CNN is reporting new details of the White House's internal attempts to contain the Ukraine scandal before it exploded. The short version is that Trump's team knew from the moment the call ended that Trump had crossed a line. "At least one National Security Council official alerted the White House's national security lawyers" with concerns about the call, reports CNN. "Those same lawyers would later order the transcript of the call moved to a highly classified server typically reserved for code-word classified material." Also: "Unsettled aides also immediately began quizzing each other about whether they should alert senior officials who were not on the call."
So it was panic, then. And at least one National Security Council member was so concerned about Trump's request to the Ukrainian president that he quickly moved to alert the White House's legal team so that it could identify whether a crime had been committed.
What did the White House lawyers do with that information? They moved all records of the call to a secret code-word-level server, as the White House had evidently been doing for other Trump calls with certain foreign leaders.
You know, the crime server. Where the crimes are stored.
The order to move the transcript came from the White House's national security lawyers to prevent more people from seeing it, according to people familiar with the situation. It also came after recognition the document would need to be preserved for legal reasons.
So now we have a clearer picture of just what happened. Trump's inner circle indeed believed that Trump may have crossed an uncrossable line, and came forward to say so; the White House response was to quickly reclassify the call as code-word-level secret, scrubbing it from the normal records. All this happened before a sole whistleblower would eventually attempt to notify Congress of what was going on.
So here are about a dozen more administration officials who are going to need to be subpoenaed to determine what they knew, when they knew it, and what actions they took upon hearing a sitting president commit what they believed at the time to be a possible crime.