For days now, we’ve been hearing reports of an alleged 7-hour gap in President Trump’s phone logs from January 6, 2021, which were obtained by CBS News’s Robert Costa and Washington Post associate editor Bob Woodward, suggesting a Nixonian cover-up.
“The lack of an official White House notation of any calls placed to or by Trump for 457 minutes — from 11:17 a.m. to 6:54 p.m. — on January 6, 2021, means there is no record of the calls made by Trump as his supporters descended on the U.S. Capitol,” CBS News reported. “The 11 pages of records — which consist of the president’s official daily diary and the White House switchboard call log — were turned over by the National Archives earlier this year to the House select committee investigating the January 6 attack.”
Reports prompted accusations from the media and Democrats—even claims that Trump was using “burner phones” to cover up his communications on that day.
Well, it turns out the accusations were completely bogus. It appears that CNN, obviously a network that isn’t friendly to Trump, looked into the allegations and found the accusations didn’t hold up.
“Official review of Trump phone logs from January 6 finds record is complete,” their headline reads in an article with a byline containing six names—suggesting they really had a lot of manpower going into this report.
“According to multiple sources familiar with Trump’s phone behavior and the White House switchboard records, the January 6 log reflects Trump’s typical phone habits,” their report explains. “He mainly placed calls through the switchboard when he was in the residence but rarely used it when he was in the Oval Office.”
“The fact the log does not show calls on January 6, 2021, from the Oval Office is not unusual, said the sources, because Trump typically had staff either place calls directly for him on landlines or cell phones,” the report continued. “Those calls would not be noted on the switchboard log.”
CNN thus deemed the switchboard logs for January 6, 2021, to be “complete based on an official review of White House records” and found “there are no missing pages and the seven-hour gap is likely explained by use of White House landlines, White House cell phones and personal cell phones that do not go through the switchboard.”
CNN’s surprisingly honest investigation concluded that the discrepancy is indicative of the antiquated system of tracking a president’s communications—not a cover-up. That CNN was willing to actually investigate this and other media outlets weren’t has my head spinning.
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