Jared and Ivanka, Without the Power or the Masks

WASHINGTON — They have been stripped of their White House backdrop, their energy and their masks.

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

First up was Ms. Trump. Speaking in a gentle voice and seemingly conscious that the video could be made public sometime, she stated she believed the phrases of the former lawyer normal, 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 Attorney General Barr. So I accepted what he said — was saying.”

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

Next was Mr. Kushner. In his video he was pressed by Representative Liz Cheney, the committee’s vice chairwoman, about whether or not he was conscious that the White House 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 said,” stated Mr. Kushner, who was not often heard from in public throughout his father-in-law’s presidency, “my interest at that time was on trying 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 team were always saying, ‘Oh we are going to resign, we are not going to be there if this happens, if that happens.’ So I kind of took it up to just be whining, to be honest 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 reason why people serving in our government take an oath to the constitution. As our founding fathers recognized, democracy is fragile. The people in positions of public trust are duty bound to defend it, to step forward when action is required. In our country, we don’t swear an oath to an individual or a political party.”

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

No two individuals had positioned themselves as prominently in Mr. Trump’s White House 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 relations may be fraught. Over 4 years, the two tended rigorously to their pictures.

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

The movies made clear that each have been conscious that issues have been going awry inside the White House. But in response to 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 drag Mr. Trump away from his obsession with staying in energy.

Instead, they left that activity 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 Office, fearful of getting to hearken to Mr. Trump vent. They have been additionally desirous to keep away from the worst- case situation: a directive from Mr. Trump that may have been unlawful, and might have ensnared them in an investigation.