Large parts of the Jan. 6 ‘gap’ have already been filled

[cigaretteman]

For much of this week, the political world has considered an unexpected detail about the day of the Capitol riot last year: Who was President Donald Trump talking to as the day unfolded?
Normally, presidential conversations, even relatively informal ones, are logged by staff in a formal calendar. Yet, as The Washington Post reported Tuesday, there was a gap in Trump’s call log for Jan. 6, 2021, that lasted for more than seven hours. For a president known to spend inordinate amounts of time on the phone, that seemed unlikely. So what was missing?
In the days that followed, we’ve learned a lot about the specific practices of the White House (and, specifically, the Trump White House) both that day and in general. It’s been confirmed, for example, that the call log we published earlier this week is the full log; there are no missing pages or anything similar. The people we know he spoke with on the phone are all of the calls that were logged. We also learned that Trump’s executive assistant was out most of the day, perhaps contributing to unrecorded conversations.
But it’s also worth noting that Trump was not simply missing for that entire seven-hour period. In fact, several hours are fully accounted for — times during which Trump might understandably have not been making calls anyway.

What we know Trump was doing​

We’ve walked through what we know Trump was doing during that period, a stretch that ran from about a quarter past 11 in the morning until a bit before 7 p.m. The timeline below will provide a rough guide to the six important segments of the day.
1. Before the rally: 11:17 a.m. to 11:38 a.m.
The official call log shows Trump’s last call on record, with Sen. David Perdue (R-Ga.), ending at 11:06. Annotations on his daily calendar, though, shows the call at 11:17 a.m. with Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-Ga.). This is where the “gap” starts — though the calendar also notes a call with Vice President Mike Pence at 11:20 a.m. This call would become rather infamous.
Trump had just met or was still meeting with a large group, including members of his family and adviser Stephen Miller, with whom he spoke for about half an hour earlier in the morning. Miller wrote many of Trump’s speeches and it’s likely this was a subject of conversation, given that Trump was about to leave the White House to address the crowd that he’d summoned to Washington.
2. The rally: 11:38 a.m. to 1:19 p.m.
Trump left the White House at 11:38 a.m. and got to the rally venue at the Ellipse at 11:41 a.m. (It’s not far.) He spent some time backstage, as captured in a video apparently shot by Donald Trump Jr. At 11:55 a.m., he went out to the stage.
It’s useful to point out that, during this period, many of the individuals he might have wanted to speak with were in his immediate presence. It’s not clear how many of the prior speakers were still there — including attorneys John Eastman and Rudy Giuliani — but it’s easy to imagine they might have stuck around to speak with the president.
At about noon, Trump began speaking and continued for more than an hour. At 1:17 p.m. he left for the White House and arrived two minutes later.

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[cigaretteman]

3. The first gap: 1:19 p.m. to 4:03 p.m.
When Trump got back to the White House, the first quiet period began — though, here too, we do know some of what happened.
When he arrived, the Capitol had not yet been breached, but thousands of people were surrounding the building. At 2:24 p.m., shortly after the first rioters got inside, he tweeted an excoriation of Pence: “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution.”
Two minutes later he used a White House line to call Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), though he was trying to reach Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.). It’s not clear why this call wasn’t in the log or the diary. He was connected to Tuberville, who would later recall he told Trump that Pence had been evacuated.
At some point after the tweet, and presumably after the call, Pence’s national security adviser, Keith Kellogg, came to speak to the president, finding Trump watching cable-news coverage. According to the book “Peril” by The Post’s Bob Woodward and CBS News’s Robert Costa (the reporters who first reported on the seven-hour gap), Kellogg pressed Trump to tweet something aimed at calming the crowd.
“Trump blinked and kept watching television,” Woodward and Costa write. “Kellogg looked around and realized the West Wing was nearly empty. [Chief of Staff Mark] Meadows was in his office, but Trump was essentially alone. National security adviser Robert O’Brien was in Florida. [Senior adviser Jared] Kushner was not there.”
Other reporting from the Wall Street Journal’s Michael Bender in his book “Frankly, We Did Win This Election” reinforces Trump’s isolation as the riot unfolded.
The president, he wrote, “ignored the public and private pleas of his advisers, both current and former, who begged him to quell the riots. Terrified Republican lawmakers called White House aides and the president’s children, pleading for help. Kellyanne Conway — who had received calls from D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser’s office asking for her help in convincing Trump to call in the National Guard — phoned a close personal aide to the president, relaying the mayor’s request and adding that she, too, felt Trump needed to calm his supporters. The mayor twice personally implored Meadows for help.” Trump himself was seemingly difficult to contact.
At 2:38 p.m., though, Trump tweeted a call for the crowd to “support our Capitol Police and Law Enforcement!” (It’s useful to note here that Trump was a very slow tweeter, taking several minutes to compose a message.)
A few minutes later at 2:44 p.m., Ashli Babbitt was shot near the House chamber, an incident audible to those inside. At some point between then and 3:05 p.m., Trump spoke with House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.). (McCarthy mentioned the call during a Fox News interview at 3:05 p.m.)
Costa and Woodward described the call, during which McCarthy told Trump that someone had been shot.
“Trump did not seem to grasp the gravity of the situation,” they write. “He never asked about McCarthy’s safety. And one remark stood out: ‘Well, Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are.’ ” This comment was later confirmed by a Republican member of Congress.
At 3:13 p.m., another tweet. It read, in part: “I am asking for everyone at the U.S. Capitol to remain peaceful. No violence!”
4. The first video: 4:03 p.m. to 4:17 p.m.
With violence still wracking the Capitol, Trump went out to the Rose Garden to film a video message to his supporters. It took several minutes. Afterward, he returned to the Oval Office and, at 4:17 p.m., the video was tweeted out.
5. The second gap: 4:17 p.m. to 6:27 p.m.
For the next several hours, it’s not clear what Trump was doing, with two exceptions.
At 6:01 p.m., he again tweeted about the violence — this time, quite sympathetically. “These are the things and events that happen,” it began, “when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long.” He encouraged his supporters to “[g]o home with love & in peace. Remember this day forever!”
It was poorly received. So the White House filmed another video, this time a formal one that involved Trump reading from a teleprompter from behind a lectern. That statement was both much less enthusiastic about the rioters and, for the first time, acknowledged that there would be a transfer of power to Joe Biden on Jan. 20. It’s not clear how long it took to script and record, but that occurred during this period.
Eventually, Trump went upstairs to his private residence.
6. Calls resume: 6:27 p.m. to 7:10 p.m.
About half an hour after returning upstairs, the call log resumes with his trying to reach Dan Scavino, the adviser who handled his social media feed. At 7:01 p.m., he called White House counsel Pat Cipollone.
At 7:10 p.m., the second video was released. Ensconced safely in the White House, Trump spent the next several hours on the phone.