The focus of the whistleblower complaint that was illegally withheld from Congress and that helped instigate the impeachment inquiry into Donald Trump is two-fold. It expresses concern about Trump’s call to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to strong-arm him into manufacturing dirt about a political opponent, but the complaint is equally focused on how that call was handled. A transcript, readout, and notes that normally would have been placed in a server that was accessible to staffers across the White House was instead buried in a highly secured server normally used for critical documents concerning national security. But why is that a big deal?
The primary reason it’s important is that it demonstrates knowledge of guilt. Trump has repeatedly claimed that his call with Zelensky was “perfect” and that he did nothing wrong. However, what’s obvious from reading the “transcript” prepared by the White House is that there were no critical national security interests discussed in the call. There are no details about Russian activity or about American intentions that could possibly have warranted putting information about the call under such tight security. The only reason that Trump—or more likely, those White House officials such as Mike Pompeo who were present to hear the call—would have felt compelled to lock this information away and all but dispose of the key was that he understood that it was incriminating.
The New York Times describes how this call should have been treated. It’s not that the raw transcript would have been handed out to the public. Instead, it would have been captured and stored on TNet, a top-secret network for White House officials. From there, it would have required a top-secret-level clearance to access, but it still would have been available to Cabinet officials who might need to consult Trump’s discussion with a foreign leader when planning everything from military to economic policy.
But rather than being placed on TNet, Trump’s talk with Zelensky was placed on the inappropriately acronymed NICE—the National Security Council Intelligence Collaboration Environment. Information stored in NICE is at the “code word” level. That is, it takes top-secret clearance, access to NICE, and a specific code word to open a file. This level of security is usually reserved for things such as active military operations and even nuclear contingencies.
Officials are often excoriated for placing a document at a lower level of security than it deserves. All but a handful of the so-called classified information that made its way to Hillary Clinton’s email server was not classified at the time, but retroactively classified by officials who later determined the information required greater protection.
But it’s just as harmful to overly classify documents. Information that’s held at too high a security level can be unavailable to those who need it for critical planning. That lack of knowledge can trigger anything from diplomatic blunders to military disasters.
And officials have long recognized that the classification system can be easily abused for exactly the reason that it appears to have been abused in this case—to hide evidence of wrongdoing. If everything that shows mistakes, complicity, or outright guilt can simply be classified to the point of invisibility, there is no way to pursue justice in any case against an official with the authority to classify. Hiding evidence of wrongdoing by shoving it into the NICE system under code word protection is still hiding evidence.
Not only does that appear to be the case with Trump’s call to Zelensky, but it appears that there are other calls sitting in NICE, snug under code words that keep their contents from being read. That includes calls to Donald Trump’s pal Mohammed bin Salman made shortly after Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi was murdered at the Saudi dictator’s command. That includes calls between Trump and Russian dictator Vladimir Putin.
In particular, it includes a May 3 call between Trump and Putin that is known to have included a discussion of the future of Ukraine and instructions that Putin wanted Trump to pass to incoming President Zelensky. Comparing what Putin said to Trump and what Trump said to Zelensky would be extremely interesting—and may be a big reason that both transcripts were locked up. Hard.
It would also be extremely interesting to question members of Robert Mueller’s special counsel team to learn if they were ever made aware of these transcripts, or whether this evidence was simply unknown to them.