“The president continues to defy the security guidance urged by his aides and followed by previous incumbents.”
On Thursday, the Washington Post reported that President Donald Trump has communicated with his lawyer Rudy Giuliani via unsecured and unencrypted phone lines that are potentially vulnerable to interception and monitoring by Russian intelligence officials and other hostile foreign powers.
“Trump is not identified by name in the House phone records, but investigators said they suspect he may be a person with a blocked number listed as ‘-1’ in the files,” stated the report. “And administration officials said separately that Trump has communicated regularly with Giuliani on unsecured lines.”
“Trump and Giuliani have effectively ‘given the Russians ammunition they can use in an overt fashion, a covert fashion or in the twisting of information,’ said John Sipher, former deputy chief of Russia operations at the CIA,” continued the report. “Sipher and others said that it is so likely that Russia tracked the calls of Giuliani and others that the Kremlin probably knows more now about those conversations than impeachment investigators.”
This stands in stark contrast to how transcripts from Trump’s phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky were stored in a classified system intended for highly sensitive intelligence, despite there being no legitimate national security purpose to doing so.