Follow the data
Take good news where you find it.
Special counsel Jack Smith has extracted data from the cell phone Donald Trump used while in the White House and plans to present evidence of his findings to a Washington, D.C. jury to demonstrate how Trump used the phone in the weeks during which he attempted to subvert the 2020 election.
In a court filing Monday, Smith indicated that he plans to call an expert witness who extracted and reviewed data copied from Trump’s phone, as well as a phone used by another unidentified individual in Trump’s orbit.
The data from Trump’s phone could reveal day-to-day details of his final weeks in office, including his daily movements, his Twitter habits and any other aides who had access to his accounts and devices. The data, for example, could help show whether Trump personally approved or sent a fateful tweet attacking his vice president, Mike Pence, during the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol.
Expert 3 “specifically identified the periods of time during which the defendant’s phone was unlocked and the Twitter application was open on January 6.”
CBS News had identified that other individual (“Individual 1” in the indictment) as former Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani.
Is it getting hot in there, Donald?
The filing is the latest glimpse into the extraordinary evidence Smith has amassed in his probe, including testimony from dozens of Trump’s closest aides and advisers, including former Vice President Mike Pence.
Prosecutors obtained a search warrant to access Trump’s Twitter data in January and ultimately obtained a massive cache of data culled from Trump’s account, including location data.
However, the prosecution filing stops short of claiming that the experts will be able to prove that activity on the phones directly involved Trump. Trump’s phones were routinely managed by others, including his social media manager, Deputy Chief of Staff Dan Scavino.
CBS News adds background:
Internal White House records from Jan. 6 turned over to the now-defunct House select committee last year showed a gap in Trump’s official phone logs of seven hours and 37 minutes, including the period when the building was under assault, according to documents obtained by CBS News’ chief election & campaign correspondent Robert Costa and The Washington Post’s associate editor Bob Woodward.
Costa and Woodward reported last year that the lack of an official White House notation of any calls placed to or by Trump for 457 minutes — from 11:17 a.m. to 6:54 p.m. — on Jan. 6, 2021, meant that there was no record of the calls made during the height of the breach.
Eleven pages of records were turned over by the National Archives last year to the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack as part of the panel’s past investigation that included examining whether or not the former president used “burner phones” while in office.
In response to Costa and Woodward’s reporting last year, Trump said, “I have no idea what a burner phone is. To the best of my knowledge, I have never even heard the term,” and a Trump spokesperson said at the time that Trump had nothing to do with the records and had assumed any and all of his phone calls were recorded and preserved.
John Bolton, his former national security adviser, asserted in an interview later — after CBS News and Washington Post reported that he recalled Trump using the term “burner phones” in several discussions — that Trump was aware of its meaning.
Counting on Trump for the truth is a fool’s errand. He only blurts out the truth by accident or as catnip for his cult. As with being a dictator in a second term. But only on Day 1, right?
Happy Hollandaise everyone!