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Hump Day open thread: Seven hours and thirty-seven minutes


"Eight hour gap." Now he feckless media has a handy, pithy way to describe January 6, 2021.

In yesterday's Washington Post, Bob Woodward and Robert Costa reported:
Internal White House records from the day of the attack on the U.S. Capitol that were turned over to the House select committee show a gap in President Donald Trump’s phone logs of seven hours and 37 minutes, including the period when the building was being violently assaulted, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post and CBS News.

The lack of an official White House notation of any calls placed to or by Trump for 457 minutes on Jan. 6, 2021 – from 11:17 a.m. to 6:54 p.m. – means the committee has no record of his phone conversations as his supporters descended on the Capitol, battled overwhelmed police and forcibly entered the building, prompting lawmakers and Vice President Mike Pence to flee for safety.

The 11 pages of records, which consist of the president’s official daily diary and the White House switchboard call logs, were turned over by the National Archives earlier this year to the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack.
Well. That blows Richard Nixon's 18-minute gap out of the water.

Trump helpfully responded to Costa in an attempt to exonerate himself:
Of course, this is a lie. A mobbed-up character like Trump knows what a burner phone is. As a witness told Costa—but not just any old witness:
The noose keeps tightening around Trump and his co-conspirators. This is why Attorney General Merrick Garland has added over one hundred lawyers to the staff investigating the insurrection. 

Of course, the "do something" people want leaks and juicy stories. They can't look at actions like this, or statements made by Garland that the Department of Justice will prosecute insurrectionists at all levels. They want to be flies on the wall, privy to all the happenings. Sadly for them, this is Joe Biden's show, not Donald Trump's. Pres. Biden's people don't leak to the media.

I think we can say that something's afoot. Again, a hundred extra lawyers working on a case sounds like a ramping up; by now the FBI and Justice should have a mountain of evidence. Now it's time to build a case. And it won't be done on the timetable of impatient pundits.

That almost-eight hour gap is the smoking gun. It is the evidence that Trump and his helpers knew that they couldn't speak on official channels. They had to go off-piste. Of course, the January 6th committee already has some of the call records. And contrary to popular belief, burner phone call records can be traced. This coup attempt was as shambolic and ad hoc as the rest of Trump's time in office. It had no institutional support, because one assumes if, say, Trump had gone to military figures, they would have revealed his plot. So he had to attempt a soft coup engineered at the last minute. Trump's own sloppiness and inattention to detail is his undoing. 

Happy Hump Day, everyone. We're winning.

Epilogue

He really is an idiot.

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