Forget the the 18 1/2 minute gap in the Nixon tapes; they’ve found a seven-hour gap in Trump’s White House phone logs for January 6, 2021.
The documents, which were turned over to the House select committee examining Jan. 6, do show that Trump had many calls before 11 a.m. and after 6 p.m. that were apparently related to the coup effort. That suggests Trump held many calls related to the insurrection between those two times that are not officially accounted for.
Greg Sargent provides three takeaways. One, “The noncooperation of Trump’s allies makes this story worse.” We know that people did speak on the phone to Trump during those missing hours. We know for a fact that he spoke to Kevin McCarthy and Mark Meadows, for example. Yet those calls are not in the log, and the lack of cooperation from people known to have been on the phone with Trump hikes up the suspicion factor considerably.
Here’s why: What’s at issue is how Trump reacted in real time as the violence unfolded. We know he reportedly watched it on TV with relish and refused multiple entreaties to issue a public statement calming the violence.
But it’s also likely Trump came to see the violence as helpful to intimidating his vice president, Mike Pence, and possibly lawmakers as well, into executing the scheme of delaying the electoral count. Trump reportedly called at least one GOP senator to press him for help delaying the count while the violence raged, another call that isn’t in the logs.
Two, “The Jan. 6 committee may already have records of missing calls.”
That’s because the committee has already subpoenaed the phone records of some of these key players, as CNN recently reported, and this includes Meadows. The committee has already started receiving some of this information, per CNN.
The committee is also getting call records from 35 telecom and social media companies. It’s not impossible that the missing seven hours can be mostly reconstituted from other sources.
See also:
Remember when @GOPLeader Kevin McCarthy threatened to take revenge on any telecom companies that provided evidence to the Jan 6 committee, like a common thug? https://t.co/h15QyZscqF
— Brian Beutler (@brianbeutler) March 29, 2022
Yeah, I had forgotten that. Last September McCarthy issued a threat to telecom companies that a future GOP majority (presumably with McCarthy as majority leader) would “not forget” any cooperation with the January 6 committee.
“If these companies comply with the Democrat order to turn over private information, they are in violation of federal law and subject to losing their ability to operate in the United States,” McCarthy said in Tuesday’s statement. “If companies still choose to violate federal law, a Republican majority will not forget and will stand with Americans to hold them fully accountable under the law.”
No, what the January 6 committee requested of the telecom and tech companies was not against the law.
And the third takeaway: “The case for subpoenaing lawmakers might have just gotten stronger.” That’s true because of the need for testimony to provide the missing information on phone calls with Trump.
Greg Sargent doesn’t mention pressuring Merrick Garland. If you saw the committee hearing on issuing contempt-of-congress referrals for former Trump advisers Dan Scavino and Peter Navarro, you will have seen several committee members call out the Attorney General and ask him to do his bleeping job. And don’t take all day about it, please.