Ivanka Trump continues to demonstrate an interesting sense of timing, especially when it comes to making her children’s presence known in the affairs of her father’s White House.

On Wednesday, President Donald Trump sat down with reporters from the New York Times in the Oval Office. It was a wide-ranging interview during which they pressed Trump on the Russia scandal and other controversies dogging his White House.

The president ended up saying some additionally controversial things: how he never would have appointed Attorney General Jeff Sessions had he known Sessions would recuse himself from overseeing the Russia investigation; how he believed former FBI Director James Comey tried to leverage a dossier of compromising material to keep his job; how he thinks special counsel Robert S. Mueller III is running an office rife with conflicts of interest as he leads the Russia investigation.

Amid all this, right after Trump accused Comey of lying during his testimony last month before the Senate Intelligence Committee, someone suddenly popped into the Oval Office. According to a recording and transcript of the interview, it was Trump’s 6-year-old granddaughter Arabella. She was being admitted to the office by her mother Ivanka, and she charmed the reporters by speaking a little Mandarin.

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It should be noted that Arabella’s surprise visit to the Oval Office also came the same day that controversy swirled around her mother. On Wednesday, 22 Democratic members of Congress sent a letter to the FBI asking the agency to review Ivanka’s security clearance, citing concerns that she may not have been forthcoming in disclosing her husband Jared Kushner’s contacts with Russian officials.

Additionally on Wednesday, one of those representatives, Jackie Speier of the Bay Area, penned an op-ed for Cosmopolitan, saying that Ivanka and Jared Kushner have damaged America’s reputation by securing powerful White House positions despite having no government experience. Speier accused the couple of bringing with them into the West Wing concerns about nepotism and conflicts of interest and said President Trump should uphold his duty to the country and fire them.

But all these difficult matters temporarily took a back seat during Trump’s interview with reporters Peter Baker, Michael S. Schmidt and Maggie Haberman. That’s when Ivanka and Arabella popped in, apparently unannounced — though perhaps not in an impromptu way — to offer a brief but humanizing distraction.

“Hi, Grandpa,” Arabella can be heard saying, brightly, affectionately as she moves into the room.

After Trump introduced the reporters to the little girl, he told her: “Say hello to them in Chinese.”

Confidently, Arabella said: “Ni hao.”

Trump then introduced the reporters to Ivanka, who of course needs no introduction. The first daughter said modestly that she “just wanted to come say hi.”

Trump, returning to his granddaughter, reminded the reporters about how she met and delighted President Xi Jinping of China by singing to him in Mandarin when he visited the president’s Mar-a-Lago estate in April. He said to Arabella: “Can you say a few words in Chinese? Say, like, ‘I love you, Grandpa’ —”

“Wo ai ni, Grandpa,”

After one of the reporters agreed “that’s great,” Trump said with pride: “She’s unbelievable, huh? … Good, smart genes.”

In a discussion on the Times Daily podcast, the reporters agreed that Araballa’s language skills are “impressive.” They also agreed that her appearance provided a more tender side of the president, though it also created an “odd juxtaposition.

“We’re sitting there interviewing the president about weighty subjects, Russia and the cloud that’s over his presidency and all of a sudden his cute granddaughter comes running in and he gives her a hug,” one said. “It’s this incredible juxtaposition of tender grandfather-ness and the harsh reality of this Russia investigation.”

It turned out that Araballa’s interruption allowed her grandfather to pivot in the interview, which perhaps is what Ivanka or her father intended.

When Arabella and Ivanka left and the interview resumed, Trump launched into a boast about how the country is “doing well” in terms of unemployment and the stock market. “We are, we are moving forward with a lot of great things. … And we’re working hard on health care.”

In recent weeks, people on social media have accused Ivanka of using her three kids — Arabella as well as Joseph, 3, and Theodore, 1 — as “political props,” or to bolster her “brand” as a doting glamorous mom with an important job in the White House, as well as a fashion and family real estate brand. Ivanka is certainly very generous in posting photos of her kids on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, often in White House settings or in locations that are related to Trump administration policies or Trump properties.

While Ivanka has her legion of fans among the 14 million or so who follow her on social media, some of her posts have also raised the concerns about the conflicts of interest cited by Speier. Her video of Arabella singing to President Xi at the dinner at Mar-a-Lago went viral in China, where she and her fashion brand are immensely popular. The day of the dinner, China gave her Ivanka Trump clothing line potentially lucrative provisional trademark approvals, CBS reported.

But mostly, Ivanka’s critics wonder if she’s trying to use her kids as a distraction from the controversies surrounding her, their father or their grandfather’s presidency.

Whatever Ivanka’s intention was with Arabaella’s Oval Office visit Wednesday, she posted more cute kid photos later in the day on Instagram. In one, she labeled herself with the hashtag “#coolmom,” as she boasted about Arabella’s visit to the White House to meet Vice President Mike Pence and Chief of Staff Reince Prieibus.

And then, once home from her take-her-daughter-to-work day, she had the kids break into a dance party to the music of Justin Bieber.