Lost in the Woods

Yesterday, Bob Woodward and Robert Costa wrote an article here in the Washington Post about having copies of White House phone logs for January 6. Beyond the record of who Trump spoke to as the Insurrection was occurring, the logs also show an unexplained 7-1/2-hour gap during the Insurrection.

Adding to the mystery of the gap, there is no record of a call with GOP Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy who has insisted he tried to convince Trump to address the rioters. So, either he's lying or (far more likely) Trump was using backchannels or a burner phone to talk to people (during that 7-1/2-hour gap) so that it wouldn't be on the official records.

I mean, seriously now, 7-1/2 hours without being on a phone call??  I don't think that even I will go 7-1/2 hours without being on a phone call.  And that's without being president.  During an Insurrection.

In a statement released yesterday from his bunker in Mar-a-Lago, Trump said, "I have no idea what a burner phone is, to the best of my knowledge I have never even heard the term." Even accepting that at face value, it’s not remotely as great an "explanation" as he thinks it is – on several levels.  After all, for starters, 12-year-olds know what a burner phone is, so how completely out of touch is he? Furthermore, just because Trump says he (supposedly) doesn’t know what a burner phone is, that doesn’t mean he didn’t use one.  You may not know what a toaster-oven is, but if you put bread in a device, push a lever and it comes out brown and crunchy, you used one.  And even more to the point, Trump’s response ignores all the other ways he could have communicated without going through the White House operator.  Saying you never saw a specific movie because you’ve never been to a movie theater in your life, that doesn’t mean you didn’t stream it at home or get the DVD. 

It also doesn't help that former Trump advisor John Bolton has said that he's not only heard Trump talk about burner phones, but even discussed burner phones with him about they're used to avoid having one's conversations scrutinized.  So, yeah, Trump being Trump.  The guy who never met a lie he couldn't pass up.

(What I'd love is that when the New York Attorney General gets Trump sworn in under oath, she asks him, "Do you know what a burner phone is?")

So, to make it easier for Trump, who wants us all to believe that he doesn't have a clue what burner phones are, he could instead be asked as simply and clearly as possible, "Did…you…use…any…mobile…phone...during...those...hours?"  Or if even the concept of mobile phones is too difficult for him, then perhaps  “Did you talk to anyone who was not physically in the White House during those 7-1/2 hours, whether using either some sort of electronic device or telepathy?

Yes, a missing 7-1/2 hours.  Man, even Rose Mary Woods only had an 18-1/2-minute gap on her tape transcriber of Richard Nixon’s infamous Watergate conspiracy cover-up meeting with Bob Haldeman.  She’s a piker compared to 7-1/2 hours.  But at least she had a bizarre twisted-body explanation for how the 18-1/2-minute gap could have possibly occurred, keeping her foot on the pedal, pushing the wrong button and reaching for the phone – for 18-1/2 minutes.

And Chief of Staff Alexander Haig explanation may have been even worse, even that’s possible.  He blamed the 18-1/2-minute gap on a “sinister force.”  Which I guess is evil demons.

The best Trump could do is, “I have no idea what a burner phone is.”  Which still leaves us with a 7-1/2-hour gap in the White House phone records.

But of course, that’s merely the missing 7-1/2 hours of the White House phone logs of people Trump likely spoke to.  What the records do show is at least some of the people who Trump did speak to on the day of the Insurrection. 

Among many others, there was six minutes talking to Rudy Giuliani, 26 minutes talking to Stephen Miller, two calls to Steve Bannon (who the day before said on his podcast that “All hell is going to break loose tomorrow”) and a call to the White House operator to phone Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO).  Whether Trump and Hawley spoke before or after the senator’s fist bump to the Insurrectionists is unclear – since obviously the 7-1/2 hours of phone logs are missing.  Also, the phone logs says that Trump and Jim Jordan spoke for 10 minutes, a call which Jordan has said he couldn’t remember at first, and when later it came to mind, he couldn’t recall exactly when it was because, yeah, most people forget a 10-minute phone call with the president.  On the day when there’s an Insurrection…