Near the beginning of March, President Joe Biden stated that he would not be using his executive privilege in the cases of former Trump administrators Pete Navarro and Michael Flynn.
Doing so would keep them from testifying before the House select committee investigating the events of Jan. 6 and the infamous Capitol riot.
Now, the White House has also confirmed that President Biden will not be asserting executive privilege for former U.S. President Donald Trump’s daughter Ivanka Trump, nor will he be invoking said executive privilege for her husband Jared Kushner.
As the former president’s son-in-law, Kushner voluntarily agreed to testify in front of the House select committee sometime this week. Request for Ivanka Trump’s testimony was requested at the end of January.
During a press briefing on Tuesday, Kate Bedingfield, White House Communications Director, said: “The president has spoken to the fact that Jan. 6 was one of the darkest days in our country’s history and that we must have a full accounting of what happened to ensure that it never happens again.”
Bedingfield relayed the views of President Biden and his administration carefully, stating that the role of executive privilege is not to hide information away from lawmakers or the American public.
She continued on: “And he’s been quite clear that they posed a unique threat to our democracy and that the constitutional protections of executive privilege should not be used to shield from Congress or the public information about an attack on the Constitution itself. So, as a result, the White House has decided not to assert executive privilege over the testimony of Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump.”
The denial of executive privilege follows the Monday ruling that Donald Trump and his legal adviser John Eastman likely committed several federal felonies in relation to the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
Investigators working with the House select committee said on Tuesday that they will also be requesting an interview with the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas following recent events surrounding Virginia “Ginni” Thomas and various messages she sent to former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows.
As a long-time activist for conservative ideology, Thomas’s messages called for Meadows to push for efforts to prohibit the confirmation of the 2020 presidential election results.
Investigators also expressed interest in speaking with both Ivanka Trump and her husband Jared Kushner about their actions leading up to and during the Capitol attack.
Bedingfield chose not to answer questions about whether or not the denial of executive privilege had been expressed to Kushner or his legal team. Just as well, neither Trump or Kushner ever publicly stated that they had any intentions of refusing to testify before the House select committee, and neither ever expressed any intention to invoke executive privilege themselves, despite that tactic being fairly common amongst other former Trump administration officials who have been asked to offer their testimony to the committee.
