Damning gap in White House call logs 'indicates something nefarious': impeachment lawyer

What Congress has not received from the White House appears to also be evidence, according to a top lawyer from Donald Trump's first impeachment hearing.

Former prosecutor Daniel Goldman was interviewed on Tuesday about a mysterious gap in White House call logs from Jan. 6, 2021.

"Fifty years ago, the scandalous actions of an American president were shielded from public view, thanks to a suspiciously convenient 18½-minute gap in the Nixon White House’s call recordings. Today, the actions of another American president remain shielded thanks to another convenient — and inexplicable — gap in White House records," The Washington Postreported. "The gap takes place between 11:17 a.m. and 6:54 p.m., covering virtually the entirety of the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, which was breached at 2:11 p.m. on Jan. 6, 2021. Other Trump actions are recorded in that period, including an hour-plus-long speech he gave at a rally that preceded the insurrection, and some of his movements inside the White House. But vast stretches of time are unaccounted for."

MSNBC's Ali Velshi asked Goldman about the 7-hour, 37-minute gap.

"Do they indicate a likely cover-up and is there a way for the investigators to actually figure out what happened in that time and get those records?" Velshi asked.

"Well, it certainly indicates something nefarious," Goldman replied. "Because either the Trump administration concealed the logs, erased them, or did not include them when they turned over presidential records to the national archives, which is where the January six committee got the logs from. Or it means that he was trying to avoid a record of the phone calls that he was making during the insurrection."

"So there is no real good, possible explanation for him," he explained.

"So we know that there were phone calls and the way that the January six committee can try to sort of reverse engineer what occurred that day is through other witnesses and other phone records," Goldman explained. "So there are ways of figuring it out, but it is certainly an alarming and a very conspicuous absence of information."

Watch:

Daniel Goldmanwww.youtube.com