Burner phones are usually cheap, no-contract, prepaid phones that can be discarded when no longer needed. In shows like Breaking Bad and The Wire, burner phones are used when criminals want to avoid detection by the police. The term “burner” comes from the idea that when the phone is no longer needed, it can be “burned” along with all of the other evidence of the crime. What Is a Burner Phone and When Should You Use One?. There are now encryption apps also available.
Did Donald Trump and his co-conspirator Coup Plotters buy a big ol’ bag of Cricket prepaid phones to plot their seditious inusrrection on January 6? Let’s just put this out there as a possibility to investigate. If you know anything at all about Roger Stone … I’m just sayin.’ What were the Coup Plotters at the Willard Hotel “Coup Command Center” and GQP members of Congress aiding and abetting the coup using to communicate with the White House?
The AP reports, Records obtained by Jan. 6 panel don’t list Trump’s calls:
White House call logs obtained so far by the House panel investigating the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection at the Capitol do not list calls made by then-President Donald Trump as he watched the violence unfold on television, nor do they list calls made directly to the president, according to two people familiar with the probe.
The lack of information about Trump’s personal calls presents a new challenge to investigators as they work to create the most comprehensive record yet of the attack, with a particular focus on what the former president was doing in the White House as hundreds of his supporters violently beat police, broke into the Capitol and interrupted the certification of President Joe Biden’s victory. The people were granted anonymity to discuss records that have not yet been released by the committee.
There are several possible explanations for omissions in the records, which do not reflect conversations that Trump had on Jan. 6 with multiple Republican lawmakers, for example. Trump was known to use a personal cell phone, or he could have had a phone passed to him by an aide. [Or he could have been using a burner phone, just say it. The man is a third-rate mob boss.] The committee is also continuing to receive records from the National Archives and other sources, which could produce additional information.
The gaps in the records of Trump’s calls on Jan. 6, first reported by The New York Times and CNN, come as a separate House committee said Thursday that it is investigating whether former Trump violated the Presidential Records Act after boxes of presidential records were discovered at his Florida estate.
House Oversight and Reform Committee Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney, a Democrat from New York, said in a statement Thursday that she was “deeply concerned that these records were not provided to the National Archives and Records Administration promptly at the end of the Trump administration and they appear to have been removed from the White House.”
The committee is focused on Trump’s actions that day because he waited hours to tell his supporters to stop the violence and leave the Capitol. The panel is also interested in the organization and financing of a rally that morning in Washington where Trump told his supporters to “fight like hell.” Among the unanswered questions is how close organizers of the rally coordinated with White House officials.
In many cases, the committee may not need direct confirmation from the White House about Trump’s calls. Lawmakers have already interviewed more than 500 witnesses, including several people in Trump’s inner circle who may be able to fill in those gaps. They are hampered, though, by the former president’s claims of executive privilege over his personal conversations, which have prompted many witnesses to refuse to answer some questions.
The crime-fraud exception eviscertates his claim of privilege. There is no executive privilege to commit a crime.
The New York Times adds Trump’s Missing Call Logs Present a Challenge for Jan. 6 Investigators:
The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol has discovered gaps in official White House telephone logs from the day of the riot, finding few records of calls by President Donald J. Trump from critical hours when investigators know that he was making them.
Investigators have not uncovered evidence that any official records were tampered with or deleted, and it is well known that Mr. Trump routinely used his personal cellphone, and those of his aides, to talk with other aides, congressional allies and outside confidants, bypassing the normal channels of presidential communication.
But the sparse call records present a major obstacle to a central element of the panel’s work: recreating what Mr. Trump was doing behind closed doors during the assault on Congress by a mob of his supporters.
The gaps in the call logs were the latest in a string of revelations this week about the extent of Mr. Trump’s flouting of the rules and norms of presidential conduct, and how his penchant for doing so has left an incomplete record of how he operated while in office.
Some of the records that the Jan. 6 committee has received had been ripped to shreds and taped back together, reflecting the former president’s habit of tearing up documents. In addition, he removed more than a dozen boxes of presidential records from the White House when he left office, which the National Archives believes contained classified material, according to a person briefed on the matter.
The House Oversight committee on Thursday announced an investigation into what it called “potential serious violations” of the Presidential Records Act.
Mr. Trump has been loath to return the boxes of documents he took from the White House, despite repeated efforts by the National Archives to obtain them. At some point during a monthslong negotiation between Mr. Trump’s team and the agency, officials at the National Archives threatened to send a letter to Congress or the Department of Justice if he continued to withhold the boxes, according to a person familiar with private discussions, who spoke about them on the condition of anonymity.
