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The House select committee investigating the attack is trying to piece together the events of the day, but then-president Trump's executive assistant, Molly Michael, was absent for most of the day.

Sources said the Trump White House's spotty record-keeping operation had virtually collapsed by the final weeks of his presidency, but Michael's absence is a previously unreported detail that may play a role in explaining the incomplete records for a key stretch of time.

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  • Her absence coupled with the shambolic state of record-keeping in the Outer Oval could complicate efforts to piece those details back together.

When she took over as executive assistant from Madeleine, she kept handwritten notes on Trump's meetings and calls.

  • Sources who witnessed this said that while in the Oval Office, the dining room adjoining it and the White House residence, Trump preferred to use the phone lines, but also used his personal cell or received calls on the cells of his close aides.

  • He would shout out "Molly!" to get her to call someone he wanted to talk to.

Michael was out of the office for personal reasons.

  • According to three sources with direct knowledge of the situation, she arrived at the White House in the afternoon.

  • Nick Luna, the head of Oval Office Operations, and a young staffer who assisted Michael in her administrative duties, were the two staffers there during the critical hours of the Capitol siege.

  • The White House was a show by the time Michael arrived, according to an official who was there. Michael did not comment for this story.

Between the lines: Trump was obsessed with his phone. According to the Washington Post and CBS News, the White House call logs show a seven hour gap in presidential communications.

  • According to witnesses, Trump spent most of his time in the private dining room next to the Oval Office watching television.

  • The staff was trying to get the president to issue a statement condemning the Capitol rioters.

  • The Washington Post reported that the logs provided to the committee did not capture several of Trump's phone conversations. There were calls of intense interest to the committee, including with Kevin McCarthy.

Each morning, the office of the Staff Secretary would leave a folder in the Outer Oval with the president's schedule and briefings. Trump would break his schedule frequently.

  • Even during the most functional periods of his presidency, his executive assistants were frequently missing meetings and calls.

  • For at least a few years, Westerhout and Michael did their best to capture the president's calls and meetings as they popped up throughout the day, according to their colleagues who watched them do so.

  • They would write down the names of the people the president had spoken with on top of the private schedule.

When he was in the White House, Trump reserved some of his more sensitive calls.

One source with direct knowledge of Trump's practices said he wouldn't call Steve Bannon when he was in the Oval Office.

The source said that the conversations with his former chief strategist were from the residence.

The staff secretary of the Outer Oval would take the president's private schedule along with their handwritten notes at the end of the day.

  • Part of the White House staff's obligation under the Presidential Records Act of 1978 was to send these notes for official records preservation.

  • Lindsay Chervinsky, a presidential historian, told the Associated Press that the presidential records-keeping law includes preserving email, text messages and phone records regardless of the device used.

The law depends on good faith from the presidents and their staff.

The Presidential Records Act has never been used to punish a president.

  • Martha Kumar, co-founder and director of the White House Transition Project, said that the implementation of that act is important because there is no real mechanism for enforcement.

  • If the president wants to avoid record-keeping, there is a way of doing it.

In recent memory, no president has tested that good faith more than Trump.

Career staff had to keep the documents together to meet record-keeping laws after he tore them up.

The New York Times first reported that papers were found in the White House toilets.

  • The White House was consumed more by chaos in early 2020 when the wheels fell off of Trump's re- election bid.

  • The casual record-keeping fell away.

According to sources with direct knowledge of the situation, Michael began taking fewer and fewer records of the president's off-schedule meetings and calls.

  • The staff began questioning the value of this type of record-keeping.

  • Two former officials said that Outer Oval staff were poorly served by their superiors.

  • The White House Counsel's Office issued a stern warning about their obligation to preserve a wide and detailed account of the president's actions during the first year of his presidency, according to a source with direct knowledge.

One of the biggest challenges to the legal requirements was the use of cell phones by the President.

  • The calls on Jan 6 have not been kept in the public record.

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