Thirty-seven minutes earlier, Washington police had declared a riot. Minutes later, then-Vice President Mike Pence hurried out of the Senate chamber, where he was chairing congressional certification for Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election, and hid. Fifteen minutes before Trump made the call, his supporters, motivated by the incumbent president to “fight like hell” against what he falsely claimed was an election, broke a window on the southern front of the Capitol and entered the heart of American democracy. The January 6 uprising was in progress. However, when you look for recorded details of Trump’s 14:26 call, as revealed by the Guardian’s Hugo Lowell, on an official White House landline, they are nowhere to be found. Lee’s call was one of the unknown numbers Trump made during a mysterious 7-hour, 37-minute vacuum in the call log – the exact time frame of the Capitol attack. These missing call logs, leaked by the Washington Post and CBS News, raise many key questions – how did the files disappear? who did the excising? – but nothing more urgent than that: what was Trump trying to hide? “A gap like this does not happen by chance. “It’s not a coincidence,” said Charlie Sykes, a columnist for the conservative Bulwark newspaper. “There is no innocent explanation here – someone decided to break the record for the critical hours of January 6 and there must be a reason.” What Trump is trying to hide is at the heart of the House committee’s investigation into the January 6 uprising. The former president has consistently tried to block the flow of information to the committee – pushing his inner circle not to testify, tearing up documents before they are handed over. The stakes in the evidence dispute rose sharply this week when a federal judge ruled that Trump “most likely dishonestly conspired to block” Congress on Jan. 6. That would be a criminal act. A mob of Trump supporters invades the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. At a time when Donald Trump was in the White House and made at least one phone call that was not recorded in the official records. Photo: Leah Millis / Reuters There has never been any doubt that Trump inspired his supporters to come down to Washington that fateful day, nor did he encourage them to protest the “big lie” that his election was stolen. Three weeks before the uprising, he wrote on Twitter: “A big protest in DC on January 6. Be there, it will be wild! “ But Trump is a master at making outrageous comments while at the same time hiding or obscuring his true intentions. What exactly did he mean by “it will be wild!”? How far was he willing to make this proposal? Critically, will the missing call logs covering the time frame of the uprising provide clues as to its motives? A call that Trump is known to have made inside the black hole of those missing hours between 11.17 and 6.54 p.m. was at Pence. Late on January 6, the current president made one last attempt to persuade his deputy to commit an illegal act – delaying the certification of Biden’s victory in breach of his constitutional duties. According to an account of the call leaked to the New York Times, Trump fooled Pence with the immortal words: “You can either go down in history as a patriot or you can go down in history as a pussy.” Pence went down in history as a patriot – doing his constitutional duty and certifying the legal result. But that phone call marked an important milestone in Trump’s coup attempt: it was a point of no return – his latest move to stay in power through political persuasion. If Trump had escaped from this point, he would have entered much darker ground. As Sykes put it: “When he got the phone call from Mike Pence, who did he call next? “Once he realized that the vice president was not going to do his bidding, what next?” David Fram, former author of George W. Bush’s White House speech, wrote in the Atlantic that there were two main lines of inquiry: Trump gave the green light to the Capitol Uprising in advance and coordinated in any way with the attackers. The Jan. 6 commission is firmly focused on the so-called “War Room” – the tangle of Trump’s close aides gathered at the Willard Hotel in Washington – as the “command center” of Trump’s efforts to overthrow the election. Among them were former strategist Steve Bannon, Rudy Giuliani’s lawyer, and John Eastman, the conservative law professor who drew up a detailed plan for how Trump could stay in power illegally. The Willard Hotel in Washington, D.C., where a Trump War Alliance’s “War Room” was the “command center” of efforts to overthrow the election. Photo: Brendan Smialowski / AFP / Getty Images According to the Guardian, Trump conveyed to the group Pence’s refusal to follow the coup plan. From there on, however, we remain in the dark. As a result of the missing logs, it is unclear whether the then president remained in contact with the Willard Hotel Group as the uprising unfolded. It is not known whether they discussed further tactics. The gap in the official records could also hinder the commission from trying to determine if there was direct contact between Trump and the Jan. 6 organizers. Ali Alexander, who instigated the “Stop the Steal” movement and planned a “One Nation Under God” rally in the Capitol that was canceled amid the violence, was a figure of interest to the committee. Trump’s son’s partner Don Jr. spoke to Kimberly Guilfoyle before the uprising. CNN reported that it also said in videos released before the attack that it planned to reach out to far-right groups Proud Boys and Oath Keepers to ask for security for his rally. Both organizations have members prosecuted for criminal acts on January 6th. Earlier this month, Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio was arrested on charges of conspiracy and other charges. The founder of Oath Keepers and 10 other members have been accused of rioting. Alexander testified before the commission on January 6 in December. In his opening remarks, he said: “I had nothing to do with any violence or breach of the law that occurred on January 6. I had nothing to do with design. I had nothing to do with the preparation. “And I had nothing to do with the execution.” Those words could easily have come from the mouth of Donald J Trump. The challenge for the commission, in the absence of the disappearing telephone logs, is to ascertain whether they are true.
