John Eisenberg, the White House attorney who goes to work every day in a locked, secure environment and who has a reputation for never talking to anyone about anything, apparently shared some advice with Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman before the NSC’s Ukraine expert came in to provide testimony about Donald Trump’s Ukraine scandal: Don’t. Or at least Eisenberg, according to Politico, told Vindman to keep his yap shut when it came to Trump’s call to Ukraine.
Until he was called to testify next week, Eisenberg’s was a name rarely heard outside the White House corridors. But he turns out to have a co-staring role in the whole Ukraine affair. Former NSC European expert Fiona Hill apparently went to Eisenberg some time before Trump’s call to Ukraine to state her concerns about how Trump’s team was pressuring the incoming government for political favors. After the call, Eisenberg was Vindman’s first stop after Trump made those same demands for favors direct from the Oval Office.
But Eisenberg appears to have done more than just reacted by taking the transcript of the call and dropping it into the most secure server available. He also instructed Vindman to take his concerns about Trump’s actions and … shut up about it. Vindman’s testimony to the House impeachment inquiry reportedly included a statement that Eisenberg told him “not to tell anyone about it.”
With Vindman in his office, Eisenberg took out a yellow legal pad, made notes as Vindman relayed his concerns. Then Eisenberg brought in another White House attorney, Michael Ellis, to ponder how to handle what Vindman had said. The result was the decision to move the transcript where no one else could see it. An action that does not seem all that reassuring.
However, VIndman reportedly testified that he didn’t think Eisenberg was attempting a cover-up at first. Then a few days later Eisenberg was back to tell him not to talk about the call, even though Vindman’s job was to act as the locus for Ukraine information. That apparently was enough to generate a whose fresh set of concerns.
On Thursday, Fiona Hill’s replacement at the NSC, Tim Morrison, apparently testified that he had also discussed the handling of the transcript and been concerned that if it was read, the contents could damage the relationship between the U.S. and Ukraine as well as endanger bipartisan support for Ukraine. But it doesn’t seem to have been Morrison who actually sent the document to the secure server.
The reaction of both Eisenberg and Morrison certainly suggests that concerns about Trump’s conversation were real, and putting the transcript in the secure server absolutely represents an attempt to take that conversation out of the normal channels of review in the White House and State Department. Morrison stated that he was not concerned that anything in the conversation was illegal. That doesn’t mean that there wasn’t cause for concern. Or that hiding the document was not a cover-up.