Trump's Jan. 6 Phone Log Has a 7-Hour Problem

House investigators hoping to learn what then-President Trump was saying and thinking as the Capitol riot unfolded have a problem, one that stretches for 457 minutes. That is the length of the gap of Trump's phone logs on Jan. 6, 2021, report Bob Woodward and Robert Costa in a joint story for CBS News and the Washington Post. Specifically, the official records turned over by the National Archives show no calls to or from Trump from 11:17am to 6:54pm on that day, a span that covers the storming of the Capitol building. But Trump was talking by phone to allies during that stretch, including House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and Sen. Mike Lee of Utah.

So how to explain the gap in the record? House investigators are looking into the possibility that Trump used the phones of aides or perhaps burner phones, or that the records they received are not complete or, worse, were compromised by what one lawmaker on the House's Jan. 6 panel calls a "possible coverup." Trump himself had this to say on Monday night: "I have no idea what a burner phone is, to the best of my knowledge I have never even heard the term." And a spokeswoman for the former president said that he has nothing to do with the keeping of White House records and that he assumed all his calls were dutifully logged. (The full story has images of the actual phone logs.)