Documents obtained by the Washington Post and CBS News put flesh and blood on one of the great mysteries of January 6: why the White House telephone records contain holes in the archive, despite evidence that the then president made busy high-profile calls of the uprising. The documents reveal that Trump’s daily diary shows an entry at 11.17 a.m. when he “spoke on a phone call to an unidentified person.” The next entry is just at 6.54 p.m. – 457 minutes later – when he asked the White House distribution panel to call Dan Scavino’s communications manager. Trump, meanwhile, was speaking at a rally in Ellipse, urging his supporters to “fight like hell.” Hundreds of Trump supporters and white supremacists marched through police barricades and stormed the Capitol building. and Mike Pence, the vice president overseeing the certification of Joe Biden’s victory in the presidential election, was forced into hiding. Seven people were killed and more than 100 law enforcement officers were injured in the attack. In the aftermath of the story, the Jan. 6 commission’s investigation into a possible cover-up was revealed by the famous Watergate reporter, Bob Woodward of the Washington Post. His journalistic collaborator on this occasion was Robert Acosta. The duo said the large gap between call logs was of “intense interest” in committee data. They quoted an anonymous member of the commission as saying they were investigating a “possible cover-up”. The J6 committee is made up of nine members, seven of whom are Democrats and two – Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois – who are Republicans taking part in the poll, defying their party leadership. According to Woodward and Acosta, the commission is examining possible ways in which Trump bypassed the normal accountability of telephone calls for an incumbent president. One theory is that it may have used disposable telephones or “cordless telephones”. In a statement to the media, Trump denied such allegations. “I have no idea what a burning phone is, as far as I know I have never even heard the term,” he said. The revelation of evidence surrounding the events of January 6 has been an apple of contention between Trump and the commission for months. Last month, the National Archives revealed that they had found boxes of secret documents that the former president had improperly removed from the White House. The phone records containing the six-hour break were handed over to the commission only earlier this year after the US Supreme Court rejected Trump’s appeal to block the transfer of the documents. The pressure on the former president for his actions on January 6 comes at a strong time for him. Earlier this month, the commission looked at a case in which Trump violated several federal laws in a bid to overturn the 2020 election results and stay in power. This week, a federal judge also said that Trump appeared to have committed multiple crimes in the search for the “big lie” that his election had been stolen. The decision came as Judge David Carter ordered John Eastman, the Conservative lawyer who advised Trump on how to delay Biden’s victory certification, to deliver hundreds of emails to the J6 commission.
