Trump’s Relationship With Jared and Ivanka Is About to Get a Lot More Awkward: Grand Jury Subpoena Edition

One needn’t be a family therapist to pick up on the fact that Ivanka Trump’s relationship with her father has been somewhat strained since he left the White House in 2021. For one thing, there was her taped testimony from the January 6 hearings, in which she admitted to fully agreeing with then attorney general Bill Barr’s December 2020 statement that there was no evidence of fraud sufficient to overturn the election, which is another way of saying that she knew that her dad was full of shit. (According to The New York Times, Donald Trump was, unsurprisingly, “infuriated” by the clip.) And then, of course, there was her decision to sit out her father’s third run for office, and not even show up when he kicked off his candidacy, despite him reportedly spending Tiffany Trump’s wedding begging her to do so. So, yes, it’s pretty clear that things are tense between Donald and Ivanka—and they’re about to get a whole lot worse thanks to the latest developments in the criminal investigation into the ex-president’s attempt to overturn the election, and the part both Ivanka and her husband could play in helping the Justice Department nail the guy to the wall.

The New York Times reports that both Ivanka and Jared Kushner “have been subpoenaed by the special counsel to testify before a federal grand jury about Mr. Trump’s efforts to stay in power after he lost the 2020 election and his role in a pro-Trump mob’s attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021,” according to two people familiar with the matter. That testimony would, of course, be under oath; the penalty for lying under oath—a.k.a. perjury—is up to five years in prison.

While it’s not clear what kinds of things Ivanka and Jared might tell a grand jury, much of what we already know could seemingly help special counsel Jack Smith and the Justice Department build a case against Trump. Ivanka has, after all, already admitted that she knew well before the January 6 insurrection that her father was full of shit re: the election being stolen. Kushner, too, reportedly knew Trump had lost fair and square, having reportedly told aides and associates as early as November 2020 that “barring some unforeseen surprise, the president had lost his bid for a second term,” and that “no matter how vociferously Mr. Trump claimed otherwise, neither Mr. Kushner nor Ivanka Trump believed then or later that the election had been stolen.”

Another matter it might be interesting for a grand jury to hear Ivanka expound on? Her reported fear that her father would take things too far on January 6, and her apparent decision to shadow him on that day in the hopes of preventing something terrible from happening.

As the Times noted last year:

Ivanka Trump had spent much of the day trying to keep her father from going too far. She had refused to address the rally on the Ellipse but at the last minute was so concerned by her father’s anger toward [Vice President Mike] Pence that she decided to accompany him there in hopes of avoiding a worse clash. Over the following hours, as rioters rampaged through the Capitol, she ran up and down the stairs in the West Wing from her office to the Oval Office hoping to persuade her father to issue stronger statements calling off the attackers.

Speaking of Pence, he also recently received a subpoena from the special counsel, which he reportedly is planning to fight. It’s not clear if Ivanka or Jared will do the same. But if they don’t—or if they try and are unsuccessful—there will clearly be a lot of fertile ground to cover once they get in front of the grand jury.