White House confirms whistleblower allegation that officials ordered Ukraine transcript be stored in separate system

(Image credit: AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

published 27 September 2019

An especially controversial piece of the whistleblower report has been confirmed.

As a whistleblower alleged, White House officials ordered the memorandum of the July 25 call between President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky be stored in a separate, secure sever, a senior White House official said Friday. Specifically, National Security Council lawyers "directed that the classified document be handled appropriately," a statement to CNN reads.

The White House released a memorandum of a call Wednesday in which Trump pushed Zelensky to investigate Joe Biden's son Hunter Biden and his role in a Ukrainian energy firm. Trump and his allies have since maintained the call was not a big deal, but as a whistleblower alleged in a complaint released publicly on Thursday, White House officials didn't necessarily agree. Lawyers in the White House ordered that the conversation transcript be "loaded into a separate electronic system that is otherwise used to store and handle classified information of an especially sensitive level," the whistleblower writes. 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."

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Trump's allies have again tried to brush off the whistleblower's complaint as inaccurate "hearsay." But just as the whistleblower provided a stunningly accurate description of the call based on secondhand knowledge, this allegation appears to be true as well. In their statement, the White House official did say "the transcript was already classified," so the NSC "did nothing wrong by moving it to another system," CNN writes.

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Kathryn is a graduate of Syracuse University, with degrees in magazine journalism and information technology, along with hours to earn another degree after working at SU's independent paper The Daily Orange. She's currently recovering from a horse addiction while living in New York City, and likes to share her extremely dry sense of humor on Twitter.