Jared Kushner’s marathon interview with lawmakers on the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol riot was “really valuable,” a lawmaker on the panel said Thursday night.
Kushner, former President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and a top White House adviser during his tenure, reportedly spoke to the committee for more than six hours on Thursday. The interview, part of the ongoing investigation into the origins of the deadly insurrection, was voluntary and took place remotely.
Rep. Elaine Luria (D-Va.), a member of the committee, told MSNBC that she couldn’t provide details about what Kushner spoke about but said he was able to substantiate reports about events on Jan. 6 and provide his own account about what took place that day.
Kushner, who was returning from Saudi Arabia during the insurrection, was an integral member of the Trump administration.
“What I’ll say is that, you know, we were able to ask for his impression about these third-party accounts of the events that happened that day and around that day,” Luria told MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace. “So he was able to voluntarily provide information to us, to verify, substantiate, provide his own, you know, take on this different reporting. So it was really valuable for us to have the opportunity to speak to him.”
The interview came after the White House said it would not assert executive privilege to prevent the testimony by Kushner or his wife, Ivanka Trump. The panel also expects to speak with Ivanka Trump, although it’s unclear when that would take place.
The panel has continued its work more than a year after the pro-Trump mob stormed the halls of the Capitol, seeking to coerce Congress into overturning Joe Biden’s presidential election. Lawmakers have turned up several shocking revelations, including recent reports that Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, sent nearly two dozen text messages urging a top Trump aide to help overturn the election.
The committee also said it planned to look into a seven-hour gap in White House logs from the day of Jan. 6, 2021.
“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,” committee chair Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) told reporters this week.