WASHINGTON — The White House severely restricted distribution of memos detailing President Donald Trump’s calls with foreign leaders, including Russia’s Vladimir Putin and members of Saudi Arabia’s royal family, after leaks of his conversations early in his tenure, a former White House official said.
The White House’s handling of Trump’s calls with foreign leaders is at the heart of House Democrats’ impeachment inquiry. A whistleblower alleges the White House tried to “lock down” Trump’s July 25 phone call with Ukraine’s new president because officials were worried about Trump’s request for help investigating Trump’s Democratic rival Joe Biden. The anonymous whistleblower alleges the White House also tried to cover up the content of other calls by moving memos onto a highly classified computer system.
The former White House official acknowledged that other calls were concealed, while casting the decision as part of an effort to minimize leaks, not an attempt to hide improper discussions. The former official was not authorized to discuss the classification system publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.
The latest revelations show the focus that White House officials put on safeguarding not only classified information but also delicate calls with Trump, the details of which the administration did not want leaked.
The White House was beset by leaks of highly sensitive information in the early days of Trump’s presidency. Trump was particularly enraged by leaks that disclosed tough conversations with the leader of Mexico on paying for a border wall and with Australia on abiding by a President Barack Obama administration deal on asylum-seekers.
After those disclosures, a White House adviser raised the possibility of lie detector tests for the small number of people in the West Wing and elsewhere with access to transcripts of Trump’s phone calls.
In the case of calls with the Saudi royal family, restrictions were set beforehand, and the number of people allowed to listen was sharply restricted. The Saudi calls placed in the restricted system were with King Salman, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Prince Khalid bin Salman, who at the time was the Saudi ambassador to the United States.
While the calls included delicate information about Trump’s discussions about the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, there was no apparent evidence of impropriety by Trump, said a person familiar with the matter.
The access restrictions placed on the calls with Putin and the Saudi royal family were first reported Friday night by CNN.
CALL DETAILS MOVED
In his complaint, the whistleblower said that unnamed White House officials told him that they had been “‘directed’ by White House lawyers” to remove the record of the Ukraine call from the National Security Council’s main computer system and load it into one managed by the agency’s intelligence directorate that is not connected to the main system and that requires special permissions and enhanced security clearances to access.
That would have the effect of vastly reducing the number of people who can read — and therefore leak — the document, in what the whistleblower described in his complaint as an acknowledgment that the president’s comments to Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskiy had been highly improper.
“One White House official described this act as an abuse of this electronic system because the call did not contain anything remotely sensitive from a national security perspective,” the whistleblower wrote. His complaint also alleged that other, unspecified presidential transcripts had received similar treatment.
The administration official did not name any of the lawyers involved. The National Security Council is part of the White House and advised by lawyers who report to the White House counsel, Pat Cipollone. The National Security Council’s chief legal adviser is John Eisenberg, a Cipollone deputy.
Kellyanne Conway, a White House counselor, pleaded ignorance of the details of how the National Security Council handles records of foreign-leader calls, saying that “the people who handle such things said it was handled appropriately.”
The White H o u s e r e - l e a s e d a m e m o r a n - dum describing the call with Zelenskiy last week in which Trump repeatedly says Attorney General William Barr and his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani could help investigate Biden. The call came days after Trump ordered a freeze of some military assistance for Ukraine.
The former official noted that even some of Trump’s calls with U.S. allies were restricted as a result of the classified matters that arise during the discussions.
EARLY LEAKS
The practice began after details of Trump’s May 10, 2017, Oval Office discussion with the Russian foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, were leaked to the news media, leading to questions of whether the president had released classified information, according to multiple current and former officials. The White House was particularly upset when the news media reported that Trump had called James Comey, the former FBI director, a “nut job” during that same meeting, according to current and former officials.
The White House had begun restricting access to information after initial leaks of Trump’s calls with the leaders of Mexico and Australia. But the conversation with Lavrov and Sergey Kislyak, then the Russian ambassador to the United States, prompted tighter restrictions.
