WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The White House will not assert executive privilege for testimony by former President Donald Trump’s daughter and son-in-law and former advisers, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, before the Jan. 6 committee, communications director Kate Bedingfield said on Tuesday.
Speaking to reporters at the White House, Bedingfield said President Joe Biden has been clear “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.”
Jared Kushner is due to testify by remote videolink on Thursday to the House of Representatives Select Committee investigating the deadly attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. The panel also expects to speak to Ivanka Trump, Kushner’s wife and the former president’s older daughter, although it has not said when that would take place.
The committee also continues its scrutiny of the former president and will look into a seven-hour gap in Trump’s telephone records from Jan. 6, 2021, which was first reported by the Washington Post and CBS News this week.
“We would expect that most of the communications coming out of the White House, especially on Jan. 6, would have involved some semblance of authority,” Bennie Thompson, the Democratic chairman of the Select Committee, told reporters at the Capitol.
“And we believe, based on the gaps, that there’s additional work that we have to do to see whether or not that was an effort to avoid communication,” he said.
(Reporting by Nandita Bose and Jeff Mason; additional reporting by Patricia Zengerle; Editing by Chris Reese, David Gregorio and Leslie Adler)
