In a new interview, Alex Holder, a documentary filmmaker whose work has become one of the many targets of the House panel investigating the Capitol riot, revealed behind-the-scenes details of how Donald Trump’s adult children reacted to his election loss.
Holder has cooperated with the committee. “As I’ve stated previously, I have provided the committee with all requested materials and am fully cooperating with the investigation,” Holder said after meeting with the panel. Holder created a documentary chronicling inner workings of the Trump team in the lead-up to and aftermath of the last presidential election. As part of his work, Holder interviewed Donald himself three times — so he’s in a position to provide unique, firsthand insight into what was going on. Holder ended up with some seven hours worth of personal interviews with Donald, Mike Pence, Trump’s adult children, and Jared Kushner, alongside some 110 hours of video from the campaign.
In a Tuesday interview with Insider, Holder explained of the ex-president’s adult children’s reactions to the election outcome: “There was an attitude that one of them would give which was sort of incredibly bitter and angry about the end result… And then there were the other children who were totally in denial and would not even refer or discuss or engage with anything to do with the fact that they were no longer in the White House and the catastrophe that had taken place earlier.”
Holder didn’t indicate who he had in mind for each description, although that would presumably become clear when his documentary comes out later this month (on July 10) on Discovery+. Ivanka indicated in testimony to the January 6 committee that she was accepting of statements from then-Attorney General Bill Barr that there was no evidence of fraud changing the outcome of the election — although she said in Holder’s footage that Donald “will continue to fight until every legal remedy is exhausted and that’s what he should do.” Ivanka made that statement over a week after Barr attested on December 1, 2020, to the lack of evidence for fraud changing the presidential election outcome. Overall, it’s worth noting that Holder has maintained that the Trumps had no editorial control over the content of the documentary.
There’s obviously no way a project started before the election could have somehow foreseen how all this would play out. After Ivanka’s statement about her supposed acceptance of what Barr said was revealed by the riot committee, Donald himself took to his social media platform Truth Social to complain. “Ivanka Trump was not involved in looking at, or studying, Election results,” Donald said. (Is that what he calls what he was doing? “Studying”?) “She had long since checked out and was, in my opinion, only trying to be respectful to Bill Barr and his position as Attorney General (he sucked!).” Jared Kushner, Ivanka’s husband who, like her, also worked on the Trump team, has also spoken to the riot panel.
