Phone calls with Putin and Saudi royal family: White House holds further talks under a special lock

How does the White House handle the content of politically controversial or even unexpectedly problematic phone calls from the US President? This issue is being discussed intensively in the US, the occasion is the complaint of the whistleblower in the Ukraine affair. Among other things, the latter accused the White House of blocking the wording of the conversation between Donald Trump and his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Selenskyj in an unusual way.

The whistleblower wrote in his complaint that about a dozen government employees overheard the phone call. As usual, an electronic wording protocol had been prepared. However, this was removed after the interview, at the direction of a White House lawyer, from a dedicated database and instead stored in a specially protected system intended for "classified information of a particularly sensitive nature". This indicates that they were aware of the "questionableness" of the conversation content. So far, only a rough conversation protocol of the phone call has been published.

In the course of these allegations, several US media have investigated how the handling of Trump's Ukraine telephone call differs from other calls. CNN and The New York Times, for example, report on the basis of insiders that records of Trump's talks with Vladimir Putin and with Saudi Arabian officials have apparently been similarly restrictive. Whether the records for those calls but landed in the same protected system as the Ukraine transcript is unclear, it says at CNN.

The New York Times writes that the research results showed that White House staff are not only concerned with protecting strictly confidential information, but also with protecting politically sensitive phone calls from Donald Trump to which leaks are being prevented.

Trouble with Leaks

The findings of CNN go in a similar direction. Accordingly, one saw in the White House in terms of calls and documents for "embarrassing leaks" for certain Trump phone calls action. Mention is made of talks with the heads of state of Australia and Mexico. In the light of these leaks, it was already decided to reduce the number of people who can receive transcripts or listen to the calls.

In the case of the Ukraine transcript, a White House official confirmed to CNN on Friday that the document was kept in an extra-secure system. The decision was made by lawyers of the National Security Council.

The representative did not comment on the handling of further telephone recordings, emphasizes CNN. It also remained unclear whether other people were involved in the decision. The White House has not explained why it puts certain phone calls such as the Ukraine call in the specially protected system, although the content is not strictly confidential.

"Politically sensitive information"

Already the whistleblower had hinted in his complaint that he had learned from White House officials that the Ukraine transcript was not the first to have been kept secret, and this only because of "politically sensitive information," not information. that affect national security.

A search by the Washington Post also indicates that the White House is trying to block some of Donald Trump's comments. She reports that Trump told the Russian Foreign Minister at a meeting in the Oval Office in 2017 that he was not worried about Russia's interference in the US election. After all, the US would do the same in other countries.

The White House staff would have arranged to restrict access to a summary of the meeting, writes the newspaper, so that the statements of the President are not public. The White House has not yet commented on the Washington Post report.

Trump's meeting with Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and then Russian US Ambassador Sergei Kislyak was already a political scandal in 2017 anyway, as the US president reportedly transmitted highly sensitive intelligence information. The New York Times writes that the White House has intensified its efforts to restrict access to content from Trump's talks, following reports of the meeting with Lawrows.

Sergey Lavrov himself indirectly called on the US on Friday not to publish minutes of talks between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. "As for the protocols of phone calls, when my mother brought me up, my mother taught me that it's inappropriate to read other addressed letters," Lavrov said in New York.