Alex Holder said that during the interviews he conducted for his documentary series Discovery + Unprecedented, Donald Trump never gave up his claim that the election was stolen from him, while his children, including Ivanka, supported his father’s post-election challenge.
Yet Holder’s access to the First Family is not the only reason the Jan. 6 committee became interested in his cadres, something that brought him into the spotlight this week after news broke that his materials had been summoned and he appeared for private testimony.
The commission, Holder said in an interview with Deadline, is also investigating footage from Jan. 6, when he was filming not only at Trump’s rally that morning in Ellipse, but also when he went with his director of photography to the chaos unfolding in the Capitol. DP was attacked and part of his camera was broken.
Holder declined to go into details, but said the footage from the day was “definitely unique.” He said it was probably “the clearest version of the day that has been seen”, filming the scene, which is described as similar to a war zone.
Ever since reports of the documentary surfaced, the nature of the project has been the subject of intrigue, curiosity and some misconceptions and assumptions about what Holder is doing. His lawyer, Russell Smith, issued a statement insisting that Trump and his family had not requested or been given editorial control of the project, which Discovery + plans to broadcast in three parts this summer.
“It was crazy. I think at the beginning of the week I started with 112 followers on Twitter, most of whom were my family, and by the end of the week I think I have 35,000, 3 million views of the video, this little video we put out, “Holder said. “So crazy.”
Holder, a British native now living in the United States, said he was working on a documentary about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict when he was introduced to Jason Greenblatt, who served as Trump’s envoy to the Middle East. “I interviewed him about my project for the Middle East and we talked about the idea of a documentary about the Trump family and that was in early 2020. He said they were still discussing such a project, provided that Trump would not have an editorial control and that he was presented to them “and this is something like everything.” He confirmed that Greenblatt had linked him to Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law.
He has some speculation as to why the family agreed to participate. “It was obvious that I was introduced. The second was that I didn’t really have any political skin in the game. And the third, and perhaps most important, is that they were very confident of winning the 2020 election, “he said. “So here was an opportunity for someone to document that they were winning the election.
They started filming in September 2020, when the campaign was in full swing. Although some of the videos released are from interviews he conducted with Trump and Ivanka, he said they also gained quick access to the president and his children. The access he received to the president and his family, including in Air Force One and during rallies, was “quite unusual,” he said. He cites a case of Trump when his DP was “somewhat closer to him than his secret services.”
Although they were not given access to Trump’s private quarters on election night – moments that were focused on the committee on Jan. 6 – Holder said there were “some intimate, interesting moments behind the scenes of the campaign.”
After Holder testified on Thursday, Holder Smith’s lawyer told reporters that one of the commission’s focuses was on potential “discrepancies” between what Ivanka Trump said and what she said in the documentaries. In her testimony, she told the commission that after Attorney General William Barr told Trump that his allegations of widespread election fraud were unfounded, she “accepted” Barr’s findings. Still, in the December 2020 documentary, she said her father “must take on this battle.”
“I don’t know what she said to her father, but I know what she told me, namely that she resonated very similar thoughts and positions with what her father was echoing at the time,” Holder said. “I imagined that she was telling me what she believed in and that she was answering what I asked. And it wasn’t surprising to me. In general, at least in my interactions with Trump’s three children, they have always reiterated their father’s position and are doing everything possible to support him.
Holder said the documentary will also explore the lives and interactions of Trump’s three children. He spoke with Trump’s two sons, including Don Jr., the latter of whom was interviewed days before the election and was considered the only brother interested in his own political career.
The focus of the committee’s hearings was the parade of administration and campaign officials, who described in live testimony and testimony how they did not reconcile with Trump’s allegations of electoral fraud and told him so. Holder said that in the post-election period he spoke to “many people while working on projects who had their own opinion” about the reality of the election, although he did not interview them for the documentary.
He interviewed Trump before Jan. 6 and twice after.
Although he heard Trump’s allegations that the election had been stolen, Holder said he did not believe it. He also said his role was to film the story, “what the president of the United States was saying in the White House,” not to act in a more prosecutorial role to challenge his election allegations.
“I think I saw a tweet where someone said I had Stockholm Syndrome because of a comment I made,” Holder said. “I said that ‘Donald Trump believes he won the election’ and that’s why people think I was deceived by Donald Trump. That’s not what I mean at all. What I mean is that it is actually much more dangerous to deal with someone who believes in something that is so absurd that he is actually misleading. But that was my approach. That’s what I got from the interview with Donald Trump.
“I thought in advance that he knew it was absurd and that therefore there would eventually come a time when he could not support the absurd because in the end the evidence would be there,” he said. “The point is that the evidence is there and he still stands firm. The point is that he is ardent in this faith, without acknowledging all the evidence against what he says, which to me means that he lives in a reality that is not where most people are.
Holder said that about a month after the election, they began to believe that they could start assembling a roll to buy the distributors’ documentary, “and then, obviously, everything changed.”
On the night of January 6, Holder said, he sent his DP a text, somewhat half-jokingly, that “I think the president will tell everyone to go to the Capitol tomorrow. And so he somehow made a plan on how to deal with the practical aspects of it.
They showed up the next day to film the rally, as until then “it was somehow clear that something very likely could happen to interrupt [the electoral vote count] or put pressure on the vice president that day.
He said that after transferring the project to various distributors, a deal with Discovery + was reached last year. They plan to release it this summer, but so far have kept their plans a secret. Holder declined to say why Discovery did so, saying it was a matter for them.
He said he was not surprised that the commission found out about the project on January 6th and even anticipated their interest. He said they were “very visible during the project”, so there were a number of ways they could find out. “As for what they are interested in, it is really their decision. I don’t know what it is, “he said.
Representative Jamie Ruskin (D-MD), a member of the commission, said he had received a letter directing him to the project, but would not say who had informed them. But Holder said there were “many reasons and ways the commission could find out what we’re doing.”
“There was inevitability in my mind, but I really, honestly, don’t know. I have a lot of theories, “he said.
It is reported that two Danish directors working on a project for Roger Stone have refused a request from the commission and the Ministry of Justice for staff, citing journalistic independence. But Holder, along with director Nick Custed, who was working on a documentary for the far-right Proud Boys, received subpoenas and each decided to collaborate.
“I think both positions are valid,” Holder said. “For me, after seeing the type of public hearings and seeing the materials that were presented, and somehow knowing the materials we had about the events of January 6, it made no sense to stand up so as not to give it to them. We had just finished the movie. It would be out in a few months and somehow coincided with the summons. He declined to give much detail about what the material was due to “the fact that they are going through this at the moment.”
He also said he would testify publicly before the commission if asked. “Of course,” he said.
He said they had never heard of Trump or his …
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