During a wide-ranging interview at Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump told the Washington Post that he offered the former brevet First Lady Ivanka Trump and her concubine Jared Kushner “privilege” if they wanted to avoid testifying before the House Select Committee investigating the January 6th domestic terrorist attack on Congress, but they declined. As numerous courts have determined, as an ex-president, Trump has no authority to convey executive privilege on anyone.
For the first documented time, Ivanka worked a full eight-hour day, testifying in person before the Committee on her and her father’s actions on the day of the insurrection. Her husband testified earlier for six hours via teleconference earlier.
Trump continued to claim he had no power to do anything to prevent the violence at the Capitol, again pushing responsibility on others even though he was the Commander-in-Chief of the military.
“I thought it was a shame, and I kept asking why isn’t she doing something about it? Why isn’t Nancy Pelosi doing something about it? And the mayor of D.C. also. The mayor of D.C. and Nancy Pelosi are in charge,” Trump said of the Jan. 6, 2021, riot in a 45-minute interview with The Washington Post. “I hated seeing it. I hated seeing it. And I said, ‘It’s got to be taken care of,’ and I assumed they were taking care of it.”
Other items from the long-ranging discussion:
- Trump claims he intended to march to the Capitol with the mob, but was stopped from doing so by the Secret Service. “Secret Service said I couldn’t go. I would have gone there in a minute.”
- He’s still fixated on crowd size: “The crowd was far bigger than I even thought. I believe it was the largest crowd I’ve ever spoken to. I don’t know what that means, but you see very few pictures. They don’t want to show pictures, the fake news doesn’t want to show pictures.”
- Trump admitted to repeatedly talking to Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. He claims he did not know of her efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
- He claimed that NATO, an organization he tried to dismantle, should be doing more in Ukraine, but didn’t give specifics.
- “I liked Zelensky from the beginning for one reason. When we had the impeachment hoax, based on a perfect phone call, he totally backed me up, and I didn’t ask him to do that. They asked him, and he said, he absolutely did nothing wrong,” Trump said. “He said there was no quid pro quo. He didn’t even know what his people were talking about. He thought they were crazy. … So I gained great respect for him there.”
- Trump doesn’t see any serious opponents for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination: “If I ran, I can’t imagine they’d want to run. Some out of loyalty would have had a hard time running. I think that most of those people, and almost every name you mentioned, is there because of me. In some cases, because I backed them and endorsed them. You know Ron was at 3 percent, and the day I endorsed him, he won the race,” he said. Asked if he thought he “made” DeSantis, Trump said he knew he did. “As soon as I endorsed him, the race was over,”
- “This is the center of the universe,” Trump said of Mar-a-Lago.