The NPR Politics Podcast - House Democrats Probe Gap In Trump's Call Logs From January 6th

Episode Date: March 31, 2022

Jared Kushner, Trump's son-in-law and a former White House staffer, was interviewed by the committee investigating the January 6th attacks on Thursday. The investigators are now hoping to have public hearings in May to lay out what they have discovered, though any criminal chargers would have to come from the Justice Department.This episode: White House correspondent Tamara Keith, congressional reporter Claudia Grisales, and acting congressional correspondent Deirdre Walsh.Connect:Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Find and support your local public radio station.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hi, I'm Luther. And I'm Maisie Rose, and we are on our way down to Nashville, Tennessee to move me into my brand new home while I pursue my country music career. This podcast was recorded at 2.05 p.m. on Thursday, I believe it's only Thursday, March 31st, 2022. Things may have changed by the time you hear it, but hopefully Maisie will be a big country star sometime soon. Okay, here's the show.

How cool would it be if she launched her career right here? Exactly. Come to the tiny desk. The only thing I'm missing is we didn't get to hear her sing or play or perform. We need a sample. Musical timestamp next time, Maisie. Yeah. Exactly. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I play or perform. We need a sample. Musical timestamp next time, Maisie. Yeah. Exactly.

Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Claudia Grisales. I cover Congress. And I'm Deirdre Walsh. I also cover Congress. The House committee investigation into the January 6th riot at the U.S. Capitol building continues today.

You both are at the Capitol. And Claudia, you've confirmed that the committee is supposed to hear from former President Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, today, right? Right, today. That was planned for him to appear remotely. This is a voluntary appearance. No subpoena was involved. I've since confirmed that he has appeared today before the panel. And it's interesting that he's going before the committee, this voluntary appearance. One, he was not at the White House on January 6th last year. He was actually coming back to Washington, D.C., had been traveling.

So it's interesting that he is coming before the committee first. Initially, the committee had asked his wife, Ivanka Trump, both of them former White House senior advisors to appear. I talked to the committee chairman about Jared Kushner when they made that ask of Ivanka Trump in January, and there didn't seem to be interest. But now that's all changed, and they're hoping that with today's appearance, they're going to learn a lot more. The Biden White House has waived any claims of executive privilege over potential testimony from Jared Kushner or Ivanka Trump. The interesting thing about executive privilege is that it rests with the president. Former President Donald Trump is no longer president. So it actually rests with President Biden. And he has decided that there is a strong national interest in this testimony being allowed to move forward.

Do you have a sense of what the committee is hoping to learn from them? So when it comes to Jared Kushner, I talked to the chairman of the committee. This is Benny Thompson, the Democrat from Mississippi, about this yesterday. And he said, even though Kushner was not here in the Washington, D.C. area during much of that day, there's still a lot more that he can share about the planning. Because he was an integral part of the administration, It's, I think, important for us to find out if he knew anything about the planning before January 6th and to get it from him. So on Friday on the pod, we talked about Jenny Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. She had sent text messages, several of them, a lot of them, to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, encouraging him to ignore the election results and keep Trump in office, do anything he could to keep Trump

in office and release the Kraken at some point. At the time we discussed this, we didn't know whether the committee was going to want to hear from her or not. Deirdre, do they want to hear from her? They do, but I think it's notable that they haven't issued a formal invitation yet. There was a lot of interest in her. And obviously, the story that The Washington Post first reported about those texts between Ginny Thomas and then White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows caught a lot of people's attention. But a lot of people were texting Mark Meadows. The committee has thousands of documents, emails and text messages from him. It seems like they've almost pressed pause on the notion of moving forward with an invitation to her. And I don't

know if it's just because there are still some internal discussions about how to do that, or they maybe just don't see her as that high priority of a witness, given the hundreds of other people that they've talked to, and the people like Jared Kushner, who were very much in the inner circle of the Trump administration. So there's also been reporting, the same reporting team at The Washington Post first reporting this, that there was a big gap in the White House phone logs. That is the record of who President Trump was talking to on that day on January 6th. You guys have confirmed that now too, right? Yes, we've talked to sources who have confirmed that.

I talked to, for example, Pete Aguilar. This is the California Democrat who also sits on the select committee. He said it's provided a basis for us in terms of our investigation. This is what we're using to question witnesses and especially trying to fill in that gap. We know now we've seen the list of phone calls that are listed there and some that are missing. For example, one Deirdre had looked into was Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. And Deirdre, you heard more about that as well in terms of what happened in that exchange. Right. This is the official call log from the White House on January 6th. And President Trump called Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. He was majority leader at the time. But McConnell declined to take his call. And he has not talked to President Trump since mid-December and has sort of moved on. But on the other side of the Capitol, the House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, has talked publicly about the fact that he did talk to President Trump that

