The gap extends shortly after 11 a.m. until about 7 p.m. on January 6, 2021 and includes phone calls to the White House, according to one of the people. Both spoke to the Associated Press on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the ongoing investigation. The committee is investigating the gap in the official White House diary, which includes the distribution board and a daily log of the president’s activities. But that does not mean the commission is in the dark about what Trump did at the time. The House panel has made extensive demands for separate cell phone records and has spoken to more than 800 witnesses, including many of the aides who spent the day with Trump. The commission also received thousands of text messages from the cell phone of Mark Mendowes, Trump’s chief of staff. The commission’s attempt to reconcile Trump’s day as supporters storm the Capitol underscores the challenge posed by the usual evasion of archive laws – not only to historians of its tumultuous four years but also to the House panel, which intends to record the full history of the former president’s attempt to overturn the election results in hearings and reports later this year. The committee has focused heavily on what the president did in the White House as hundreds of supporters beat police, stormed the Capitol and cut off certification of Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election. Trump deliberately bypassed official channels to avoid the files. Trump was known to use other people’s cell phones to make calls, as did his own. He often bypassed the White House distribution board by making direct calls, according to a former aide who asked not to be named to discuss private calls. It is not uncommon for presidential calls to be channeled through other people. It is not clear whether the committee received records of cell phone calls made that day. The panel issued a broad record-keeping mandate in August to nearly three dozen telecommunications and social media companies, urging companies to save communications for several hundred people in the event that Congress decides to issue calls to them. The people involved in this request were Trump, members of his family and several of his Republican allies in Congress. The committee also continues to receive files from the National Archives and other sources, which could generate additional information and help create a complete picture of the president’s communications. While hundreds of people have worked with the investigation, in some cases the commission has been thwarted by Trump’s claims of executive privilege over material and interviews. The courts rejected his attempts to block some documents, but many witnesses who were still close to the former president – and several who were in the White House that day – refused to answer the committee’s questions. Biden, who holds the rotating presidency of the White House, said on Tuesday he would reject Trump’s allegations about the testimony of his daughter, Ivanka Trump, and her husband, Jared Kouchner. Kouchner, who was one of Trump’s top aides in the White House, is scheduled for an interview with the panel on Thursday. The commission also requested an interview with Ivanka Trump, but did not say whether she would comply. For about eight hours on Jan. 6, Trump addressed a large crowd of supporters in nearby Ellipse, repeated lies about his election defeat, and told them to walk to the Capitol, hear their voices, and “fight like the hell”. He then returned to the White House and watched the mob invade the Capitol. More than 700 people have been arrested in the violence. Several of Trump’s calls that day are already publicly known. He spoke with Vice President Mike Pence between 11 a.m. and 11:30, according to a person familiar with the conversation, as he pressured Pence publicly and privately to oppose him while chairing the certification. He also spoke to several members of the House and Senate GOP as his allies in Congress prepared to challenge the official vote count. He had a tense conversation with House Republican Rep. Kevin McCarthy, who asked him to withdraw the mob, according to Republican lawmaker Jaime Herrera Beutler in Washington, D.C., who shared his account shortly after McCarthy. Trump responded that the troublemakers should be “more upset about the election than you are,” according to Herrera Beutler. Trump also spoke with Ohio lawmaker Jim Jordan and Alabama Sen. Tommy Tamberville, among others. Tuberville said he spoke to the president while the Senate was being evacuated. Utah Sen. Mike Lee said Trump called him by mistake when he was trying to get to Tamberville. The White House diary shows the calls Trump made before that time as he prepared to speak at the rally. This diary shows the calls with his former assistant, Steve Bannon, the conservative commentator William Bennett and Sean Hannidi of Fox News, according to one of the people who knows the records. The gap in telephone records was previously reported by the AP. The exact time of the vacuum was first reported jointly by the Washington Post and CBS News. Trump had no immediate comment on Tuesday, but had previously dismissed the investigation and sued to stop record production.
Associated Press author Zeke Miller contributed to this report.
