Virginia Democrat sees ‘overtones’ of Watergate in missing Jan. 6 phone logs

Democratic Virginia Rep. Elaine Luria on Tuesday said the reported gap in former President Trump’s phone records had “overtones” of the Watergate scandal.

On Tuesday, it was reported by multiple outlets that Trump’s phone records from Jan. 6 provided to the House select committee investigating the attack had a gap of more than seven hours.

Luria, a member of the select committee, appeared on MSNBC’s “All In With Chris Hayes” and said the absence of certain phone records was “always very strange” due to outside reports from other lawmakers who have said they called Trump on that day,

Noting how the Watergate scandal was an “infamous cover-up,” Luria said this absence in Trump’s phone records “definitely has overtones of that.”

“There’s just really no explanation for this seven hours. If I was to go even further, you know, we’ve talked a lot in the committee about the 187 minute, the three-plus hours that this was happening on national TV — that the president sat and watched this,” Luria said. “What this brings to me is this idea of dereliction of duty. The president has a duty to take care that the laws of the nation are enforced and carried out.”

Luria, a Navy veteran, said that if Trump was a military officer who waited three hours to intervene in the Jan. 6 attack, then he would probably be facing a court martial.

According to reports from The Washington Post and CBS News, there is a gap in Trump’s communications on Jan. 6 from 11:17 a.m. to 6:54 p.m., leading some to suspect that a cover-up may have been carried out. Representatives for Trump have said that he did not control the records and believed all his communications from that day were logged.

Several lawmakers including House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) are reported to have called Trump within the time frame on Jan. 6 where the gap in communications occurred.