Several current and former officials played down the significance of placing the classified calls into the secure system, saying it made sense to restrict the calls given the number of leaks from the Trump White House.
Nevertheless, the use of the system has come under scrutiny after the unclassified version of the whistleblower complaint was made public. The complaint raised questions that the July 25 call with the Ukrainian president had been improperly placed in the classified system, suggesting that officials put the reconstructed transcript into a system meant to protect the nation’s most sensitive secrets.
The Trump administration said Friday that National Security Council lawyers had made the decision to place the reconstructed transcript of that phone call into a highly classified computer system accessible to only a small number of officials.
“NSC lawyers directed that the classified document be handled appropriately,” said a senior administration official. The statement was also first reported by CNN.
But the official did not actually say how the document was handled, nor address the whistleblower’s specific charge that the reconstructed transcript, in what would be a highly unusual action, was moved from a computer system widely accessible to National Security Council officials to one reserved for those with code-word clearance to handle the country’s most closely guarded secrets such as covert operations and foreign surveillance.
A White House spokesman did not respond when asked about that specific claim. Democrats in Congress and former National Security Council officials and lawyers in both parties have said such an action, if motivated by a desire to conceal Trump’s efforts to put political pressure on the Ukrainian leader, would be far from appropriate and, at a minimum, unethical.
IMPEACHMENT PACE
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said the newly intensified impeachment process — focused primarily on whether Trump tried to coerce Ukraine’s leader to investigate Biden — “should move with purpose and expeditiously.”
Democrats are moving ahead even as more potentially damaging details are revealed, including a Washington Post report on Friday that Trump told the two senior Russian officials in the May 2017 meeting that he wasn’t concerned about Moscow’s interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election because the U.S. did the same in other countries.
The comments, which have not been previously reported, came in his meeting with Lavrov and Kislyak in which Trump revealed highly classified information that exposed a source of intelligence on the Islamic State. He also said during the meeting that firing Comey the previous day had relieved “great pressure” on him.
A memorandum summarizing the meeting was limited to all but a few officials with the highest security clearances in an attempt to keep the president’s comments from being disclosed publicly, according to former White House officials, who requested anonymity to discuss sensitive matters.
White House officials were particularly distressed by Trump’s election remarks because it appeared the president was forgiving Russia for an attack that had been designed to help elect him, the three former officials said. Trump also seemed to invite Russia to interfere in other countries’ elections, they said.
The previous day, Trump had fired Comey amid the FBI’s investigation into whether the Trump campaign had coordinated with Russia. White House aides worried about the political ramifications if Trump’s comments to the Russian officials became public.
Trump had publicly ridiculed the Russia investigation as politically motivated and said he doubted that Moscow had intervened in the election. By the time he met with Lavrov and Kislyak, Trump had been briefed by the most senior U.S. intelligence officials about the Russian operation, which was directed by Putin and included the theft and publication of Democratic emails and the seeding of propaganda in social-media, according to the findings of the U.S. intelligence community.
Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., said if true, the comments to the Russians was “one of the most disturbing things we’ve learned yet.”
“The White House should immediately provide the Congressional intelligence committees with all the records of that meeting so we can get to the bottom of it,” Schumer said in a statement on Saturday.
Sen. Amy Klobuchar of M i n n e s o t a , a Democratic candidate for president, called for legislation to secure U.S. elections. “This is just another example of the President’s crossing the line when it comes to our security versus his own interests,” she said in a statement.
Information for this article was contributed by Zeke Miller of The Associated Press; Julian E. Barnes, Michael Crowley, Matthew Rosenberg and Mark Mazzetti of The New York Times; Laura Litvan, Billy House, Erik Wasson, Emily Wilkins and Daniel Flatley of Bloomberg News; and Shane Harris, Josh Dawsey and Ellen Nakashima of The Washington Post.
The White House had begun restricting access to information after initial leaks of Trump’s calls with the leaders of Mexico and Australia. But the conversation with Lavrov and Sergey Kislyak, then the Russian ambassador to the United States, prompted tighter restrictions.
