Trump’s Missing Phone Logs Mean We Don’t Even Know Half the Illegal Shit He Did on 1/6

Whether or not you’ve buried the events of January 6, 2021, into the deepest recesses of your brain, we’d like to take a moment to quickly recap what we know about the events of that day. Approximately two months after losing the election to Joe Biden, Donald Trump sicced a violent mob of supporters on the Capitol in an attempt to stop his opponent from becoming president. As the riot was unfolding, Trump, then the president of the United States, refused numerous pleas to stop the violence, including ones from his own flesh and blood. Instead, he “gleefully” watched the chaos unfold on TV, reportedly remarking, “Look at all of the people fighting for me,” and continued to try to convince Senate allies to blow up the certification process, even after it was abundantly clear that many people’s lives were in danger, including that of his own vice president. Not until hours later did he address the mob, telling them, “You’re very special” and “we love you” and shortly after that, “These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long.”

All in all, really bad stuff—some might even say criminal. And that’s just the stuff we know Trump did that day. Are there other, even worse things the then president did or said that haven’t even come out yet and that he and his allies really, really don’t want people to find out about? The seven-plus hours of missing phone records during the exact period in which the Capitol was being attacked suggest the answer is a big freaking yes!

Internal White House records from the day of the attack on the U.S. Capitol that were turned over to the House select committee show a gap in President Donald Trump’s phone logs of seven hours and 37 minutes, including the period when the building was being violently assaulted, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post and CBS News. The lack of an official White House notation of any calls placed to or by Trump for 457 minutes on Jan. 6, 2021—from 11:17 a.m. to 6:54 p.m.—means the committee has no record of his phone conversations as his supporters descended on the Capitol, battled overwhelmed police and forcibly entered the building, prompting lawmakers and Vice President Mike Pence to flee for safety…. The seven-hour gap also stands in stark contrast to the extensive public reporting about phone conversations he had with allies during the attack, such as a call Trump made to Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah)—seeking to talk to Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.)—and a phone conversation he had with House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.).

Could there be a perfectly innocent explanation for why there are exactly zero official records of who Trump spoke with while his supporters were trying to overturn the election on his orders? Sure, there could be, but it seems pretty unlikely. (Let’s also not forget the recent news of Trump’s extensive shredding habit.) According to reporters Bob Woodward and Robert Costa, the House select panel “is now investigating whether Trump communicated that day through backchannels, phones of aides or personal disposable phones, known as ‘burner phones,’ according to two people with knowledge of the probe.” (On Monday, Trump claimed in a statement, “I have no idea what a burner phone is, to the best of my knowledge I have never even heard the term,” and while we believe he doesn’t know what a burner phone is, just like he doesn’t know how to pronounce the words chasm, peninsula, or internet, that doesn’t mean he’s never used one.) One lawmaker told The Post the panel is probing a “possible cover-up” of the official records, and we don’t want to alarm anyone, but given everything we know about Donald Trump and the people he surrounds himself with, a cover-up does not seem out of character. (At this moment we’d like to make sure everyone is aware of the fact that former first son-in-law and senior presidential adviser Jared Kushner once reportedly claimed that blackmail and witness tampering are “family matters” prosecutors shouldn’t stick their noses in. Kushner formed that take on the law after his own father, Charles Kushner, went to prison for retaliating against his brother-in-law for cooperating with the feds against him, by setting the guy up with a sex worker, filming the encounter, and then sending the tape to his own sister.)

Of course, we do know some of the details about calls Trump made and received on the day of the insurrection, thanks to both the logs from that morning and evening that didn’t mysteriously disappear, and investigative reporting. For instance, we know at 8:37 a.m. the then president spoke with Steve Bannon—who on January 5 had said on his podcast that “all hell is going to break loose tomorrow”—during which Bannon told Trump he needed to keep pressuring Mike Pence to block Biden’s certification, according to people familiar with the matter who spoke to The Post. At 9:02 a.m., the White House left a message for the V.P. from the president. Trump also spoke to Rudy Giuliani that morning, as well as senior adviser Stephen Miller, from 9:52 a.m. to 10:18 a.m. That night, according to The Post, the president again talked to Bannon, adviser Jason Miller, and White House counsel Pat Cipollone. Two days after the riot, CNN reported that Trump had tried to call Senator Tommy Tuberville to urge him, amid the chaos, to delay the certification of the Electoral votes, but accidentally called Senator Mike Lee, who passed Tuberville the phone.

But that doesn‘t make up for the fact that, somehow, there are more than seven hours’ worth of phone calls that seemingly vanished into thin air. Which is shady as hell at absolute best. As constitutional law scholar Laurence Tribe put it on Tuesday, the gap in the records “makes the infamous 18-minute gap in Nixon’s tapes look like nothing in comparison.” Nixon, of course, resigned before he could be impeached, while Donald Trump is currently threatening to run for president again in 2024. So it would be nice to know exactly who he was talking to while the Capitol was under siege, and what he was advocating for.