Hiding Trump's calls

Experts are homing in on allegations that the White House used a computer system meant for highly classified information to store details of President Donald Trump’s calls with foreign leaders, in what they described as a stark departure from how the server is normally used and how memos of the president’s exchanges are typically handled.

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And it has surprised former White House and National Security Council officials who say the NSC’s codeword-level system is specifically designed to protect highly sensitive compartmented intelligence matters.

  Politico

Right there seems to be a contradiction to Joe Maguire's testimony that he went to the White House and DOJ with the complaint because it didn't fit the requirement of pertaining to intelligence matters, which would be the trigger for him going direct to the Intel Committee with the complaint. I wonder why they didn't press him with that in the hearing.

Those include covert action programs, diplomatically sensitive information and other national security secrets, said Larry Pfeiffer, the former Situation Room senior director under President Barack Obama and CIA chief of staff in the George W. Bush administration. An example, he said, would be “information surrounding the very sensitive negotiations and conversations involving Oman” in the early stages of negotiating the Iran nuclear deal.

“It would never be used to protect or ‘lock down’ politically sensitive material or to protect the president or senior officials from embarrassment,” Pfeiffer said.

That was then. Things have changed.

[T]he whistleblower alleged that senior White House officials had intervened to “‘lock down’ all records” of [Trump's July 25 call to Ukraine's president Volodymyr Zelensky] by removing it from the system where these transcripts are normally stored and uploading it into a separate system “managed directly by the NSC’s Directorate for Intelligence Programs.” They did so because “of the likelihood, in the officials’ retelling, that they had witnessed the president abuse his office for personal gain,” according to the whistleblower.

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After 2017, when verbatim transcripts of his conversations with the leaders of Australian and Mexico were leaked to the press, the White House began to restrict the number of officials who had access to the transcripts. One former Trump administration official confirmed that the White House started placing transcripts into the codeword system after those leaks. “I don’t think the person who leaked those was ever really discovered,” said the former Trump administration official. “So there was a decision to tighten the restrictions for those who had access to those transcripts.”

Can't wait till the impeachment committee subpoenas them all. And you have to wonder about the calls he's undoubtedly made on his own personal unsecured phone in the middle of the night that nobody else would know about.

That classification indicates that the disclosure of the call would cause "serious damage" to national security, cannot be disseminated by anyone except the originator, and is prohibited from disclosure to foreign nationals. A code word classification, meanwhile, is top secret—a level higher than secret—and then further compartmentalized by adding a code word so that only those who have been cleared for each code word can see it.

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“It risks undermining a whole host of important national security activities,” [April Doss, who served as senior minority counsel for the Russia investigation on the Senate Intelligence Committee and, prior to that, as a top attorney at the National Security Agency] said, noting that “most if not all” officials who would need to have access to call readouts as part of carrying out their regular duties in advising on foreign affairs and implementing the administration’s policies “would not have access” to the codeword system.

The president has ultimate classification authority and it’s an open legal question whether he’s bound by executive orders, including one signed by Obama in 2009 that says information can’t be classified in order to “conceal violations of law, inefficiency, or administrative error” or “prevent embarrassment to a person, organization, or agency.”

I'm sure his lawyers, and by "his" lawyers, I include the DOJ, will argue he's not.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE: