Ivanka Said Her Dad Should ‘Continue to Fight’ While Knowing He Lost

Ivanka Trump said that her father should “continue to fight until every legal remedy is exhausted” to challenge his election loss—even though she’d already admitted she knew the claims underpinning those challenges were utter bullshit.

Trump made the comments on Dec. 10, 2020, to documentarian Alex Holder, whose video was recently subpoenaed by the House Jan. 6 Select Committee. The video was shown to the New York Times.

Attorney General Bill Barr testified to the committee that he had told then-President Donald Trump that his claims were “bullshit” and “crazy stuff” in a series of meetings in the weeks after the election, and Ivanka Trump said in a videotaped deposition that she’d accepted Barr’s statements as fact.

“It affected my perspective. I respect Attorney General Barr, so I accepted what he was saying,” she said in a deposition recorded in April that was released during the committee’s June 9 hearing.

Barr testified that he’d told Trump his claims were bunk in meetings on Nov. 23, Dec. 1, and Dec. 14. It’s unclear which meeting Ivanka Trump was present for—but the comments came more than a week after Barr publicly declared on Dec. 1 that there was no widespread election fraud.

Ivanka Trump, a senior White House adviser during her father’s presidency, justified her support of her dad’s attempt to reject his election loss because, as she reportedly said to the filmmaker, people were questioning “the sanctity of our elections.” 

“I think that, as the president has said, every single vote needs to be counted and needs to be heard, and he campaigned for the voiceless,” Ivanka Trump said. “And I think a lot of Americans feel very, very disenfranchised right now, and really, question the sanctity of our elections, and that’s not right, it’s not acceptable.”

“And he has to take on this fight. Look, you fight for what you love the most, and he loves this country and he loves this country’s people, and he wants to make sure that their voice is, is heard and not muted,” she continued.

But the reason people were questioning the election was because Ivanka’s dad and his allies had spent months pushing a mountain of lies and conspiracy theories about the results, leading his followers to believe something had genuinely gone wrong with the 2020 election.

And as then-President Trump pushed these lies, his daughter and senior adviser seemingly decided it was easier to go along than say anything to refute her dad.

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