White House aides have reportedly long been tasked with keeping Trump call details under wraps

(Image credit: Jim Watson/AFP/GettyImages)

published 27 September 2019

White House staffers didn't just recently start keeping details about President Trump's calls with foreign leaders under wraps, several people familiar with the matter told The Washington Post on Thursday.

Earlier in his presidency, Trump was "enraged" when transcripts of calls he had with foreign leaders leaked, so changes were made, the Post says. The White House removed several people from the list of government officials with permission to review memos about calls, and cut the number of aides able to listen in on conversations. Officials who delivered call memos had to sign for them, the thinking being if they leaked, it would be easier to find the source. Former senior administration officials also told the Post that last year, Trump aides were so paranoid that Defense Department employees might share call transcripts, they told them they had to return the documents.

The whistleblower complaint about Trump's call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky alleges that at the order of lawyers in the White House counsel's office, the transcript of their conversation was "loaded into a separate electronic system that is otherwise used to store and handle classified information of an especially sensitive level." One White House official told the whistleblower this was "an abuse of this electronic system because the call did not contain anything remotely sensitive from a national security perspective." During the call, Trump asked Zelensky to work with Attorney General William Barr and lawyer Rudy Giuliani to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden. Read more about the efforts to keep phone call details secret at The Washington Post.

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Catherine Garcia has worked as a senior writer at The Week since 2014. Her writing and reporting have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Wirecutter, NBC News and "The Book of Jezebel," among others. She's a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.