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Jan. 6 Committee Requests Interview With Ivanka Trump

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The House committee investigating the U.S. Capitol insurrection is asking Ivanka Trump, daughter of former President Donald Trump, to voluntarily cooperate as lawmakers make their first public attempt to arrange an interview with a Trump family member.

The committee sent a letter Thursday requesting a meeting in February with Ivanka Trump, a White House adviser to her father.

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In the letter, the committee chairman, Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., said Ivanka Trump was in direct contact with her father during key moments on Jan. 6, 2021, when Trump supporters stormed the Capitol in an effort to halt the congressional certification of Joe Biden’s presidential win.

The riot followed a rally near the White House where Donald Trump had urged his supporters to “fight like hell” as Congress convened to certify the 2020 election results.

The committee says it wants to discuss what Ivanka Trump knew about her father’s efforts, including a telephone call they say she witnessed, to pressure then-Vice President Mike Pence to reject those results, as well as concerns she may have heard from Pence’s staff, members of Congress and the White House counsel’s office about those efforts.

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“Ivanka Trump just learned that the January 6 Committee issued a public letter asking her to appear,” her spokesperson said. “As the Committee already knows, Ivanka did not speak at the January 6 rally.”

The committee cited testimony that Ivanka Trump implored her father to quell the violence by his supporters and investigators want to ask about her actions while the insurrection was underway.

Testimony obtained by the Committee indicates that members of the White House staff requested your assistance on multiple occasions to intervene in an attempt to persuade President Trump to address the ongoing lawlessness and violence on Capitol Hill,” Thompson wrote.

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READ ALSO: Trump Slams Netanyahu For Congratulating Biden On Electoral Victory

The letter is the committee’s first attempt to seek information from inside the Trump family.

Earlier this week, it issued subpoenas to lawyer Rudy Giuliani and other members of Trump’s legal team who filed meritless court challenges to the election that fueled the lie that the race had been stolen from Trump.

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The committee is narrowing in on three requests to Ivanka Trump, starting with a conversation alleged to have taken place between Donald Trump and Pence on the morning of the attack.

The committee said Keith Kellogg, who was Pence’s national security adviser, was also in the room and testified to investigators that Trump questioned whether Pence had the courage to delay the congressional counting of the electoral votes.

The Constitution makes clear that a vice president’s role is largely ceremonial in the certification process, and Pence had issued a statement before the congressional session that laid out his conclusion that a vice president could not claim “unilateral authority” to reject states’ electoral votes.

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“You were present in the Oval Office and observed at least one side of that telephone conversation,” the letter to Ivanka Trump said, adding that the committee “wishes to discuss the part of the conversation you observed” between the then-president and Pence.

The letter also mentioned a message, in the days before the scheduled vote certification on Jan. 6, 2021, between an unidentified member of the House Freedom Caucus to then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows with an explicit warning: “If POTUS allows this to occur … we’re driving a stake in the heart of the federal republic.” POTUS is an abbreviation for president of the United States.

The other requests in the letter to Ivanka Trump concern conversations after Donald Trump’s tweeted, “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution.”

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The committee said White House staff and even members of Congress requested Ivanka Trump’s help in trying to convince her father that he should address the violence and tell rioters to go home.

We are particularly interested in this question: Why didn’t White House staff simply ask the President to walk to the briefing room and appear on live television — to ask the crowd to leave the capital?”

Besides the subpoenas issued this week, the committee had a victory Wednesday when the Supreme Court rejected a bid by Trump to block the release of White House records sought by lawmakers.

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The National Archives began to turn over the hundreds of pages of records to the nine-member committee almost immediately. They include presidential diaries, visitor logs, speech drafts and handwritten notes dealing with Jan. 6 from the Meadows’ files.

The committee’s investigation has touched nearly every corner of Trump’s orbit in the nearly seven months since it was created, from strategist Steve Bannon to media companies such as Twitter, Meta and Reddit.

READ ALSO: Judge Refuses Trump Request To Block Jan. 6 Records

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The committee says it has interviewed nearly 400 people and issued dozens of subpoenas as it prepares a report set for release before the November elections.

Still, the committee has run into roadblocks from some of Trump’s allies, including Bannon and Meadows, who have refused to fully cooperate. Their resistance has led the committee to file charges of contempt of Congress.

The seven Democrats and two Republicans on the committee have also faced defiance from fellow lawmakers. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., and GOP Reps. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania and Jim Jordan of Ohio have denied the committee’s requests for voluntary cooperation.

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While the committee has considered subpoenaing fellow lawmakers, that would be an extraordinary move and could run up against legal and political challenges.

The committee says the extraordinary trove of material it has collected — 35,000 pages of records so far, including texts, emails and phone records from people close to Trump — is fleshing out critical details of the worst attack on the Capitol in two centuries.

