The White House allegedly took steps to restrict access to President Trump's call with Ukraine's president, a declassified whistleblower complaint alleges. And it may not have been a one-time thing.
The whistleblower complaint released Thursday alleges that after Trump's July phone call with Ukraine's president, senior White House officials moved to "lock down" all records of the call, with officials allegedly being "'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."
Instead, the transcript was allegedly put into a "standalone computer system reserved for codeword-level intelligence information, such as covert action," which some officials said "would be an abuse of the system."
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
But the whistleblower goes on to allege that this wasn't an isolated incident and that "according to White House officials I spoke with, 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."
Read the full whistleblower complaint here.
Continue reading for free
We hope you're enjoying The Week's refreshingly open-minded journalism.
Subscribed to The Week? Register your account with the same email as your subscription.