With the release of the whistleblower complaint on Thursday, the first item on the whistleblower’s list of concerns was the July call between Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. The second item was “efforts to restrict assets related to the call.” In this section, the whistleblower says that White House officials removed the transcript of the call and other documents from the server where such documents are usually kept to provide access to Cabinet-level officials. Instead, the documents were sent to a special server for “classified information of an especially sensitive nature.”
So, three years later, America is back to being confronted with the idea that someone misused a server and hid documents. Only this time, that someone is Trump, and the documents are directly related to his attempts to extort an allied nation into manufacturing political dirt for his benefit.
As Politico notes, the server in question is one that was specifically intended to handle items such as “covert action programs” and national security secrets. The carefully protected, restricted-access server has been used for items related to international relations, such as early stages of the negotiations on the Iran nuclear deal, but not for day-to-day transcripts of calls to foreign leaders.
In fact, previous to 2017, such calls were announced in advance. And previous to 2018, the White House routinely issued a “readout” of the call shortly after it happened. Trump ended both those practices. And it seems he wasn’t done there, because he placed his conversation with Zelensky behind a lockdown that keeps out even Cabinet-level officials. It’s an aspect of the complaint that has proven troubling even to Republicans, as it seems to indicate that Trump, or at least someone near him, needed to cover up what was said in the conversation.
Why Trump felt that this conversation, one that he called “beautiful” and “perfect,” required special handling designed for the most sensitive of national security documents, is an interesting question. But there’s another one that may be even more important: Was this the only time this happened?
For example, in May, Trump had a chat with Vladimir Putin in which they discussed the situation in Ukraine, and Putin explained to Trump that Zelensky “needed to take responsibility for clashes with Russian-backed rebels in eastern Ukraine.” Where is the full transcript of that call? Is it also hidden in the secret server?
During the questioning of acting DNI Joseph Maguire on Thursday, Rep. Eric Swalwell asked whether other calls, such as calls to Putin, Saudi Arabian dictator Mohammed bin Salman, or Turkish authoritarian Recep Erdoğan were also being shoved down into a box where no one could see what Trump had said to them. Maguire was quick to say that how the White House handles its documents is its own business and none of his.
But it should be. Because as the Ukraine call demonstrates, Trump is using these calls to leverage foreign relations for his personal gain—and there’s no reason to believe the Ukraine call is the worst example. The server that should be concerning everyone right now isn’t a missing DNC server that never existed. It’s one in Trump’s basement that is all too real.