Jack Smith Plans To Corner Worried Sick Trump With His Own Data

I think we should all chip in and send Donald Trump a Christmas present, shall we? I have just the right item in mind. A maze. A maze with many corridors and we can put a lot of gilt-edged mirrors and gold toilets in the place so that Trump will feel at home, and we can even throw some boxes labeled Top Secret into a ballroom here, a closet there.

But the best part of our present will be what Jack Smith has found by way of cornering and trapping the Trump rat, and that is his very own cell phone data. Yes, friends, we will be able to find out on March 4, or thereabouts, exactly what Trump said and when he said it to his MAGA minions. That would be good to know. For example, did Trump himself send the tweet that called Mike Pence a coward, sent moments before the MAGolian hordes began chanting “Hang Mike Pence” and worse? Or, did somebody else with access to Trump’s devices do that? The New Republic:

The prosecution in Donald Trump’s federal election subversion trial has an apparent bombshell on the horizon. Special counsel Jack Smith filed legal documents on Monday indicating that he will call three (currently unnamed) witnesses to speak to a trove of data extracted from Trump’s cell phone in use during his years at the White House.

The first two witnesses will translate geographic location data logged on the device by Google into a visual representation of the “movements of individuals toward the Capitol area during and after the defendant’s speech at the Ellipse,” according to the document. The third witness will use the data to explain how Trump used Twitter on January 6, revealing images and websites visited, determining the “usage of these phones throughout the post-election period,” and identifying the “periods of time during which the defendant’s phone was unlocked and the Twitter application was open on January 6.”

The data on Trump’s phone could provide a tick-tock of Trump’s behavior on January 6 and the days immediately preceding and following it, as well as supply additional information about who had access to his accounts and devices.

It would be good to know who is in fact running the Trump show and to what extent. I, for one, would love to know why Trump was on the phone to Stephen Miller a lot that day. White House phone records indicate that Trump talked to Miller more than anybody else that day. The reason that has always intrigued me is because of Mike Pence’s refusal to get into a Secret Service limousine and leave the Capitol. I believe that Pence has reason to fear kidnapping or assassination that day.

Pence may say that he and Trump were friends and that they prayed for one another, all that, but I seriously doubt that Pence was so stupid as to not recognize the mobspeak that Trump was using that day, “It’s all up to Mike Pence, now.” It was up to Mike Pence to break the law for Trump, yes, that’s what he was being cued for and he knew it. And he had to know what the potential payback was going to be if he refused to be cued.

At least that is my theory as to why Pence didn’t want to get in the car. He didn’t know and couldn’t know, who in Trump’s administration was going to abide by the law that day and who was only too happy to break it and stage a coup d’etat. And part of a coup d’etat might well have been the kidnapping, or worse, of the vice president. And Pence knew that.

These phone records will be very interesting indeed. They may lend light to the three-hour period of time between when Kevin McCarthy spoke with Trump, as the Capitol was being breached, and then when Trump finally meandered down to the Rose Garden to do a video to his MAGA minions asking them to go home.

In a best case scenario, the data could provide a blueprint for where Trump was, what he was or wasn’t doing — watching the riot on TV was his high priority, we are told, not stopping it — and how long he took with each activity. Conversely, people trying to reach Trump, such as Nancy Pelosi or Chuck Schumer, would show up in the logs as well.

Let’s see Trump find a way to wriggle out of this one. This is yet one more reason he’s dying to delay the March 4 trial, although not the primary one, to be sure. The primary reason Trump wants to obfuscate and stall is so he can campaign without all the bother of his 91 felonies trailing after him, like Santa’s sleigh. That’s a lot of baggage.