Jan. 6 panel member says calls involving Trump took place during call log gap

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) on Sunday said the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol is aware of phone calls involving then-President Trump that took place the day of the violent attack during a more than seven-hour gap in Trump’s phone log.

Asked by moderator Margaret Brennan on CBS’s “Face the Nation” if he has any insight on the seven-hour and 37 minute phone gap in Trump’s Jan. 6 phone logs, Raskin said the break in calls is “very unusual.”

“It’s a very unusual thing for us to find that suddenly everything goes dark for a seven-hour period in terms of tracking the movements and conversations of the president,” said Raskin, a member of the Jan. 6 select committee.

“And some things we’ve been able to piece together from other people’s interviews and depositions that we know took place during that time. We are aware of other phone calls that took place during that time that included the president, but we have no comprehensive fine-grained portrait of what was going on during that period, and that’s obviously of intense interest to us,” he added.

The Washington Post and CBS News reported this past week that the call logs provided to the Jan. 6 panel had a more than seven-hour gap, some of which overlapped with rioters taking aim at the building.

Brennan on Sunday said Trump’s office “was known for being sloppy,” noting that the former president used cellphones and that his executive assistant, Molly Michael, was absent for most of the day on Jan. 6. She reportedly arrived at the White House in the afternoon of Jan. 6 after missing the morning for personal reasons.

Axios first reported on Michael’s absence, noting that she was responsible for taking handwritten notes on meetings and calls the president took that did not appear on her schedule.

Pressed by Brennan on if there is a chance that there was “large-scale incompetence” in the Trump White House rather than conspiracy, Raskin said “we’re taking that possibility into account.”

He did, however, say that “it does seem like the gaps are suspiciously tailored to the heart of the events.”

This story was updated at 1:45 p.m.