NEWS / HUMAN INTEREST

Did Trump misdial Mike Lee instead of Tommy Tuberville amid Capitol riots? Here's a breakdown of his call records

It is still unclear how Trump got confused between the contact numbers of Senators Tommy Tuberville and Mike Lee

The second day of Donald Trump's impeachment trial ended in chaos after Republican Senator Mike Lee expressed his objection regarding a phone call made by Trump on the evening of the Capitol riots. During the ongoing trial on Wednesday, February 10, the House impeachment managers stated that Lee overheard a phone conversation between Trump and Senator Tommy Tuberville.

A visibly irked Lee strongly objected to testimony that cited him as a source for the phone call, terming it inaccurate, and added that Trump had actually dialed his number by mistake while trying to call Tuberville during the Capitol riots.

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What really happened on January 6 evening?

At 2.24 pm on January 6, Trump had tweeted that then-vice president Mike Pence 'didn't have the courage' to overturn the results of the presidential election. He tweeted: "Mike Pence didn't have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify. USA demands the truth!". 

It must be noted that this tweet came moments after the House was adjourned for the day and evacuation had started after rioters infiltrated the Capitol building. At that time, the Congress had met on a joint session to certify Joe Biden's victory at the presidential elections. Sometime around when the tweet was published, Trump reportedly made a phone call to Lee from the White House official line. After Lee answered the call, Trump addressed him as 'Tommy' and asked how it was going. 

The president was told that he was actually speaking to Lee, following which Trump insisted that he dialed Tommy Tuberville's number. Lee then passed on the phone to Tuberville with whom Trump had a 5-10 minute conversation, before both the senators needed to evacuate the hall. 

What did Lee say about the call in question? 

Bryan Schott, a journalist with The Salt Lake Tribune, was the first one to break this story on January 7, 2021, a day after the horrific US Capitol riots. Schott learned about the incident directly from Lee through an exchange of text messages and published the text unedited the next day in his newsletter 'The Rundown'. 

In Lee's own words in text messages, the incident panned out like this: 

"Moments after the proceedings in the Senate were halted by the Capitol Police, my phone rang. The caller ID indicated that the call was coming from the White House. I thought it was Robert O’Brien, the president’s national security advisor, calling to update me on a question I had asked him about a security threat from Iran.

To my great surprise, it was not Robert O’Brien, but President Trump on the other end of the line. My heart started to beat a little faster, as I was convinced he could only be calling to argue with me about my reading of the Twelfth Amendment and Article II, Section 1.

There was a lot of noise and commotion in the room, but I thought I heard him say “How’s it going, Tommy?”

I said, “Mr. President, this is Mike Lee.”

“No,” he insisted, “I dialed Tommy’s number.”

“Mr. President, are you calling for Tommy Tuberville (my new colleague from Alabama)?”

“Yes.”

Anxious to hand the phone to someone else (and not have to argue with the president about matters at hand), I asked if he’d like me to find Senator Tuberville.

He said, “Yeah sure, that’d be great.”

I went and found Senator Tuberville, handed him my phone, and explained that the president would like to speak to him. I stood nearby for the next five or ten minutes as they spoke, not wanting to lose my phone in the middle of a crisis.

Then the Capitol Police became very nervous and ordered us to evacuate the chamber immediately. As they were forcing everyone out of the chamber, I awkwardly found myself interrupting the same telephone conversation I had just facilitated.

“Excuse me, Tommy, we have to evacuate. Can I have my phone?”

Senator Tuberville promptly ended the call and returned my phone to its rightful owner."

What did Trump say to Tuberville? Twitter speculates

Lee is unaware of what exactly Trump told Tuberville. However, Twitter has not backed down from speculating what the conversation could have been about. 

Politico journalist Kyle Cheney listed down a timeline of the phone call in a Twitter thread. "From what I can establish from the record: -Trump spoke to Tuberville sometime between 2-2:15 (Deseret News) -Pence was evacuated at 2:15pm, prompting Tuberville to relay this to Trump and end the call (Tuberville comment) -Trump tweeted his attack against Pence at 2:24pm."

Like many others, this user could not figure out how Trump made the mistake of confusing Tuberville's contact with Lee's. "How is Tommy Tuberville's name and Mike Lee's name saved in Donald Trump cell phone that he can accidentally call Lee twice? Even if we assume he has some senator related honorific, there has to be others between the two in a phone book. Was the call to Lee accidental?"

"Of the many future historical fools of the last few days, Senator Mike Lee will definitely be the snivelest," said one user. "The managers retracted the statement so they could enter it again later. Which made Lee even more pissed. Mike Lee looks so pissed off I thought he was going to cry." another tweeted.