WASHINGTON — Former Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway met for nearly five hours Monday with investigators on the House committee probing the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol.
The committee did not publicly issue Conway a subpoena, and aides refused to comment on whether she was issued one privately. The panel declined to comment on her appearance Monday.
The closed-door meeting took place at the O’Neill House Office Building, where Conway was seen entering a conference room with attorney Emmet Flood, a lawyer in former President Donald Trump’s White House.
Conway spoke to the committee on the record, two sources familiar with her appearance said.
Speaking to reporters around 3 p.m. after the meeting ended, Conway said she did not invoke the Fifth Amendment at any point Monday.
Earlier, when Conway left the meeting room for a break, she told reporters, “I’m here voluntarily.” Asked by a reporter when she last spoke with Trump, Conway said he called her last week.
Conway worked as a senior counselor to Trump from the beginning of his term through August 2020. She decided to leave the administration because, she said, she needed to focus on her family. She also was a campaign manager for Trump's 2016 presidential bid.
Conway told reporters Monday that she is not working on Trump's 2024 campaign, and she refused to detail previous discussions with Trump about the 2020 election.
“Oh, I don’t reveal those conversations,” Conway said when she was asked whether Trump ever told her that he knows the election was not stolen. “I think if they want to know that from him, they should depose him.”
Pressed about whether she has advised Trump to cooperate with the committee, Conway said: “They asked him so late, though. I think the committee’s almost wrapped up.”
She also said the Justice Department has not contacted her about its Jan. 6 probe.
Although Conway was not working for Trump on Jan. 6, 2021, The Washington Post, in a report citing 15 Trump advisers, members of Congress, GOP officials and other Trump confidants, said she called an aide who was with the president that day and said she was joining others in urging Trump to tell his supporters to stand down. Conway also told the aide that Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser's office called her asking for help getting Trump to call up the National Guard, The Post reported.
The committee is expected to release a final report about its investigation before the end of the year, before the new Congress convenes in January. The panel is not expected to exist in the new, GOP-controlled House next year.
Before Thanksgiving, the panel interviewed Bobby Engel, the lead Secret Service agent for Trump when the riot took place, whose statements could have a bearing on the bombshell testimony of Cassidy Hutchinson, who was a top aide to former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows. Hutchinson testified over the summer that she was told Trump tried to grab the steering wheel in an armored SUV and lunged toward his security detail when he learned he would not be taken to the Capitol after his rally on Jan. 6.
At the beginning of November, committee investigators were scheduled to meet with a Secret Service agent who was in the lead car of Trump’s motorcade on the day of the riot.
