March 29 (UPI) — Internal White House records from Jan. 6, 2021 — the day a mob of pro-Trump radicals attacked the U.S. Capitol in a bid to subvert the results of the 2020 presidential election — show a gap of more than seven hours in then-President Donald Trump’s phone logs, according to news reports Tuesday.
The White House records, which were recently turned over to the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack, show that the gap is seven hours and 37 minutes long.
The gap in Trump’s telephone records is at odds with known conversations that Trump had during the blackout period with some of his Republican allies during the Capitol siege, including Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy, and Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama.
The Washington Post and CBS News reported the gap in Trump’s phone records after receiving copies of the documents.
The records show no notations for any phone calls placed for a total of 457 minutes between 11:17 a.m. and 6:54 p.m., which covers virtually the entire duration of the Capitol attack.
The period of the phone gap followed a fiery speech Trump delivered on the Ellipse on Jan. 6 to a crowd of supporters, at which he urged them to go to the Capitol and “fight like hell.” At the time, the House and Senate were certifying the results of the 2020 election that put Biden in the White House and removed Trump from office.
Not long after Trump and others finished speaking at their “Save America” rally, many of their supporters marched down the street, fought with police and broke into the Capitol building in a bid to stop Congress from certifying the 81 million votes that propelled Biden to victory.
The records show that Trump was active on the phone both before and after the seven-hour gap. He’d spoken to eight people in the morning and nearly a dozen people in the evening, CBS News and the Post reported.
According to the Post report, one lawmaker on the committee said it’s investigating a possible “coverup” of the official White House record from that day — and another source said the gap in phone calls is of “intense interest” to some on the committee. Both spoke anonymously to the outlets because they weren’t authorized to talk about the details.
The 11 pages of White House records that show the extended gap were turned over to the House committee by the National Archives earlier this year. The National Archives is tasked with cataloging and maintaining all records from past presidential administrations.
The House Jan. 6 committee, which has been investigating the attack for about a year, is trying to determine whether Trump also may have used other phones during the period of the gap — such as aides’ phones or disposable cellphones, known as “burner phones.”
A Trump spokeswoman said the former president has no control over how the records were kept and assumed all of his calls were recorded and preserved.
The records did show that Steve Bannon, Trump’s former strategist, talked with the then-president twice on the morning of Jan. 6. Bannon said on his Jan. 5 podcast that “all hell is going to break loose tomorrow,” according to CBS News and The Washington Post.
