The special counsel for the Department of Justice has sent subpoenas to Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner. The special counsel is looking into whether or not Donald Trump tried to rig the 2020 presidential election and whether or not he illegally kept and didn’t turn over hundreds of classified and top-secret documents.
“The decision by the special counsel, Jack Smith, to subpoena Ms. Trump and Mr. Kushner underscores how deeply into Mr. Trump’s inner circle Mr. Smith is reaching and is the latest sign that no potential high-level witness is off limits,” The New York Times reports.
The Times reports that on January 6, 2021, the then-daughter president’s attended his address at the Ellipse and was present when he called Mike Pence in the White Office to pressure him to illegally reject the electors in an effort to retain his post.
Officially, Ivanka Trump held the positions of Director of the Office of Economic Initiatives and Entrepreneurship and White House Adviser to the President. Kushner served as the Director of the Office of American Innovation and a Senior Adviser to the White House.
Former U.S. Attorney and former Deputy Assistant Attorney General Harry Litman noted Smith was “going for the jugular” as he was already on MSNBC when the news broke.
In response to the revelation, legal commentator Lisa Rubin of MSNBC noted: “Pence. Meadows. Jared. Ivanka. One of these people has an interesting constitutional defense; the others will likely find themselves in the grand jury at least once—and maybe, depending on the scope of their invocations of executive privilege, twice.”
Andrew Weissman, a former senior DOJ official who is now a legal analyst for MSNBC, termed Special Counsel Jack Smith “tenacious” for subpoenaing Mr. and Mrs. Kushner, adding that they were being asked to testify for sworn grand jury testimony rather than an interview.
“There’s a wealth of information they could have about the fake elector scheme, about putting pressure on DOJ. Obviously, the pressure on Mike Pence,” Weissman told MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace. “Indeed, it could even go into Mar-a-Lago because he couldn’t deal with what was it that they were told about how to retain or not retain documents.”
“This isn’t just about asking for them to come in for an interview, This is about asking them to come in and be in the grand jury,” Weissman stressed. “It shows that Jack Smith is really being tenacious. Usually there are all sorts of accommodations that are made for people like this to be interviewed, to have their counsel present, but this is saying, ‘No, like everyone in America, I’m entitled to everyone’s testimony in the grand jury,’ and they’re being treated just like everyone else.”
“The former president is now the former president, the Attorney General is not Attorney General Barr, and those kinds of accommodations don’t need to be made, or Jack Smith is going to be fired, and you see him really taking advantage of that, and making sure he can get their testimony under oath in the grand jury which is what you really need to do to set up a case going forward if you are going to bring charges.”
