What was Trump doing on Jan 6? Probe panel has no record of his calls
WASHINGTON: White House call logs obtained so far by the House panel investigating the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the Capitol do not list calls made by thenPresident Donald Trump as he watched the violence unfold on television, nor do they list calls made directly to the president, according to two people familiar with the probe.
The lack of information about Trump’s personal calls presents a new challenge to investigators as they work to create the most comprehensive record yet of the attack, with a particular focus on what the former president was doing in the White House as hundreds of his supporters violently beat police, broke into the Capitol and interrupted the certification of President Joe Biden’s victory. The people were granted anonymity to discuss records that have not yet been released by the committee.
There are several possible explanations for omissions in the records, which do not reflect conversations that Trump had on January 6 with multiple Republican lawmakers, for example. Trump was known to use a personal cell phone, or he could have had a phone passed to him by an aide. The committee is also continuing to receive records from the National Archives and other sources, for additional information.
The committee is focused on Trump’s actions that day because he waited hours to tell his supporters to stop the violence and leave the Capitol. The panel is also interested in the organisation and financing of a rally that morning in Washington where Trump told his supporters to “fight like hell.”
Where are the papers? The gaps in the records of Trump’s calls on January 6, first reported by The New York Times and CNN, come as a separate House committee said on Thursday that it is investigating whether former Trump violated the Presidential Records Act after boxes of presidential records were discovered at his Florida estate.
House Oversight and Reform Committee Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney, a Democrat from New York, said in a statement on Thursday that she was “deeply concerned that these records were not provided to the National Archives and Records
Administration promptly at the end of the Trump administration and they appear to have been removed from the White House”.
The oversight panel is seeking communications between the National Archives and Trump’s aides about the missing boxes and information on what they may have contained. Maloney wrote a letter to the archivist, David Ferriero, seeking information on 15 boxes of records the National Archives recovered from Trump at his resort, in Palm Beach, Florida.
The Presidential Records Act mandates that records made by a sitting president and his staff be preserved in the archives, and an outgoing leader is responsible for turning over documents to the National Archives at the end of the term.