“I don’t think the person who leaked those was ever really discovered,” said the former Trump administration official. One former Trump administration official confirmed that the White House started placing transcripts into the codeword system after those leaks. The White House did not immediately reply to a request for comment on the whistleblower’s allegations, though President Trump has angrily accused Democrats of conducting another “witch hunt” and defended his conversations with Zelensky.Īfter 2017, when verbatim transcripts of his conversations with the leaders of Australian and Mexico were leaked to the press, the White House began to restrict the number of officials who had access to the transcripts. It was declassified before its release on the president’s orders.īut the whistleblower alleged that senior White House officials had intervened to “‘lock down’ all records” of that call by removing it from the system where these transcripts are normally stored and uploading it into a separate system “managed directly by the NSC’s Directorate for Intelligence Programs.” They did so because “of the likelihood, in the officials’ retelling, that they had witnessed the president abuse his office for personal gain,” according to the whistleblower. It’s not clear whether the memo the White House released, which was originally marked “SECRET/ORCON/NOFORN,” is the one the president’s aides were allegedly trying to conceal. Trump also tried to get Attorney General William Barr involved, according to the memo. aid to Ukraine as a carrot for Zelensky’s cooperation in investigating Trump’s political rivals, including former vice president Joe Biden. On Wednesday, the White House released a “ memorandum” documenting that conversation, which backs up the allegation that Trump dangled U.S. The Trump-appointed watchdog for the intelligence community conducted a “preliminary review” of the whistleblower’s accusations, which reportedly included witness interviews, and deemed them credible despite the whistleblower not having first-hand knowledge of the incident and “some indicia of an arguable bias in favor of a rival political candidate,” according to a letter released on Thursday. government’s efforts to deter and counter foreign interference in U.S. “I am concerned that these actions pose risks to U.S. The whistleblower, who is a member of the intelligence community but whose identity remains unknown but, alleged in a complaint filed on August 12 that Trump sought to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky “to take actions to help” his 2020 re-election campaign during a phone call on July 25-and that White House officials tried to cover it up.
BREAKING NEWS WHITE HOUSE LOCKDOWN CODE
“It would never be used to protect or ‘lock down’ politically sensitive material or to protect the president or senior officials from embarrassment,” Pfeiffer said.Ī former Trump National Security Council official acknowledged that “it would be unusual to put transcripts in the code word system,” and that “it is probably not done frequently.”
An example, he said, would be “information surrounding the very sensitive negotiations and conversations involving Oman” in the early stages of negotiating the Iran nuclear deal. Those include covert action programs, diplomatically sensitive information and other national security secrets, said Larry Pfeiffer, the former Situation Room senior director under President Barack Obama and CIA chief of staff in the George W.
And it has surprised former White House and National Security Council officials who say the NSC’s codeword-level system is specifically designed to protect highly sensitive compartmented intelligence matters. The revelation, disclosed in a whistleblower complaint deemed an “urgent concern” by the intelligence community’s inspector general, raises the specter of a coverup led by White House lawyers seeking to protect the president - with the obvious parallels to past impeachment scandals.
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