The White House acknowledged Friday that Trump administration lawyers moved a record of President Donald Trump’s call with the Ukrainian president to a separate system for classified documents, CNN first reported.
An unnamed senior White House official told CNN: “NSC [National Security Council] lawyers directed that the classified document be handled appropriately.”
An administration official sent the same statement to TPM.
That appeared to be a reference to an aspect of the anonymous whistleblower’s complaint about the memorandum of the call, which contained a rough record of what was said and shows Trump pressuring Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate Joe and Hunter Biden.
The whistleblower’s complaint, which focuses on the events surrounding the call, alleged that the whistleblower “learned from multiple U.S. officials that senior White House officials had 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.”
White House officials, the whistleblower alleged, claimed they’d been “directed” by “White House lawyers” to move the transcript into a separate electronic filing system that’s otherwise used to handle sensitive classified information.
The Washington Post reported Thursday, citing unnamed current and former administration officials, that in order to transfer a call record into the classified system in which it was reportedly held “a senior White House official — someone as high as the chief of staff or the national security adviser — must make a formal written request to do so, according to two people who worked with memos of calls with foreign leaders.”
