More suspicious “sloppy” record keeping:
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 used his personal cellphone, and those of his aides, routinely to talk with aides, congressional allies and outside confidants.
But the sparse call records are the latest major obstacle to the panel’s central mission: recreating what Mr. Trump was doing behind closed doors during crucial moments of the assault on Congress by a mob of his supporters.
Ron Brownstein on CNN said it best:
The question is going to be whether Donald Trump can get away with flouting and barreling through so many laws and customs and norms that we thought limited the exercise of arbitrary presidential power. Everything from firing Inspectors General, extorting the government of Ukraine, to politicizing the census to it appears a far reaching effort to undermine the election to violating the presidential records act.
On all of these fronts, Trump simply barreled through what we thought in the past were barriers on misbehavior of the president. He did no on all of those fronts with silence from the Republican congress who were outraged about Hillary Clinton’s email in 2016. It wasn’t just Donald Trump raising that alarm. There were an awful lot of Republicans on Capitol Hill.
I think really the question that is facing the Justice Department and other law enforcement agencies, like the Georgia Grand jury that is looking at this is, if we don’t put any sanction on Trump for all of these behaviors, you are essentially guaranteeing that you are going to get more misbehavior from a future president, whether him or somebody else. And you would think to an institutionalist like Merrick Garland, that would be a prospect that would concentrate the mind.
Allowing this man to not only get away with EVERYTHING he has done, but to continue to lead the Republican Party and run for office just two years from now should be unthinkable. Yet it’s sadly probable. And I think this may be the most frightening portent of our future of all. There are a lot of things moving in the wrong direction, but this signals an existential crisis.