Ivanka Trump feared the nation’s capital could erupt in violence on January 6 after hearing her dad attack and humiliate Vice President Pence over the phone, Timothy L. O’Brien, author of the 2000s Trump biography TrumpNation, has said.
“Absolutely. We know from other accounts of what she did that day that she honoured the fact that Mike Pence was resisting Donald Trump’s pressure to decertify the electoral results on January 6 at the Capitol,” O’Brien said, speaking to MSNBC on Saturday, after being asked whether Mrs. Trump may have had “a bad feeling” ahead of her father’s White House rally.
“And then she obviously was in the Oval Office with several other campaign advisors, including lawyers, who heard him swearing at Mike Pence, who heard him grow increasingly angry at Mike Pence because Mike Pence wouldn’t do what Donald Trump wanted him to do, which was to break the law,” O’Brien added.
In taped testimony released by the House panel this week, Ivanka recalled a “pretty heated” conversation between her dad and Pence on the fateful January day. “When I entered the office the second time he was on the telephone with who I later found out was the vice president. It was a different tone than I’d heard him take with the vice president before,” she said.
In separate testimony, Ivanka’s former chief of staff Julie Radford indicated that Mrs. Trump had communicated to her that her father “had an upsetting conversation with the vice president,” and that he’d called Pence the “P-word.” Trump also reportedly called the Pence a “wimp,” according to Nick Luna, another former staffer.
Ivanka also testified that Attorney General Bill Barr’s position that there was no evidence that the 2020 election was rigged “affected [her] perspective,” saying she has “respect” for Barr, “so I accepted what he was saying.”
Donald Trump dismissed Mrs. Trump’s testimony, saying she didn’t know what she was talking about and had “checked out” after the election.
“Ivanka Trump 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!),” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform last week.
Trump also commented on other claims made by committee, including the allegation that he had incited the “hang Mike Pence” refrain shouted by protesters outside the Capitol on January 6. “I NEVER said, or even thought of saying, ‘Hang Mike Pence’. This is either a made up story by somebody looking to become a star, or FAKE NEWS!...The so-called ‘Rush on the Capitol’ was not caused by me, it was caused by a Rigged and Stolen Election,” Trump insisted.
'Weak' Not 'Wimp'
He also dismissed that he called Pence a “wimp,” but admitted that the VP was “weak.”
“I never called Mike Pence a wimp. I never called him a wimp. Mike Pence had a chance to be great. He had a chance to be frankly historic. But just like Bill Barr and the rest of these weak people, Mike and I say it sadly ‘cause I like him, but Mike did not have the courage to act,” Trump said, speaking at the Faith and Freedom conference on Friday.
“Mike was afraid of whatever he was afraid of, but as you heard a year and a half ago, Mike Pence ‘had absolutely no choice to be a human conveyor belt’. He was a human conveyor belt, even if he was the votes were fraudulent,” Trump said.
The former president and his allies have dismissed the ongoing public hearings of the House January 6 committee as a partisan farce, pointing to the committee’s makeup of all Democrats and Never-Trump Republicans, and alleging the prime time hearings constitute a “show trial” meant to prop up Democrats ahead of the November midterms.
Trump has long maintained his non-involvement in the breach of the Capitol by a mob of supporters, holding a separate ‘Stop the Steal’ rally at the White House, several kilometers from the Capitol complex, and telling protesters to “stay peaceful” and “go home” later in the day before having his Twitter handle suspended. A day after the violence, Trump “unequivocally” condemned the “heinous attack on the United States Capitol,” saying he was “outraged by the violence, lawlessness and mayhem,” and that America must be “a nation of law and order.”
Democrats have accused the former president of seeking to overturn the 2020 election results via a violent coup, and have sought to permanently bar him from public office and, if possible, refer him to the Justice Department for criminal prosecution.