Mueller report shows Ivanka was in on the Trump Tower meeting cover-up

First daughter Ivanka Trump has long stayed above the fray of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.

However, the Mueller report suggests that she was involved in the cover-up of the fateful Trump Tower meeting with a Kremlin-connected lawyer, which was attended by Ivanka’s husband, Jared Kushner; her older brother Donald Trump Jr.; and convicted former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort.

The evidence of Ivanka Trump’s role begins on page 98 of the report, which details the moment when “senior administration officials” learned about emails setting up the Trump Tower meeting intended to get “dirt” on Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

Ivanka Trump, along with Kushner, former White House Communications Director Hope Hicks, and former senior communications official Josh Raffel, went to Trump personally to tell him that the emails about the Trump Tower meeting would soon be leaked, and they discussed “proactively” releasing them.

“Communications advisors Hope Hicks and Josh Raffel recalled discussing with Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump that the emails were damaging and would inevitably be leaked,” the Mueller report states.

The report states that when presented with the emails, Trump refused to look at them and said he “did not want to know about it.”

However a few days later, Ivanka, Hicks, and Kushner went back to Trump, and Kushner “told the President the June 9 meeting was not a big deal and was about Russian adoption, but that emails existed setting up the meeting” and that they would be “really bad” for the White House.

Trump again refused to talk about the issue.

The report goes on to say that in the days leading up to the meeting of June 9, 2016, Ivanka Trump attended a “regular morning meeting of Trump campaign staff and family members,” during which the upcoming meeting with Russians was discussed, according to recollections from former Trump campaign aide Rick Gates, who pleaded guilty in the Mueller probe.

Gates recalled that this meeting of campaign staff “was attended by Trump Jr., Eric Trump, Paul Manafort, Hope Hicks, and, joining late, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner,” the report states — and that Manafort warned the group that the meeting with Russians “likely would not yield vital information and they should be careful.”

It’s clear that Ivanka Trump knew a lot more than she’s let on so far — and that she is not the golden child she makes herself out to be.

Correction: This piece has been corrected to reflect that Ivanka Trump attended a Trump campaign meeting to discuss the June 9, 2016, Trump Tower meeting with Russians, but she did not attend the June 9 meeting itself. 

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.