January 6 committee member says panel is ‘triangulating’ to get ‘fulsome picture’ of Trump’s actions
By Kasie Hunt and Paul LeBlanc, CNN
A member of the House select committee investigating the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol said Wednesday that the panel is “triangulating” to get a “fulsome picture” of then-President Donald Trump‘s actions in the lead-up to the attack.
“We’re triangulating basically from a lot of different angles and we are getting a fulsome picture of what happened in the run-up to and on the day of January 6,” Democratic Rep. Stephanie Murphy told CNN+.
Her comments come after The Washington Post and CBS News reported that official White House records from January 6, 2021, show a gap of more than seven hours in phone calls placed to or from Trump and do not list calls between Trump and lawmakers while the riot was ongoing that were later widely reported.
CNN first reported in February that the records turned over earlier this year from the National Archives to the House select committee showed no record of phone calls for several hours made to or from Trump as the violence unfolded on Capitol Hill.
The 11 pages of the White House presidential diary, which is a record of the president’s daily activities, and White House switchboard call logs show phone calls Trump had with at least eight people the morning of January 6 and 11 people that night — with no notations of calls from 11:17 a.m. ET to 6:54 p.m., according to the Post and CBS, which obtained the records.
The lack of documentation of Trump’s calls leaves congressional investigators so far with holes in their understanding of what transpired in January, but Murphy maintained Wednesday that the panel will ultimately get the information its seeking.
“What I always say is whether it’s a witness who is unwilling to cooperate with us or whether there are gaps in documentation that we have received, we will get that information some other way,” the Florida Democrat said. “Those conversations weren’t one-way conversations. There was somebody on the other side of those conversations, and we’ll get that information that way.”
As CNN previously reported, Trump, according to sources, had a habit of asking aides to call certain people on his behalf and Democratic Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, chair of the House select committee, has acknowledged that the use of private cell phones was common in the Trump White House.
One former Trump White House staffer told CNN that Trump’s calls on personal cell phones were rarely tracked or recorded.
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CNN’s Veronica Stracqualursi contributed to this report.