And while he was president, staff in the White House residence periodically discovered wads of printed paper clogging a toilet — leading them to believe that Mr. Trump had attempted to flush documents, according to people familiar with the situation. He was known to do the same on foreign trips, the people said. (Those incidents are recounted in a forthcoming book, “Confidence Man,” written by a New York Times reporter, about Mr. Trump and his presidency.)
President Trump has gone to extraordinary lengths to conceal details of his conversations with Russian President Vladimir Putin, including on at least one occasion taking possession of the notes of his own interpreter and instructing the linguist not to discuss what had transpired with other administration officials, current and former U.S. officials said.
Flushed the notes down the toilet, did he? Or did he eat the notes?
Trump did so after a meeting with Putin in 2017 in Hamburg that was also attended by then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. U.S. officials learned of Trump’s actions when a White House adviser and a senior State Department official sought information from the interpreter beyond a readout shared by Tillerson.
The constraints that Trump imposed are part of a broader pattern by the president of shielding his communications with Putin from public scrutiny and preventing even high-ranking officials in his own administration from fully knowing what he has told one of the United States’ main adversaries.
As a result, U.S. officials said there is no detailed record, even in classified files, of Trump’s face-to-face interactions with the Russian leader at five locations over the past two years. Such a gap would be unusual in any presidency, let alone one that Russia sought to install through what U.S. intelligence agencies have described as an unprecedented campaign of election interference.
The highly irregular practices underscore the challenge of creating a full historical record of a presidency that often operated outside the bounds of longstanding rules.
They have also prompted accusations of hypocrisy from Democrats, who recall how Mr. Trump branded Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while she was secretary of state “worse than Watergate,” and made “lock her up” a campaign rallying cry in 2016. Republicans who eagerly followed his lead in savaging Mrs. Clinton for her email practices have been notably silent amid revelations that Mr. Trump spent his four years in office — and much of the time since — mishandling presidential records.
The House panel investigating Jan. 6 is still awaiting additional material from the National Archives and Records Administration, which keeps the official White House logs. The committee has also subpoenaed telecommunications companies for the personal cellphone records of a range of people in Mr. Trump’s inner circle.
Ah, but there would be no record of any burner phones they were using, that’s the whole point.
It is unknown whether the committee has specifically demanded records from Mr. Trump’s personal cellphone.
The call logs obtained by the committee [only] document who was calling the White House switchboard, and what calls were being made from the White House to others. Two people familiar with the phone records discussed details about them on the condition of anonymity because they did not want to be identified discussing an ongoing congressional investigation. A spokesman for the committee declined to comment.
Since the attack on Jan. 6, 2021, former Trump administration officials have said that investigators would struggle to piece together a complete record of Trump’s conversations that day, because of his habit of using his and other people’s cellphones. At least one person who tried to reach Mr. Trump on his cellphone on Jan. 6 had their call picked up by one of his aides. It is unclear where Mr. Trump was at the time.
Counterintelligence officials say it is highly risky for presidents to use their personal cellphones, as those phones almost certainly have no protection against spying by foreign adversaries. There is nothing in federal record-keeping laws that explicitly addresses whether a president can use a personal cellphone for official business. But the spirit of the law is that presidents should avoid doing so — and if they do, their calls should still be memorialized, said Jason R. Baron, the former director of litigation at the National Archives.
“Government agencies are supposed to document phone calls when the conversation is about important government business,” said Mr. Baron, a professor at the University of Maryland. “A president choosing to use a personal cellphone on a sensitive matter of government business without the conversation being recorded anywhere raises serious questions about his compliance with the spirit” of the Presidential Records Act.
Dude, he showed contempt for the law in everything he did. The man is a third-rate mob boss.
Little is known of what Mr. Trump did inside the White House as rioters stormed the Capitol. He was watching television as the riot played out on cable news, and several aides, including his daughter Ivanka Trump, implored him to say something to try to get the rioters to stop.
Nevertheless, his first public communication as the melee unfolded was a Twitter post attacking Vice President Mike Pence, who was presiding over the joint session of Congress to count the Electoral College votes. Mr. Trump also is known to have tried to reach out to one senator as the certification of the vote was delayed [newly elected Sen. Tommy Tuberville, but he dialed Sen. Mike Lee instead]. And he fielded a call from Representative Kevin McCarthy, the top House Republican, who told Mr. Trump that people were breaking into his office on Capitol Hill.
Early on in his administration, Mr. Trump was known to use a cellphone belonging to Keith Schiller, his personal bodyguard at Trump Tower and later the director of Oval Office operations, for some of his calls. It meant the White House call logs were often an incomplete reflection of his contacts.
After the Supreme Court ruled against Mr. Trump’s efforts to block the release of hundreds of pages of presidential records, the National Archives turned over to the House panel investigating the riot voluminous documents that included daily presidential diaries, schedules, appointment information showing visitors to the White House, activity logs, call logs, and switchboard shift-change checklists showing calls to Mr. Trump and Mr. Pence on Jan. 6.
