Ivanka Trump, the elder daughter of former President Donald J. Trump, told a documentary film crew in the middle of December 2020 that her father should “continue to fight until every legal remedy is exhausted” because people were questioning “the sanctity of our elections.”
The video, which was played for The New York Times by someone with access to it, was part of a trove that the filmmaker Alex Holder turned over to the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol. He recorded several hours of interviews with Mr. Trump, Vice President Mike Pence, some of Mr. Trump’s adult children and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Mr. Holder is expected to be interviewed by the committee on Thursday.
Neither Mr. Holder nor the committee has disclosed the contents of the full trove of videos, and neither has commented on whether it provides substantial new information about Mr. Trump’s efforts to reverse his election loss.
But the small piece of it seen by The Times was striking for how it shows Ms. Trump using a different tone in describing her father’s efforts to overturn the outcome than she did in the portion of her deposition to the House committee that has been made public so far.
The interview for the documentary was conducted on Dec. 10, 2020, the person with access to the video said. That was nine days after a public statement by Attorney General William P. Barr, who declared at the time that there was no widespread fraud impacting the election’s outcome, a rare public rebuke of Mr. Trump’s claims at the time.
The Themes of the Jan. 6 House Committee Hearings
In her recorded interview with the House committee, Ms. Trump said that Mr. Barr’s comments “affected my perspective.”
“I respect Attorney General Barr so I accepted what he said,” she said. The committee may release additional video of her recorded testimony.
People close to Ms. Trump have insisted that she had distanced herself from what was taking place around her father at that time. Those people have said that, after the race was called for Joseph R. Biden Jr., Ms. Trump began focusing on winding down her office and looking toward a new life in Miami.
Yet in the video with the filmmaker, Ms. Trump, describing her father’s gains in votes among key demographic groups, had a different reaction when asked whether she had a “take” on her father’s “very clear position on the results and what’s going on.”
“I think that, as the president has said, every single vote needs to be counted and needs to be heard, and he campaigned for the voiceless,” Ms. Trump replied. “And I think a lot of Americans feel very, very disenfranchised right now, and really, question the sanctity of our elections, and that’s not right, it’s not acceptable.”
She went on, “And he has to take on this fight. Look, you fight for what you love the most and he loves this country and he loves this country’s people, and he wants to make sure that their voice is, is heard and not muted.”
She said that he “will continue to fight until every legal remedy is exhausted and that’s what he should do.”
An aide to Ms. Trump did not respond to a message about the new video.
The filmmaker was connected to Mr. Kushner by Jason Greenblatt, a former lawyer at the Trump Organization and then the White House envoy to the Middle East. The film was envisioned as a legacy project for Mr. Trump, according to two people familiar with how it came about.
