Former president Donald Trump was aware that the slang term “burner phone” is used to describe an untraceable mobile phone used to evade surveillance and used the term on multiple occasions, his former national security adviser has said.
On Tuesday, The Washington Post and CBS News reported that White House records turned over to the House January 6th select committee by the National Archives and Records Administration do not include any calls made or recieved by Mr Trump between the hours of 11:17am and 6:54pm on the day a mob of his supporters stormed the US Capitol in hopes of stopping certification of President Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory.
According to the report, the nine-member panel is probing whether Mr Trump or his advisers used so-called “burner” phones to evade official White House record-keeping systems which would otherwise have documented the president’s inbound and outbound phone calls that day.
In a statement, Mr Trump said he had “no idea what a burner phone is,” adding that he had “never even heard the term” to the “best of [his] knowledge”.
But one of the reporters who broke the White House phone logs gap story, Robert Costa of CBS News, said on Twitter late Tuesday that Ambassador John Bolton — Mr Trump’s third national security adviser — said in an interview that the former president was well aware of it and had used it during several conversations.
He added that Amb Bolton recalled specifically discussing with Mr Trump how one would use such phones to keep one’s phone call records from being scrutinised.
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