Trump’s Cell Phone Data Fills In That 7 Hour Gap In Jan. 6 WH Phone Logs

(If there’s an afterlife, or the WH is as some say haunted it would be fun to talk to Rosemary Woods who became famous back during Watergate.)

If you’re old enough to remember Watergate, or if  you are too young but have read up on it you know about how Nixon, fueled by paranoia and enabled by others orchestrated crimes and the attempted subsequent cover-up. The cover up included avoidance by Nixon and his people of talking to investigators, and even concealing and destroying evidence. Most of it all came out in the end, except for one piece of evidence I’ll talk about in a minute. The thing is, it’s pretty easy to draw parallels between then (Nixon) and now (Trump) and if history isn’t repeating itself it’s rhyming and in multi-part harmony.  Hell, the name Roger Stone strikes chords when talking both Nixon and Trump as he served both!

So far it looks like Trump has been more effective than Nixon in dragging things out and slowing down, even in some cases preventing some evidence/testimony being collected. Although it appears more may have been gathered than we know. What Trump hasn’t, at least in one instance been as good at is destroying evidence as we shall see.

For all WE are learning about the case Special Counsel has built against Trump you can be sure there’s plenty we don’t know. Yet. However, due to the legal Discovery process Jack Smith has to hand over his evidence to Trump’s defense lawyers. That’s how the system works. If Trump seems to be increasingly freaking out it’s because he actually is. It’s likely his lawyers and those closest to him try to hide bad news as much and for  however long they can but sooner or later he’s got to be told. We DO know Trump hates any sort of records being kept. He’s worked hard at few things in his life but avoiding a paper trail is one of them. He avoids signing memos or say financial statements whenever he can. There’s not trove of emails to mine because he doesn’t use a computer (so he thinks) or send emails.

Still, the fact is that even though he thinks he’s so clever Trump DOES have and use a computer. It’s his freaking smart phone! They really are just small computers, with far more power than old desktops or even going back those huge ones that took up entire rooms. Your smart phone is infinitely more powerful than the computers that took Americans to and from the moon over fifty years ago. Like any computer smart phones have memory that gets stored away. A lot of it. Add in that, Trump’s twitter activity and texting (not quite email in the amount of the info. retained but still more than zero) and whoops! Trump has without realizing it left a lot more record/paper trail than he realized.

We also know he’s clumsily tried to destroy records starting years before his attempted coup. Remember the stories of him ripping stuff up, and aides later digging through the waste-basket and scotch-taping things back together before forwarding what after all Presidential records required by law to be given to the National Archives? When Trump read about THAT word is he sometimes started ripping stuff up and flushing it down the toilet! He’s screamed at lawyers, actual lawyers who are competent for taking notes in meetings with him. Given the decades of experience he has with lawsuits he knows full well the probative value of lawyers notes in legal proceedings.

All of that brings us to January 6, as well as the days just prior and afterwards. While we’re only finding out now thanks to a rather casual admission in a a recent court filing Trump doesn’t just know, but has likely known for a while now that Jack Smith obtained his personal cell phone data for that time frame. The court filing lists three witnesses that Smith plans to use and apparently they are good ones for Smith and very, very bad ones for Trump. According to this Newsweek article Trump was “totally freaked out” to learn this:

Writing on X, formerly Twitter on Tuesday, Litman said: “The bland disclosure of expert witness #3 by Jack Smith in the 1/6 trial has to have the Trump camp totally freaked out. Expert apparently can figure out thru Twitter data not just what Trump tweeted and visited but his physical whereabouts and others who used his phone. Gulp!”

“Gulp” is right. I doubt Trump has had a bigger “Oh sh*t” moment since learning back during the Mueller investigation that NONE of his discussions with his WH Counsel were privileged conversations. It’s reported when he was told this, and that those hours McGahan spent testifying were certainly more than a series of answers about being unable to respond because of attorney/client privilege Trump went pale. And exclaimed something like “OH MY GOD! I told him damned near everything!” Now? Via his precious smart phone he’s told on himself.

Trump probably thought he was soooooo clever in ordering that the WH phone logs get screwed with on Jan. 6. He knew calls would be flying back and forth between him and all sorts of people (Gym Jordan? Looking at you kid!) and being Trump didn’t want any record, any “paper trail.” I thought of this when reading about the cell phone thing because some of the reporting I heard and read pointed out how it can fill in those gaps Trump tried to create in the record. Seven hours is a LONG time to not have recorded who was calling out of the WH and who they were calling. Or also who was calling to the WH and where/who those calls were routed to. Gee, you think maybe Trump (and others) knew there was a boatload of stuff to hide? I don’t know whether the order was given before (in the morning just before things started getting wild) to not log calls, or if they went back and recreated logs with that seven hour gap. Either way it goes to prove consciousness of guilt. Intent.

But seven freaking hours? That’s one helluva gap, and yesterday evening the parallel to fifty years ago and Nixon/Watergate hit me. Specifically it was Nixon’s chief secretary Rosemary Woods and that infamous 18 minute gap in one of the most crucial phone calls Nixon made. The revelation there was a recording system for the Oval Office was a bombshell. Nixon fought like  hell to prevent investigators from getting their hands on the recordings. We’d wind up learning why. The matter went all the way to SCOTUS which in a 9-0 ruling said this was about possible criminal wrongdoing and being President didn’t exempt Nixon (or anyone) from such things. (That’s something I’ve thought a lot about this week and I’m surprised pundits don’t mention it. Then again maybe the news bosses are threating THEM with consequences for informing the public SCOTUS has a fat, juicy precedent sitting there to refer to.)

But there was ONE particular call investigators were eager to hear. The only problem was there was a gap of over 18 minutes in the dialogue! As this CBS article from 2017 explains there was a series of “buzzes and clicks of missing audio.” Judge John Sirica who presided over things would later determine the erasures were done in “five separate and contiguous segments.” Woods tried to offer a benign explanation. She claimed at most she accidentally (sure!) erased no more than five minutes because while transcribing the tapes she reached for the phone and instead of hitting the pause button on the dictaphone with her foot she hit record by mistake. (And HELD it? For at least five minutes?) The title pic proves the ridiculousness of the LIE.

I’ve heard retired attorney Jill Wine-Banks talk about that more than once. Including the famous photo of Woods re-creating the moment for prosecutors. You can see it in the picture they took, her body at a forty-five degree angle with her left hand holding the phone and her right hand clutching the handle of the chair. All while she desperately tried to get her foot to press on the foot pedal. Try doing that for even thirty seconds, let alone 18 minutes, or even only five as Woods claimed. It was so ridiculous it got labeled “The Rosemary Stretch” and Wine-Banks noted Woods hand was gripping the chair so tightly it was white knuckled. Woods could have and should have been prosecuted for Obstruction of Justice but with so many bigger fish to fry she pretty much skated.

The audio has never been recovered, even with modern technology. That gap will never be filled in. However, it turns out the much longer gap in a crucial record Trump had eithe ordered not to be created or actually ordered destroyed and re-created can, at least in part be filled in as we now know. It warms my heart to think of Trump staring at his precious cell phone, maybe even screaming at it “how could you DO this to me!” I’m having more than a little fun thinking about his tantrums when he thinks about having thought he’d outsmarted anyone who might come looking only to find out he was wrong. And that HE was in large part providing much of the information that went missing at his direction. Hey, as I’ve said before I take my entertainment where I can find it.

Well, it’s something to think about and perhaps like me amuse yourself with. I’ll leave you with this suggestion on how to view it: Trump has often whined about not having his own Roy Cohn. It turns out what he might have needed more was his own Rosemary Woods!