Donald Trump is always concerned about leaks, so much so that on Thursday he was ready to stand the whistleblower and everyone who talked to them in front of a firing squad. But when he was mentioning how terrible it was that someone had talked to the whistleblower about Trump’s attempts to extort an allied country, what Trump didn’t mention was that someone had also talked to him … about the whistleblower. Because it seems that people in the White House knew about the whistleblower complaint even before the acting DNI called them up.
The New York Times has already reported that the whistleblower was a CIA analyst. It now appears that that analyst not only followed the law carefully in filing the whistleblower complaint, but followed department protocol in advance of that filing by taking concerns to a CIA lawyer. That lawyer then did just what acting DNI Joseph Maguire would do when the complaint hit his desk—they took it to the White House.
So when Maguire called up the White House counsel, it wasn’t the first time they had heard this information. They knew it was coming. And they acted to declare that the complaint couldn’t be released due to privilege—though, as in so many cases since Trump took office, the White House never made any formal claim of privilege. Still, it was easy for the White House to catch and kill the whistleblower complaint, because it knew in advance that it was coming, and it knew the subject of the complaint.
And it reacted to the complaint as it did to everything else related to Trump’s scheme in Ukraine; It put it under lock and key. Maguire not only didn’t hand over the complaint, but he also never notified Congress that there was a complaint. And when Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson asked if he could prepare the whistleblower to meet with the intelligence committees, Maguire turned him down.
The information suggests that the White House had both an inside track on the fact that the complaint was coming and a good idea of both the contents and the source of the complaints. And it responded by doing what this White House does: covering up.
As The Washington Post reports, not only did the whistleblower’s allegations about the conversation between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky turn out to be dead-on, but the real focus of the complaint wasn’t the conversation itself, but how the White House acted to cover up that conversation by taking documents that would have normally been widely distributed and locking them down in a system meant for the most sensitive national security information.
In this case, it may not be true that the cover-up was worse than the crime, because the crime was enormous. But that doesn’t mean the cover-up wasn’t also a crime.
And there’s one aspect of this that got little attention in these first days since the complaint was released. According to those White House officials who shared the information included in the complaint, this was not the first time one of Trump’s phone transcripts had been locked deep behind security walls.
This cover-up may be just a bread crumb on a trail to other cover-ups. And other crimes. For example, on May 4, Trump had a conversation with Vladimir Putin. According to the Kremlin, that conversation included Putin telling Trump that Ukraine was to blame for the fighting in its eastern region, and that incoming President Zelensky needed to take responsibility for it. The Kremlin doesn’t say what Trump said in reply.
But somewhere, there could be a transcript. Locked-up, locked-down, and covered-up.