“Transcript of the Trump-Zelensky call was moved to a computer system managed by the National Security Council Directorate for Intelligence Programs”
President Donald Trump used a National Security Council computer server – “a separate electronic system” – to hide documents detailing his impeachable and possibly illegal efforts including extortion of a foreign nation, according to the just-released unclassified whistleblower complaint.
After the now infamous July 25 telephone call between Trump and Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky, the whistleblower says they learned from multiple U.S. government officials that senior members of the Trump White House intervened to “lock down: all records of the phone call, especially the official word-for-word transcript of the call that was produced as is customary by the White House Situation Room.”
Those unusual efforts appeared to serve as a heads-up to the whistleblower.
“This set of actions underscored to me that White House officials understood the gravity of what had transpired in the call,” as CNN reports.
“White House officials told me that they were ‘directed’ by White House lawyers to remove the electronic transcript from the computer system in which such transcripts are typically stored for coordination, finalization, and distribution to Cabinet-level officials.”
CNN adds that the actual, word-for-word transcript of that July 25 call “was loaded into a separate electronic system that is otherwise used to store and handle classified information of any especially sensitive nature.”
This was “not the first time” the Trump White House acted to hide disturbing or possibly even criminal details of the president’s conversations with foreign leaders.
“The whistleblower describes how the transcript of the Trump-Zelensky call was moved to a computer system managed by the National Security Council Directorate for Intelligence Programs, in a partially redacted appendix attached to his complaint,” CNN adds.
“According to White House officials I spoke with,” the whistleblower writes, “this was ‘not the first time’ under this Administration that a Presidential transcript was placed into this codeword-level system solely for the purpose of protecting politically sensitive–rather than national security sensitive–information.”
In that July 25 phone call it is clear President Trump attempted to extort the Ukraine president to dig up dirt against Joe Biden and his son, and withheld hundreds of millions of dollars in vital military aid as leverage.
Earlier, NCRM reported President Trump, according to the whistleblower complaint, asked Ukraine President Zelenskiy to locate the servers used by the Democratic National Committee (DNC) during the 2016 election cycle and discuss his findings with his personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, and Attorney General Bill Barr.