media and members of Congress.

The panel has already obtained some testimony about Ivanka Trump's interactions with her father concerning the Jan. 6 attack and the events that led to the violence.

In a Jan. 20 letter to Ivanka Trump, the committee said it had heard from Keith Kellogg, a retired lieutenant general who was Pence's national security adviser, about Donald Trump's refusal to condemn the violence as the mob engulfed the Capitol, despite White House officials — including Ivanka Trump, at least twice — urging him to do so.

Kellogg testified that Donald Trump had rejected entreaties by him as well as Mark Meadows, his chief of staff, and Kayleigh McEnany, the White House press secretary. Kellogg then appealed to Ivanka Trump to intervene.

"She went back in, because Ivanka can be pretty tenacious," Kellogg testified.

Kellogg also testified that he and Ivanka Trump witnessed a telephone call in the Oval Office on the morning of Jan. 6 in which Donald Trump pressured Pence to go along with a plan to throw out electoral votes for Biden when Congress met to make its official count of the results, thus invalidating the 2020 election and allowing Trump to stay in office.

Kellogg told the committee that the president had accused Pence of not being "tough enough" to overturn the election. Ivanka Trump then said to Kellogg, "Mike Pence is a good man," Kellogg testified.

The investigation threatens to turn an unwelcome spotlight on Ivanka Trump, who has all but vanished from the public eye since the tumultuous end to her father's presidency. During her four years in the Trump administration, she worked to establish a political brand in her own right, focusing on issues of women in the workforce and presenting herself as a more polished Trump, without the mean tweets and erratic behavior.

She delivered a prime-time speech at the Republican National Convention and became one of the biggest draws at fundraisers and as a surrogate on the campaign trail, both for her father and for other Republican candidates.

Donald Trump liked to float the idea that his daughter might run for president herself one day, and after leaving the White House, there was speculation that Ivanka Trump might challenge Sen. Marco Rubio for his seat in Florida, where she moved with her family after Donald Trump's term ended.

Instead, Ivanka Trump has gone mostly dark, surprising even some longtime confidantes. On the social media feeds she spent years curating, she has posted three pictures of herself in the past 13 months: two photographs of her getting her vaccine shots and one delivering food boxes.

She remains in demand for Republican candidates in the midterm elections, but so far she has stayed off the campaign trail and out of the endorsement game. Instead, she has been leading a private life in Miami, a few hours away from her father's complex at Mar-a-Lago, where she is still a subject of fascination for the tabloids.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.