Despite the lack of call records from the White House, the committee has learned in recent weeks that Mr. Trump spoke on the phone with Mr. Pence and Republican lawmakers on the morning of Jan. 6 as he pushed to overturn the election.
But many of the calls the committee is aware of did not show up in the official logs.
The committee did receive evidence in the documents requested from the National Archives that Mr. Trump had a call with Representative Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio, who led the floor strategy on Jan. 6 of objecting to Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory in key states, according to two people familiar with the investigation. Mr. Jordan has said he spoke with Mr. Trump multiple times that day.
The Washington Post reported on Wednesday that Justice Department officials were weighing whether to investigate Mr. Trump after the National Archives made a referral to the Justice Department, asking it to examine Mr. Trump’s handling of White House records.
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No one should be allowed to behave as if they are above the law without retribution. To do so, promotes anarchy and destroys Democracy.
Former U.S. Attorney Glenn Kirshner says it’s not the Presidential Records Act, which he calls “largely toothless,” that Trump has to worry about, but rather a closely related law that does have substantial criminal penalties: 18 U.S. Code § 2071:
a) Whoever willfully and unlawfully conceals, removes, mutilates, obliterates, or destroys, or attempts to do so, or, with intent to do so takes and carries away any record, proceeding, map, book, paper, document, or other thing, filed or deposited with any clerk or officer of any court of the United States, or in any public office, or with any judicial or public officer of the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.
(b) Whoever, having the custody of any such record, proceeding, map, book, document, paper, or other thing, willfully and unlawfully conceals, removes, mutilates, obliterates, falsifies, or destroys the same, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both; and shall forfeit his office and be disqualified from holding any office under the United States. As used in this subsection, the term “office” does not include the office held by any person as a retired officer of the Armed Forces of the United States.
“Not only is there a 3-year federal felony, but importantly anybody who is convicted under that statute is prohibited from holding federal office,” Kirschner said.
John Gans and Jon B. Wolfsthal write at The Atlantic, “The DOJ Needs to Investigate Trump’s Records Management”, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/02/doj-trump-records/622069/
The modern rules dictating the proper handling of U.S. government records were born after a high crime. In 1974, President Richard Nixon declared that it was his right to destroy the records made in his White House, including secret recordings of Oval Office meetings. But the U.S. Supreme Court ruled otherwise. After that ruling and Nixon’s resignation, Congress passed the Presidential Recordings and Materials Preservation Act to put the Nixon materials in the National Archives, and later the Presidential Records Act of 1978, which made clear that the government—not the private citizens who once worked in the White House—owned all presidential records.
That origin story is what gives America’s archival laws and regulations their punch. Everyone from the president down to the most junior federal bureaucrat swears an oath to protect the Constitution and is informed that keeping records is a crime. Many citizens, including those who are in or have left office, have been charged in violation of these rules, their careers destroyed or damaged, some sent to prison. Even with these “lesser” cases, it is the Nixon example that sets the bar, indicating that this is not some minor issue or mere convention. Protecting the paper of a presidency is about nothing less than the rule of law, government accountability, and whether everyone in our government, and in this country, is held to the same standards.
[Our] experience of working for the government underscored exactly what many Americans who have never walked into a federal building believe intuitively: The president has to follow the same rules as anyone else. This is part of why we were infuriated to learn that former President Donald Trump is reported to have removed unique materials from the White House that later had to be recovered from his Mar-a-Lago resort. And it is why we believe that the Department of Justice must investigate Trump for his handling of government records and, if the facts justify it, prosecute him, just as other less prominent Americans have been for similar behavior.
[A]lthough the 45th president’s predilection for tearing up documents (and also reportedly flushing some down the toilet) has gotten the most attention, the brazen theft—and it is theft—of at least 15 boxes of materials from the White House is most alarming. The materials taken were not private reflections written in a diary but, among others, correspondence with the North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, according to The New York Times. This is exactly the sort of material—sensitive communications with another head of state—that is crucial to preserve.
[A]nd as could have been predicted, some of the stolen materials appear to have been classified, and left vulnerable for the past year. On Thursday The Washington Post reported that some of the information taken to Mar-a-Lago was designated “top secret.” This is no longer just a case of removing materials important for historians and accountability. This has morphed into a full-blown intelligence scandal that could undermine both national security now and democratic norms in the future.
[T]hose 15 boxes represent another of Trump’s blows to democracy. At a time when the rule of law and basic democratic norms are under attack, responding to clear violations of the rules is even more important. If the country does not hold the former president to account for breaking a law, what’s to stop the next one?