The Ivanka Trump document request saga takes an even stranger turn

| 8:40 pm EST March 5, 2019
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When the House Judiciary Committee requested documents from eighty-one Trump related people and entities yesterday, one name stood out conspicuously by its absence: Ivanka Trump. After all, her husband Jared Kushner, and her siblings Donald Trump Jr and Eric Trump, were both on the list. Now the Ivanka story has taken a rather strange – and confusing – turn.

When House Judiciary Committee staffers were asked yesterday specifically about Ivanka Trump’s absence from the list, they simply responded that more names were coming “soon.” So we know that the committee does plan to include Ivanka, just not quite yet. Then House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler confirmed last night that all of the requests sent yesterday are for documents that have already been requested by Robert Mueller or prosecutors. Apparently the committee has decided to do a massive catch-up operation first, before deciding what new evidence to seek out.

But if Ivanka Trump wasn’t included in Monday’s document requests, and those requests were all about obtaining all of the documents that prosecutors have already sought out, then by definition, that would mean Mueller hasn’t yet sought any documents from Ivanka. This is really strange, considering that the inclusion of Don Jr, Eric, and Kushner yesterday means that Mueller has requested documents from all of them. So what’s going on here?

There are only a few hypothetical possibilities here, and each seems stranger than the last. The first would be that Robert Mueller is not even bothering to investigate Ivanka Trump, even though he’s investigating so many other Trump family members. This is possible, but it would fly in the face of previous reporting that Mueller is probing the Trump Soho real estate deal, which has long been a suspected money laundering front, and previous reporting that Ivanka helped take the lead on the Trump Soho deal.

Is it really possible that Robert Mueller isn’t bothering to investigate Ivanka Trump? Even if Mueller has determined that she is innocent, how could he know that without at least asking for her relevant documents first? There is a second potential explanation, which would be that Mueller hasn’t bothered to interact with Ivanka because she’s the primary target in all of this, as prosecutors sometimes build cases against the kingpin based entirely on evidence provided by other people. But all of the available evidence points to Donald Trump Jr, and not Ivanka, having played a key role in the Trump-Russia election scandal. There is no known evidence that Ivanka is the kingpin of this scandal.

There is yet another hypothetical possibility, but it might be the strangest one of all: Ivanka Trump secretly cut a plea deal with Robert Mueller against her entire family a long time ago, and that’s why he never had to send her a document request. Does that make sense to anyone? Really, none of these explanations make any instinctive sense. But there has to be some reason Mueller hasn’t asked Ivanka for documents, even while hitting up her husband, her brothers, and her father. In any case, the House Judiciary Committee is indicating that it plans to include her eventually, so take it all for whatever it’s worth.