Dennis Aftergut writes:

On Tuesday, Bob Woodward and Robert Costa reported in the Washington Post that the House select committee investigating Jan. 6 has the White House presidential phone log, and it shows a seven-hour gap in the record of his communications that fateful day.

The gap’s importance is difficult to exaggerate. The evidence of former President Donald Trump’s criminal intent with regard to his efforts to overturn the 2020 election is building, day by day, so relentlessly that at this point, a failure to prosecute becomes tantamount to a negation of the rule of law’s first principle—that no person “stand[s] above the law.”

Why is the gap so significant? If, as some analysts have hypothesized, Trump is so detached from the factual world that he actually believed his own Big Lie that the 2020 election was marred by fraud, that would make conviction for trying to steal the election difficult. Under this analysis, he would not have thought he was acting “wrongfully,” a necessary element for conviction on the charges to which he is most vulnerable. [Continue reading…]