What kind of “president” immediately reaches for a private, unofficial phone when the U.S. Capitol is under violent assault and he feels the need to keep up to speed? David Frum, writing for the Atlantic, states the obvious: one who is guilty as hell of something and wants to keep others from finding out what that “something” is.
Seriously, a burner phone? That’s something drug dealers and other criminals use. Or cheating spouses. But as much as the latter may have been one of Trump’s preoccupations, having a Secret Service detail shadowing him probably put a damper on it. He clearly wasn’t trying to hook up with another porn star that afternoon of Jan. 6. He had other things to think about.
So he was hiding conversations, activity that he knew would get him in serious trouble. He wanted to leave no trace, no recordings, and even though he knew there would be a long line of eyewitnesses who saw him on the phone that day, he’d always be able to argue about what was said.
Frum has a good idea of what Trump was talking about in his “offline chats” that day, because Trump had already laid it out when he incited the crowd to assault members of Congress in an effort to overturn the election. Quoting from Trump’s speech that day, Frum reminds us it was all about “convincing” Mike Pence:
Because if Mike Pence does the right thing, we win the election. All he has to do, all this is, this is from the number one, or certainly one of the top, Constitutional lawyers in our country. He has the absolute right to do it … States want to revote. The states got defrauded. They were given false information. They voted on it. Now they want to recertify. They want it back. All Vice President Pence has to do is send it back to the states to recertify and we become president and you are the happiest people.
As Frum notes, Trump had already moved offline when he gave that speech. We only know about the calls that went back and forth for the next seven and a half hours because witnesses in his vicinity have told the media—or the Jan. 6 Committee—about them.
Working different phones was a time-tested method for Trump, as it is for most criminals familiar with the practice. As Gloria Borger and Jamie Gangel reported for CNN in February, Trump’s habit of switching phones was incessant:
According to multiple sources formerly in the administration, the ex-President often used other people’s telephones (or multiple phones of his own, sometimes rotated in and out of use) to communicate with his supporters – and even family.
One former staffer blamed the former President’s habit on an aversion to anyone listening to his calls...[.]
As Frum notes, Trump used his own phones and those of others all the time; when Melania refused to answer his call after the Stormy Daniels affair went public, Trump grabbed a phone from a Secret Service Agent because he knew Melania wouldn’t recognize the number. (Yes, that really happened.)
So we have to take this mysterious seven and a half hour gap in the context of knowing that for Trump, as Borger and Gangel point out, “The phone was his lifeline:”
In Donald Trump’s White House, telephones were a valued commodity. The then-President loved to talk to everyone, said a former White House aide.
“He took everybody’s calls,” the aide said, even interrupting national security briefings to make and receive calls.
Such a talker! And when you examine what else was going on Jan. 6 after Trump urged his minions to “take [their] country back,” you can just imagine how much there was to talk about during those seven and a half hours, while the very seat of the United States government was besieged.
He could have talked to the Department of Defense to rein in the insurrection. He could have contacted the Capitol Police. He could have called the mayor of D.C. to coordinate a National Guard response to quell a protest that had gone dangerously awry. With nearly existential national security issues looming, he could have done all these things using official communications.
But he did none of these things. Instead he picked up an unofficial, private phone — possibly an aide’s, possibly a “burner” — to talk to someone about what really mattered to him that day. As Frum observes, we already have an idea what that was:
Trump’s actions that day were not secret. They all happened in full public view. He incited a crowd to attack Congress in order to overturn by violence his election defeat. He refused to act to protect Congress and the Constitution when the attack began, and for a long time afterward. When he finally did act, he did so ineffectively: a tweet at 2:38 p.m. faintly suggesting that the crowd be more peaceful, another at 3:13 saying so more emphatically, and after all that, a tweet at 7:24 again condemning Pence for not indulging the fantasy that his vice president could overturn the election for him.
Meanwhile, Trump busied himself watching it all unfold on TV, while doing absolutely nothing to stop it. If his well-established predilections are any indicator at all, he was on the phone most of that time. And they sure weren’t borrowed Secret Service phones he was using this time. At the risk of pointing out the obvious, Frum observes:
Trump’s phone behavior may suggest the answer to the most important remaining questions:
- Did Trump in any way authorize the attack in advance?
- Did Trump in any way communicate or coordinate with the attackers as the attack unfolded?
During those seven and a half hours, Trump was in the employ of the American people. He was at work, on the clock, being paid, and just like the waiver the lowliest corporate employees sign when they’re hired by a firm, their communications during work-time are not their own. In this case, barring some privilege that does not apply here, those communications and their contents are the property of the American public, his employer.
Whether they were made on a “burner phone” or otherwise.