The White House attempted to cover up President Trump’s repeated requests that Ukrainian officials launch a probe into the son of a top political rival, former Vice President Joe Biden, a bombshell whistleblower complaint released Thursday alleges.
The nine-page document charges administration officials tried to “lock down” all records of Trump’s phone call with the Ukrainian president.
“In the course of my official duties, I have received information from multiple US Government officials that the President of the United States is using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 US election,” the unidentified whistleblower wrote in the Aug. 12 complaint. “This interference includes, among other things, pressuring a foreign country to investigate one of the President’s main domestic political rivals.”
The complaint — which the administration initially withheld from Congress for weeks — was declassified and made public with several redactions by the House Intelligence Committee.
The whistleblower said he or she was alerted by “more than half a dozen US officials … of various facts related to this effort” and was not a direct witness to most of what the complaint goes on to describe — including Trump’s July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
In a rough summary of the call released Wednesday, Trump repeatedly urges Zelensky to get in touch with his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani and Attorney General William Barr to investigate Joe Biden and his son Hunter.
“The White House officials who told me this information were deeply disturbed by what had transpired in the phone call,” the whistleblower’s complaint said. “They told me that there was already a ‘discussion ongoing’ with White House lawyers about how to treat the call because of the likelihood, in the officials’ retelling, that they had witnessed the President abuse his office for personal gain.”
About a dozen White House officials — policy officials and duty officers — listened to the call in the White House Situation Room, “as is customary,” the complaint noted.
The whistleblower also claimed he or she was notified by “multiple US officials” that “senior White House officials intervened to ‘lock down’ all records of the phone call, including the official word-for-word transcript of the call that was produced — as is customary — by the White House Situation Room.”
“This set of actions underscored to me that White House officials understood the gravity of what had transpired in the call,” the whistleblower wrote.
The officials told the whistleblower that they were “directed” by White House lawyers to remove the electronic transcript of the July 25 call from the computer system where such transcripts are stored and put onto a separate system used to store “classified information of an especially sensitive nature” and only accessible via codeword.
“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.
Additionally, the complaint alleges the abuse of the classified computer system was part of a pattern.
“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 protection politically sensitive — rather than national security sensitive — information,” the whistleblower said.
A day after the Trump-Zelensky phone call, Trump’s special envoy to Ukraine, Kurt Volker, and US Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland met with Zelensky and other officials to provide advice on how to “‘navigate’ the demands that the president had made of Mr. Zelensky.”
US officials also raised concerns to the whistleblower about Giuliani’s contact with Ukrainian officials and believed he was used as a liaison to relay messages back and forth between Trump and Kiev.
At least two State Department officials had spoken with Giuliani in an attempt to “contain the damage” to US national security.
Around that same time, US officials told the whistleblower that leaders in Ukraine were “led to believe that a meeting or phone call between the President and President Zelensky would depend on whether Zelensky showed willingness to ‘play ball’ on the issues” raised by Ukraine’s prosecutor general Yuriy Lutsenko and Giuliani.
A footnote in the complaint also shows the whistleblower was confused about why Trump linked CrowdStrike — the cyber-security firm hired by the Democratic National Committee to investigate the 2016 election hack — with Ukraine in the call with Zelensky.
The whistleblower complaint’s release came about 20 minutes before acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire was set to speak publicly for the first time about the complaint, which was hand-delivered late Wednesday to Capitol Hill.
Lawmakers were provided the opportunity to read the account that prompted Democrats to launch a formal impeachment inquiry against the president.
Democrats who read the document, which was available to lawmakers in two secure facilities, said it backed up their commitment to their probe.
“I found the allegations deeply disturbing,” said House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.). “I also found them deeply credible and I understand why the inspector general found them credible.”
Illinois Democrat Rep. Mike Quigley, a member of the House Intelligence Committee, called the complaint “troubling, disturbing” and said it “reinforces our concerns,” CNN reported.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said: “Having read the documents in there, I���m even more worried about what happened than I was when I read the memorandum of the conversation.”