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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.

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.

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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.

“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.”

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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.

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

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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.

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.

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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.

“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.

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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.”

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.

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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.

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.

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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

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.

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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.

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

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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.

(AP)

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Sweden To Charge 18-year-old Over IS Terror Plot

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The Swedish Prosecution Authority said Tuesday it intended to charge an 18-year-old man for planning a terrorist act in Stockholm on behalf of the Islamic State group.

According to prosecutors, the planning took place between August 2024 and February 2025.

“We believe the purpose of the preparations was to induce serious fear in the population, in the name of the Islamic State. The criminal act could have seriously harmed Sweden,” Deputy Chief Prosecutor Henrik Olin said in a statement.

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READ ALSO:Tragedy As Erosion Sweeps Away Motorcyclist In Edo

Prosecutors did not provide details of the plan but said the man was also suspected of “preparation for serious crimes under the act on flammable and explosive goods and training for terrorism”.

Prosecutors said they planned to file the charges on Thursday and that a press conference would be held the same day.

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The young man will also be charged alongside a 17-year-old boy with attempted murder in Germany in August 2024.

READ ALSO:China Backs Nigeria, Warns Against Foreign Interference

Both of them are also suspected of “participation in a terrorist organisation,” according to the statement.

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The man was arrested in Stockholm on February 11 and has been in custody since then.

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US Shutdown Hits 35 Days, Tying Longest In History

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The US government shutdown entered its 35th day on Tuesday, matching a record set during President Donald Trump’s first term, as lawmakers voiced hope over progress behind the scenes to end the dispute.

The federal closure appears almost certain to become the longest in history, with no breakthroughs expected before it goes into its sixth week at midnight — although there were fragile signs in Congress that an off-ramp is closer than ever.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune set the buoyant mood music on Monday when he told reporters he felt “optimistic” that newly energised talks between warring Republicans and Democrats could end in a deal before next week.

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The government has been grinding to a halt since Congress failed to pass a bill to keep federal departments and agencies funded past the end of the last financial year on September 30.

READ ALSO:I’ll Support Trump To Fight Terrorism In Nigeria If… – Wike

“I’ll be honest with you, I don’t think any of us expected that it would drag on this long. We didn’t believe, we couldn’t have imagined,” House Speaker Mike Johnson told a news conference arranged to mark the six-week milestone.

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“It’s now tied for the longest shutdown in US history. And we didn’t think we’d have to come in here every single day — day after day after day — and repeat the obvious facts to the American people and to put on display every day what is happening here.”

Some 1.4 million federal workers — from air traffic controllers to park wardens — have been placed on enforced leave without pay or made to work for nothing, while vital welfare programs and even paychecks for active-duty troops are under threat.

Both sides remain dug in over the main sticking point — health care spending.

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READ ALSO:UK Jails Nigerian Student For Raping Stranded Teenage Bus Passenger

Democrats say they will only provide votes to end the funding lapse after a deal has been struck to extend expiring insurance subsidies that make health care affordable for millions of Americans.

But Republicans insist they will only address health care once Democrats have voted to switch the lights back on in Washington.

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While both sides’ leadership have shown little appetite for compromise, there have been signs of life on the back benches, with a handful of moderate Democrats working to find an escape hatch.

A separate bipartisan group of four centrist House members unveiled a compromise framework Monday for lowering health insurance costs.

READ ALSO:Trump To Receive Full Menu Of Options To Stop Nigeria Genocide – US Rep, Moore

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Democrats believe that millions of Americans seeing skyrocketing premiums as they enroll onto health insurance programs for next year will pressure Republicans into seeking compromise.

But Trump has held firm on refusing to negotiate, telling CBS News in an interview broadcast Sunday that he would “not be extorted.”

The president has sought to apply his own pressure to force Democrats to cave, by threatening mass layoffs of federal workers and using the shutdown to target progressive priorities.

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Last week his administration threatened to cut off a vital aid programme that helps 42 million Americans pay for groceries for the first time in its more than 60-year history, before the move was blocked in court.

READ ALSO:Christian Genocide: Regha Reveals Why Trump Called Nigeria ‘Disgraced Country’

And the president has returned to a familiar playbook of demanding the elimination of the Senate filibuster — the 60-vote threshold for passing most legislation — so Republicans can pass government funding themselves.

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Terminate the filibuster now, end the ridiculous shutdown immediately, and then, most importantly, pass every wonderful Republican policy that we have dreamt of for years, but never gotten,” Trump fulminated in an all-caps social media post.

Preserving the filibuster — which senators say protects the voice of the minority — is one of the few issues on which Republicans are willing to defy Trump and radical reform seems highly unlikely.

“The votes aren’t there,” Thune told reporters on Monday.

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China Backs Nigeria, Warns Against Foreign Interference

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China has urged the international community to respect Nigeria’s sovereignty following a US threat of military action.

The Chinese government reiterated its support for President Bola Tinubu’s administration, commending the government for guiding the country along a development path tailored to its national conditions.

According to a report sourced from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, People’s Republic of China’s website, the Spokesperson for China’s Foreign Ministry, Mao Ning, stated this at a press briefing on Tuesday in Beijing.

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READ ALSO:PHOTOS: Xi, Putin, Kim At Beijing Parade As China Flaunts Military Might

She said, “As Nigeria’s strategic partner, China opposes any attempt by foreign powers to use religion or human rights as a pretext to meddle in another country’s internal affairs or impose sanctions and military threats.”

Recently, the US threatened Nigeria with possible military action due to the alleged persecution of Christians in the country.

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The United States President, Donald Trump, had threatened to deploy military forces in Nigeria if the alleged genocide against Christians is not stopped in the country.

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