Jared and Ivanka, Without the Power or the Masks

WASHINGTON — They had been stripped of their White Home backdrop, their energy and their masks.

In short video clips, Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump appeared within the first of a half-dozen public hearings held by the Home committee investigating the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol.

First up was Ms. Trump. Talking in a gentle voice and seemingly conscious that the video could be made public sometime, she stated she believed the phrases of the previous lawyer common, William P. Barr, who on Dec. 1, 2020, stated that there was no widespread fraud impacting the election that had taken place three weeks earlier.

“It affected my perspective,” Ms. Trump stated quietly, peering right into a digital camera for a recorded interview that didn’t happen in particular person. “I respect Lawyer Common Barr. So I accepted what he stated — was saying.”

That was regardless of what her father, President Donald J. Trump, was claiming, and even though, in keeping with a number of White Home aides working alongside her, she did little to attempt to mood his false claims that he had received the 2020 election. She continued to journey with him as he vented his claims in public.

Subsequent was Mr. Kushner. In his video he was pressed by Consultant Liz Cheney, the committee’s vice chairwoman, about whether or not he was conscious that the White Home counsel, Pat A. Cipollone, had been threatening to resign as a result of Mr. Trump was making more and more outlandish efforts to remain in energy.

“Like I stated,” stated Mr. Kushner, who was not often heard from in public throughout his father-in-law’s presidency, “my curiosity at the moment was on making an attempt to get as many” presidential pardons completed as attainable. Mr. Kushner repeatedly inserted himself into the pardons course of, prompting complaints from authorized consultants and a few of his colleagues. He added that he knew that Mr. Cipollone and “the crew had been at all times saying, ‘Oh we’re going to resign, we’re not going to be there if this occurs, if that occurs.’ So I type of took it as much as simply be whining, to be trustworthy with you.”

Ms. Cheney, Republican of Wyoming, sounding grim, spoke to the listening to room after the video ended. “Whining,” she stated. “There’s a purpose why folks serving in our authorities take an oath to the structure. As our founding fathers acknowledged, democracy is fragile. The folks in positions of public belief are responsibility certain to defend it, to step ahead when motion is required. In our nation, we don’t swear an oath to a person or a political get together.”

Mr. Kushner’s phrases enraged Mr. Cipollone’s former colleagues, lots of whom traded messages as they complained to reporters and each other because the listening to went on that the previous president’s son-in-law was “conceited.”

No two folks had positioned themselves as prominently in Mr. Trump’s White Home as his daughter and his son-in-law, who got here on as official advisers regardless of anti-nepotism legal guidelines and warnings from different aides that hiring members of the family could be fraught. Over 4 years, the 2 tended fastidiously to their pictures.

Aides feared getting on the mistaken facet of the couple, who lived in Washington’s costly Kalorama neighborhood and hosted dinners for the town’s political elite.

The movies made clear that each had been conscious that issues had been going awry throughout the White Home. However in keeping with greater than a half-dozen former Trump advisers, though each have tried to distance themselves from that interval, neither made a lot of an effort to tug Mr. Trump away from his obsession with staying in energy.

As an alternative, they left that job to the paid employees, who in flip stored ready for the household to intervene extra aggressively. Shortly after Election Day, most aides tried to keep away from the Oval Workplace, fearful of getting to take heed to Mr. Trump vent. They had been additionally desirous to keep away from the worst- case state of affairs: a directive from Mr. Trump that may have been unlawful, and will have ensnared them in an investigation.