How Donald Trump’s Missing Call Logs Will Be the Richard Nixon Tapes

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During the nearly nine hours that Congress was attacked on January 6, 2021, official White House call logs show that former President Donald Trump did not make a single phone call. And while historians may consider the missing call logs a crime of historical misremembering, it may actually bolster the expected criminal case against Trump.

The first thing one thinks of is the Nixon tapes, the missing 18 minutes. It has never been resolved, said American University professor Chris Edelson, who studies presidential power.

Edelson was referring to the Watergate scandal that brought down President Richard Nixon, who taped White House discussions about the burglary but conveniently deleted 18-and-a-half minutes of those incriminating conversations that were too angered federal investigators.

Trump who was impeached a second time for his incitement to insurrection on January 6, 2021 and now faces a top secret investigation by the Justice Department is now in the same boat.

It’s exactly like that all you’re left to guess is that, for nefarious reasons, this particular president doesn’t want to keep any records, says Barbara Ann Perry, professor of the study of the presidency at the University of Virginia.

The gap begins at 11:04 a.m. that day, with a logged incoming call from then Senator David Perdue (R-GA) with the note, Talked Ok. The next item appeared nearly eight hours later at 6:54 p.m., when Trump asked the switchboard operator to call his social media director. POTUS directed the operator to call Mr. Dan Scavino back, it said.

From that point on, the staff’s written Trump presidential daily diary and switchboard call logs both record what happened next. Some 22 minutes later, the switchboard operator told Trump that he had calls pending from all the male and female presidents who had helped his coup in various ways. The list includes Kurt Olsen, a lawyer who tried to use the nation’s courts to overturn election results, Mark Martin, a former chief justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court who advised him on frivolous lawsuits, and Cleta Mitchell, a lawyer who joined Trump in his threatening call to Georgia’s top election official in a failed attempt to get him to falsify vote tallies.

Sen. also lined up. Bill Hagerty (R-TN) and Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO). According to the memo, Trump took calls from lawyers but declined calls from senators.

Call logs and memos show Trump spoke with Olson for 11 minutes starting at 7:17 p.m., then Martin for nine minutes, then Olson again for another 10 minutes, then Mitchell in two minutes.

But like Nixon, there is ample evidence that former President Donald Trump actually had damaging conversations that do not appear in the official record. Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), and Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) admitted to having phone conversations with the former president during the terrifying hours as the attack took place in the afternoon, but the White House switchboard normally used for official call does not show any of those calls. It’s unclear what phone he used for these calls, but Trump is known to sometimes use his aides’ mobile devices or even his own cell at times.

Yes, it is missing evidence of wrongdoing on the part of the president, Perry told The Daily Beast. This will be part of that story. Why would he hide it?

The records, which were returned to the House Jan. 6 Committee investigating the insurrection of the National Archives under the current administration of President Joe Bidens, were released Monday on the eve of the 117th Congress.

We may never know. It was certainly strange to say the least. We know that Trump is talking to people during this time, Edelson said.

Long before the insurrection, Trump had run afoul of official presidential recordkeeping, a particularly ironic point because he ascended to the White House by berating Hillary Clinton over her questionable use of a private email server while in public office. . Trump aides had to re-tape torn documents, and administration officials resorted to using encrypted device apps to text each other the missing message.

But over the years, Trump has also developed a distaste for the White House’s official switchboard, drama stemming from his staff’s attempts to stop him. Gen. John F. Kelly, the Marine who served as Trump’s chief of staff for much of the first half of his presidency, would secretly monitor his calls to bosses, according to a book published last year by the adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner of the Trump White House.

When Trump was informed that Kelly had been doing that for months, he was stunned.

Kushner remembers what Trump said, what did Kelly do? and ordering the staff to finish it immediately. At that moment, Kelly had the incoming replacement, Mick Mulvaney, sign Trump a document that would end the practice Kelly had started of listening to all your phone calls.

The Mulvaneys’ replacement, Mark Meadows, has strictly restricted which White House officials can access the call logs, according to CNN. However, Trump has long made a habit of bypassing the official White House switchboard by cutting off landline calls and ordering contacts to call him directly on his cellphone, CNN reported.

Meadows was still in that position as Trump’s right-hand man in late 2020, when he played a key role in trying to keep his boss in power despite losing the general election. Meadows, who helped start the House Freedom Caucus while a congressman, tapped former colleagues in that group of far-right Republicans to help with a plan to prevent Congress from certifying college results in the electoral countries. Much of what we know now about the scheme comes from emails and text messages he gave to the House Jan. 6 Committee, which this week released documents it gathered during its investigation including call logs with White. House.

The missing information has frustrated congressional investigators, and Representatives on the nine-member panel have often complained about the Trump administration’s lack of transparency when recording the day’s events.

But the eight-hour gap in the phone log may prove to be just a speed bump for the Justice Department, which is currently scrutinizing Trumps election reversal efforts as part of a larger investigation into various criminal actions. of the former president. That’s because FBI special agents could use subpoenas to quietly collect the phone toll records of McCarthy, Jordan, Tuberville, and anyone Trump spoke to during those times to find which phones the White House called them.

Billing records never really disappear. Can it be used against him? Of course. This can be seen as evidence of the state of mind. It’s pretty weak evidence, but it does suggest something that you’re not engaging in certain communications, said Benjamin Wittes, the editor-in-chief of the national security legal blog Lawfare.

If the DOJ makes the historic but expected decision to indict the former president, a major challenge will be proving that Trump knows what he’s doing is wrong. Political scientists who spoke to The Daily Beast wondered aloud whether the call logs would prove as damning on Trump as the erased tapes on Nixon, especially if federal prosecutors decide that Trumps criminal intent is proven. by his taking steps to deliberately avoid making official government records of damaging phone calls to key lawmakers who supported his insurrection.

But there’s another dimension to Trump’s missing White House calls: the way it has frustrated historians tasked with giving future Americans a clear picture of how this president has attempted to undermine the democracy of country.

The White House switchboard is highly regarded in the historical literature, said Bowdoin College presidential scholar Andrew Rudalevige, who emphasized how important these types of records are.

I have very little doubt that he was discussing things that were not good at the time, he said.

But political scientists have emphasized that the missing records mean more than potential criminal evidence that they serve as a stark reminder of how low the Trump administration was before its disgraceful exit.

One thing we tend to forget with Trump is how strange, unusual, unprecedented and unprecedented his term has been. Normalization is a real thing. People have accepted these things that in any presidency people would consider out of bounds, delinquent, Edelson said. It’s very mind-blowing.

Perry, the University of Virginia professor, noted that the incoming Congress now finds itself in the same position as the one that followed Nixons resignation. In 1978, four years after Nixon left the White House, lawmakers passed the Presidential Records Act to prevent future presidents from withholding or destroying records documenting their time in office. But that law proved too weak of a deterrent, archivists and historians say. Democrats reeling from Trump’s lawlessness will support tougher accountability measures. And the Republicans who continue to press charges against the Biden administration and now form the majority in the House of Representatives would be wise to join them.

I hope that under normal circumstances, Congress will step up and say, if nothing else, that presidents have to keep records of their phone calls. So far I don’t think there is such a law, he said.

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