afternoon. In that almost eight-hour gap, sometime in that afternoon, McCarthy called then-President Trump and asked him to help stand down those people who were attacking the Capitol at the time. And they had this whole conversation. We also know that Trump reached out to Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville, and that is not on the call log. So it just raises questions about why those calls aren't on the call log. Was he using an AIDS phone? Did someone just not record those calls? You know, and all these records from the archives sort of begs the question about like what else is in there? And, you know, how is the committee going about talking to other witnesses, the hundreds of witnesses they've been talking to, about what happened that day? Is the committee trying to reconstruct those eight hours? Essentially, yes. That is their job now, is trying to figure out what was going on in that gap. We've heard from multiple members of the panel who say this is disturbing, that this was not in the call log. Was it tampered with? Why is there this gap here? And in trying to

fill in all those blanks. And so they're looking at any possible avenues. They can gather more of the records if they exist, if they're out there through other possible options and through witnesses and confirming through them when these calls took place and perhaps the content of those calls as well. I guess we should just mention that for people who know the history of Watergate, this causes a little bit of a, you know, a flash here because there were not eight hours, there were 18 minutes that were gone. And that was critical, a critical part of what ultimately took down Richard Nixon. And you have to wonder what the committee already knows about other things that were happening in that gap. And it sort of goes back to Jared Kushner, who is talking to the committee today. Ivanka Trump, he was traveling. Ivanka Trump was in the White House. And we know from other things that have been in, you know, sort of dripped out from the committee so far that she was one of the people that was talking to the president later in the afternoon about trying to get him to send a message following up on Kevin McCarthy's appeal to get the rioters to stand out.

All right. Well, we are going to take a quick break and we'll have more in a second. And we are back. And I wanted to ask you both how the committee members and staff that you've been talking to in the last week or so, how do they feel about the state of the investigation? Yeah, that is interesting when you talk to members because the clock is ticking and they've had to move back the timing of these public hearings to present their findings. Initially, they wanted to do it earlier this year, maybe in April, and the clock has slipped. Now they're saying those hearings could start in May. For example, April 1st, Chairman Thompson had initially told me would be the cutoff for interviews and depositions. And I checked with him on that recently. And he said that, you know, that was a little too optimistic and we're going to need more time.

I asked him, well, how many more interviews do you have? Because they're doing about two to three a day at this rate. And he said a lot. So he wouldn't give me a number. And he's trying for now to steer away from another deadline, but they seem determined nonetheless that they will get two hearings in the month of May. They want to issue an interim report this summer and a final report by the fall. And the reality is for this committee, they have a political deadline and that's the November midterm elections. The House Democrats could lose control of the House in November. And if that happens, House Republicans could disband the January 6th committee. So they need to push all this stuff out, have the hearings and put out the report, you know, in the run up to the midterms.

Yeah, I guess I'm wondering, as we talk here, what success looks like. Right. In terms of talking to members, it's really setting a very comprehensive narrative of the months, the weeks, leading up to January 6, the day of, in terms of what actually happened. And looking at other issues surrounding it. They want to provide a complete record and they hope in the end maybe try and take over some of the false information, the misinformation that has surrounded January 6th for some folks out there and make an influence and hold people accountable as well as look at legislative fixes to try and ensure that this never happens again. But when you talk about holding people accountable, we should just remind people this is not a criminal investigation. This is a congressional

investigation. It's about establishing a historical record. But anything beyond that, I guess, would go to the Justice Department. That's right. And we saw sort of the open frustration from several members of the January 6th committee this week on Monday when they had their business meeting, sort of openly complaining that the Justice Department was not acting. This committee is doing its job. The Department of Justice needs to do theirs. We are upholding our responsibility. The Department of Justice needs to do theirs. We are upholding our responsibility. The Department of Justice must do the same.

Attorney General Garland, do your job so that we can do ours. Oh, my God. So that's Zoe Lofgren, Adam Schiff, and Elaine Luria, three Democrats on the January 6th committee. I should say there's one Democrat, Jamie Raskin, who Claudia has talked a lot to, who the other day sort of distanced himself from this sort of open venting at the Justice Department. He noted that Merrick Garland is actually his constituent. He represents Maryland. But he also made the point with maybe a little shade at some of his colleagues that this is the same kind of behavior that Democrats called out when Republicans ran the House and were openly urging the, you know, Bill Barr Justice Department, the Jeff Sessions Justice Department under then President Trump

to do various things. So it's sort of like we shouldn't be politicizing what the department ends up doing. Well, and it's not like the Justice Department is doing nothing. They have a sprawling investigation of their own underway, hundreds of prosecutions in process. And the Justice Department is bringing on more people to deal with this. This is going to be with us for a while. Right. And Attorney General Garland hasn't responded to the specific people calling him out earlier this week. But, you know, a few months ago, back in January, around the one-year anniversary, he did put out a statement basically saying he understands people have a lot of interest in what they're doing at the DOJ. But,

you know, they're going to continue to pursue the facts wherever they lead the department, and they're not going to comment on things. And the statement at the time basically suggested, you know, be patient. We know people have a lot of interest in this. All right. Well, we are going to leave it there for today. But this is obviously not the last time we will be talking about this. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Claudia Grisales, I cover Congress. I'm Deirdre Walsh, I also cover Congress. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.