The next phase of the investigation will include a series of public hearings in the coming months.

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(AP)

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Syrian Ex-leader Assad Faces War Crime Charges For Killing Journalists

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French judicial authorities have issued arrest warrants for ousted Syrian president Bashar al-Assad and six other top former officials over the bombardment of a rebel-held city in 2012 that killed two journalists, lawyers said Tuesday.

Marie Colvin, 56, an American working for The Sunday Times of Britain, and French photographer Remi Ochlik, 28, were killed on February 22, 2012, by the explosion in the eastern city of Homs, which is being investigated by the French judiciary as a potential crime against humanity as well as a war crime.

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British photographer Paul Conroy, French reporter Edith Bouvier, and Syrian translator Wael Omar were wounded in the attack on the informal press centre where they had been working.

READ ALSO:France’s Top Court Annuls Arrest Warrant Against Syria’s Ex-president al-Assad

Assad escaped with his family to Russia after being ousted by Islamist rebels at the end of 2024, although his precise whereabouts have not been confirmed.

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Other than Assad, the warrants notably target his brother Maher al-Assad, who was the de facto head of the 4th Syrian armoured division at the time, intelligence chief Ali Mamlouk, and then-army chief of staff Ali Ayoub.

The issuing of the seven arrest warrants is a decisive step that paves the way for a trial in France for war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by Bashar al-Assad’s regime,” said Clemence Bectarte, lawyer for the Paris-based International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) and Ochlik’s parents.

READ ALSO:US Embassy Warns Americans In Nigeria Of Looming Visa Overstay Penalties

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The FIDH said the journalists had clandestinely entered the besieged city to “document the crimes committed by Bashar al-Assad’s regime” and were victims of a “targeted bombing”.

The investigation clearly established that the attack on the informal press centre was part of the Syrian regime’s explicit intention to target foreign journalists to limit media coverage of its crimes and force them to leave the city and the country,” said Mazen Darwish, lawyer and director of the Syrian Center for Media and Freedom of Expression (SCM).

Colvin was known for her fearless reporting and signature black eye patch, which she wore after losing sight in one eye in an explosion during Sri Lanka’s civil war. Her career was celebrated in a Golden Globe-nominated film, “A Private War”.

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Ghana’s President Sacks Chief Justice Over Corruption Allegations

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President John Dramani Mahama has dismissed the Chief Justice of Ghana following the outcome of a high-level investigation into allegations of falsifying judicial records and misusing public funds.

A five-member commission, chaired by a Supreme Court judge and set up by Mahama, concluded that the allegations against the country’s top judicial officer were substantiated and recommended her removal.

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After considering the petition and the evidence, the Committee found that the grounds of stated misbehaviour under Article 146(1) had been established and recommended her removal from office,” said the spokesperson to the President, Felix Ofosu, in a statement on Monday.

READ ALSO:Police Bust Lagos-Ghana Sex Trafficking Ring

President John Dramani Mahama has accordingly removed the Chief Justice from office with immediate effect.”

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The dismissal marks the first time a sitting Chief Justice in Ghana has been investigated and dismissed from office.

While Mahama, who took office in January, has repeatedly pledged to intensify the fight against corruption, it remains unclear whether the embattled Chief Justice, Gertrude Torkonoo, will face criminal prosecution.

 

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Danish Court Sentences Ex-minister To Prison For Child Abuse Material

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A former Danish government minister was jailed for four months on Monday for possession of thousands of images of child sexual abuse.

Henrik Sass Larsen, once a senior Social Democrat who served as industry minister, admitted to having more than 6,000 photographs and 2,000 videos on his computer depicting sexual abuse of children.

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He had denied the charges, saying he had the material because he was trying to find out who had abused him as a child.

Prosecutor Maria Cingari said she was “satisfied” with the verdict but added that it was sad that someone “who managed to make the most out of their life despite a bad start finds himself in such a situation.”

READ ALSO:JUST IN: Finnish Court Jails Simon Ekpa Six Years For Terrorism Offences

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You should never be in possession of child pornography, no matter the reason,” Cingari added.

During his trial, the 59-year-old told the court he had received a link in 2018 to a 50-year-old video showing him being sexually abused when he was three years old.

He testified that he received another video clip in 2020, in which a three-year-old girl was raped in his presence when he was around the same age.

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The two videos disappeared after he viewed them, he said.

READ ALSO:South African Court Affirms 18-year Jail Term For Nigerian Over Human Trafficking

He told the court he regretted not having contacted the police when he received the videos.

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Sass Larsen was also accused of being in possession of a child sex doll, but the court did not find him guilty on that charge.

His lawyer, Berit Ernst, told reporters that “we’ll see if it is a definitive end or if we will appeal.”

The scandal came to light last March and led to his expulsion from the Social Democratic Party.

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At the time, Social Democratic Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen expressed her shock over the case.

AFP

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