“If being complicit is wanting to... be a force for good and to make a positive impact then I’m complicit," she said. "I don’t know that the critics who may say that of me, if they found themselves in this very unique and unprecedented situation that I am now in, would do any differently than I am doing.
“I don’t know what it means to be complicit, but you know, I hope time will prove that I have done a good job, and much more importantly, that my father’s administration is the success that I know it will be.”
She also explained why she doesn’t publicly speak out on issues. “I would say not to conflate lack of public denouncement with silence,” Trump said. She said there are multiple ways to make her voice heard, and sometimes it's quietly.
“So where I disagree with my father, he knows it, and I express myself with total candor," she said. "Where I agree, I fully lean in and support the agenda and hope that I can be an asset to him and make a positive impact. But I respect the fact that he always listens. It’s how he was in business. It’s how he is as president.”
The interview took place Tuesday afternoon at Ivanka Trump's rented home in Washington, while her husband was visiting Iraq.
Ivanka Trump, 35, the elder of Trump's two daughters, is now her father's closest and most trusted adviser in the White House (next to Kushner), with her own title (assistant to the president), West Wing office, chief of staff and security clearance.
That makes her unprecedented, as the first modern presidential first daughter to work for her father in the White House. Already fascinated by Ivanka, official Washington is wondering: What does she plan to do with her enhanced power? CBS says she talks about her plans in the interview.
Shortly after the election, she and the rest of the family were interviewed by 60 Minutes' Lesley Stahl. Ivanka said then she wasn't planning on joining the administration.
Four months later, that's all changed.
She has tried to push her issues — such as equal pay and empowering women in the workplace, in business and in science and technology — to the top of the White House agenda, at least in optics. On Tuesday, she joined Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross at a town hall meeting for CEOs to discuss the state of American business and workforce development.
Kushner, 36, himself has a heavy load of responsibilities, having been tasked by POTUS with transforming government to be more like a business, with brokering Israeli-Palestinian peace, and with managing the Trump administration's relations with foreign countries such as Mexico, Canada and now Iraq, among other duties.
Since January, Ivanka Trump has been front and center at the White House far more than her stepmother, first lady Melania Trump, who remains in Trump Tower in New York at least until June.
As documented by the media and her Instagram page, Ivanka Trump has been in the front row at press conferences with foreign leaders, at the table next to her father in meetings or at his desk in the Oval Office, attending luncheons and conferences, or walking to Marine One with her husband and one or more of their three children.
By taking on a more formal, if unpaid, role as her father's assistant, she and Kushner have had to deal with far more critical scrutiny of their financial worth — as much as $740 million according to newly released ethics records on the holdings of White House staffers — and from ethics-in-government pundits skeptical about whether either of them can fully step away from their respective real estate, investment and fashion empires to avoid complicated conflicts of interest.
Ivanka Trump is also under more scrutiny than her four siblings, who remain in New York, because she and Kushner and their children are nearby: She and Kushner have moved into a rented six-bedroom house in the posh Kalorama neighborhood near Barack and Michelle Obama's rented mansion.
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