No? Her father certainly seems to think it is, as does her brother, but Ivanka Trump tells the Associated Press that the whistleblower’s identity is “not particularly relevant.” With one caveat, Ivanka adds — only as it goes to motives. “That person’s identity is known,” Ivanka Trump says, “it’s all over the Internet,” but she carefully avoids using the name anyway:
Ivanka Trump on Friday echoed her father’s view that the House impeachment investigation is an attempt to overturn the 2016 election. But, in an interview with The Associated Press, she parted ways with President Donald Trump by calling the identity of the impeachment whistleblower “not particularly relevant.”
The Republican president and some of his allies have been pressing the news media to publicize the whistleblower’s name, but Ivanka Trump said the person’s motives were more important. And she declined to speculate on what they may have been.
“The whistleblower shouldn’t be a substantive part of the conversation,” she told the AP, saying the person “did not have firsthand information.”
She added that, “to me, it’s not particularly relevant aside from what the motivation behind all of this was.”
Ivanka Trump — deep-state operative? I kid, I kid, mainly because she’s correct. The whistleblower’s identity only matters in terms of identifying motives and access. The specific identity of the whistleblower doesn’t need to be made public so much as it needs to be made known to elected officials of both parties in Congress and the White House, for evaluation as part of the decision-making and due process. The rest of us wouldn’t know an Derek Caramel from a Larry Carter, so to speak, which makes the specific identity much less useful than his position, connections, and contacts before and during the whistleblower process.
Curiously, the interview cuts away just at the point at which Ivanka is asked to offer her thoughts on what those motivations might be. The reported article on the interview doesn’t plumb that question either. Did Ivanka not answer it — or did the AP not care for her thoughts on the matter?
Instead, it returns to a discussion about the Trumps’ wealth and its influence on the president’s policies. Ivanka turns that around and notes that the Trumps created their wealth “prior” to their public service, and contrasted that with the Bidens, who created theirs during their public service. The AP boils it down to this Biden-defense-but-still construct:
She rejected any suggestion that her own family has been profiting off the presidency even as President Trump and his allies have criticized the involvement of Biden’s son with a Ukrainian oil venture when Biden was vice president.
Hunter Biden served on the board of a Ukrainian gas company at the same time his father was leading the Obama administration’s diplomatic dealings with Kyiv. Though the timing raised concerns among anti-corruption advocates, there has been no evidence of wrongdoing by either the former vice president or his son.
Still, Ivanka Trump said the Bidens had “created wealth as a derivative” of public service while her family had made its money in business before her father became president.
Er … is there any doubt about that? Did Biden come to Washington a wealthy man, or did he and his family get that way while Biden was in the Senate and White House? That’s pretty easy to check, no? If Biden wins the nomination, expect the Trumps to raise that point — repeatedly. And it’s not a bad one in these populist times, either.
Here’s more of Ivanka talking about the impeachment inquiry and explaining her tweet quoting Thomas Jefferson. This is all about “overturning the results of the 2016 election,” and takes a jab at the AP’s use of anonymous sourcing too.
