Irish Examiner view: Politicians must be held accountable

Retaining phone records

Violent insurrectionists, loyal to then president Donald Trump, storm the Capitol in Washington on January 6, 2021. Picture: John Minchillo/AP

We have all had that feeling from time to time. The sense that a phone, once presented to us as a great and liberating time-saver, can be more foe than friend. Inconveniently going missing just when we need it, inducing the panic state of nomophobia; irritatingly interrupting us just when we are enjoying a little bit of me time. 

And tracking us, and all our actions and interactions, just when it might be more convenient to be off-grid.

For Donald Trump it must be a particular inconvenience that there is a seven-hour gap in his call log for January 6, 2021, thus denying him the opportunity to distance himself once, and irrevocably, from the events of that day. 

That insurrectionary day when rioters overwhelmed the Capitol and put public servants and lawmakers in fear of their lives and may have helped tyrants everywhere to be persuaded that the game was up for democracies.

Missing data

The missing data for the former president covers nearly the full span of a working shift and looks like non-compliance with the Presidential Records Act, a statute that requires all communications data to be retained. 

Comedians are making hay, with Jimmy Fallon suggesting that the only time there should be a seven-hour gap is “when you are trying to remember what happened on St Patrick’s Day”. 

He queried whether POTUS (as he still was on that shocking morning) used a burner phone. “It’s always reassuring when a president acts like a character in The Wire,” he added.

It was nearly 50 years ago that Richard Nixon’s secretary, Rose Mary Woods, gave testimony as to how she erased 18.5 minutes of a crucial White House recording during the Watergate crisis, which brought the 37th president down. 

The holes in the Trump records cover 457 minutes, 25 times as long, on one of the most febrile days in contemporary history where it seemed for a while that a counter-revolution was underway.

Not that the White House is an outlier in such matters. In London, Boris Johnson has, sadly, lost all his phone messages before April 2021 after he changed his phone because of a security breach. 

This must be a nuisance because it covers the period when he was refurbishing his flat at 10 Downing Street and seeking benefactors to help him with the costs of the lavish upgrade.

That information emerged during a court hearing when campaign groups claimed that there were “many instances” of government decisions made over phone messaging services being unlawfully deleted and of ministers using private accounts for public business.

A witness statement from Sarah Harrison, chief operating officer for the British cabinet office, stated that private devices are used by government officials on a “daily basis”.

Here in Ireland, we had a set-to last autumn about text messages concerning Katherine Zappone, Leo Varadkar, and Foreign Affairs Minister Simon Coveney about her appointment as a special envoy. 

Mr Coveney acknowledged that he regularly deleted messages as a security measure and that he had experience of his phone being hacked.

Binding principle

The missing Donald Trump records are of a far different order of magnitude but there is a binding principle in all of this which affects voters everywhere. 

Politicians are public servants working on the taxpayer dollar. Is it right for them to decide the saliency of what should be retained for the public record? We suggest not. 

If it is a matter of government business and policy such messages should be archived and kept for future reference. No ifs, no buts, and no wriggling.