The Dept. of Justice’s special counsel investigating Donald Trump’s role in the attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election and the ex-president’s unlawful retention and refusal to return hundreds of classified and top secret documents has issued subpoenas to Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner.
“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 notes that the then-president’s daughter was with her father during his speech at the Ellipse on January 6, 2021, and with him in the Oval Office that day when he called his vice president, pressuring Mike Pence to unlawfully reject the electors in an effort to keep him in office.
Ivanka Trump officially served as White House Advisor to the President and the Director of the Office of Economic Initiatives and Entrepreneurship. Kushner was a White House Senior Advisor and the Director of the Office of American Innovation.
Former U.S. Attorney and former Deputy Assistant Attorney General Harry Litman, who was already on MSNBC as the news broke, observed Smith was “going for the jugular.”
MSNBC legal analyst Lisa Rubin, responding to the news, observed: “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.”
Former top DOJ official Andrew Weissman, also an MSNBC legal analyst and on the air at the time, called Special Counsel Jack Smith “tenacious” for subpoenaing Mr. and Mrs. Kushner, noting they were not being asked to appear for an interview, but for sworn grand jury testimony.
“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.”
Weissman, asked if he thinks Bill Barr would also be subpoenaed, he said the former Trump Attorney General likely either has or will be subpoenaed before the grand jury. Litman countered that Barr may have already appeared voluntarily.
Image via Shutterstock