Donald Trump’s non-existent seven hours of phone logs on January 6 had MSNBC host Tiffany Cross calling him a “ghetto president” who was acting like the drug-dealing thug Bodie on the HBO crime drama “The Wire.”
Cross invited The Nation’s justice correspondent Elie Mystal on MSNBC’s “Cross Connection” on Saturday to discuss the White House call logs and the seven-hour gap in calls going through the switchboard (both to Trump and from him) on January 6 at the exact time of the capital riots. However, multiple sources corroborated that Trump and then-Vice President Mike Pence did speak on a phone that day.
Cross and Mystal said the gap in the phone records and the absence of at least one call in the logs raise a lot of questions.
“Honestly, Elie, the ghetto president that they thought Obama would be is officially Donald Trump,” Cross said. “This dude is walking like he’s Bodie from ‘The Wire’ with burner phones and erasing phone records. How are they able to do that? And who exactly would be the person to make these call logs disappear?” she asked.
On Thursday, CNN reported that no pages were missing from the six-page log, and no call logs were erased ore removed… but the call with Pence is just one of the calls that are conspicuously missing.
“Remember, well, the reason why we want to know what’s on the call logs, who he called, is because we’re trying to figure out if during the eight hours when the government was under attack by forces sent there by Donald Trump, if Donald Trump did anything to protect the country,” Mysta said. “Did he call the National Guard? Did he call the Capitol Police? Did he call Kal-El? Did he call anybody to stop the violence that he started?”
Kal-El, by the way, is Superman’s Kryptonian name.
According to Mystal, the GOP is saying that the reason there are no call logs for precisely the time that Trump supporters were storming the Capitol is that Trump “habitually violated the rules for four years and didn’t log all of his phone calls that he was making while on the job.”
So their actual argument is that, ‘Well, actually the president broke the law all the time so it’s not surprising that we don’t know he was calling during a coup that he started against his own government. Duh,'” Mystal mused.
“I’m laughing at you, Elie, when you were saying that, but really, none of this is funny,” Cross said. “But I’m laughing because the stupidity is off the charts.”
The January 8 committee is continuing to investigate the attack, including “whether Trump communicated that day through backchannels, phones of aides or personal disposable phones, known as ‘burner phones.‘”
