Now, Trump has been caught using a secret computer system ― a private server, if you will ― to hide his election interference attempts.
“Republicans have made it very clear that secret servers are a criminal offense,” said Jesse Ferguson, a Democratic strategist who served on the Clinton campaign. “Will they apply the same rules to Trump that they apply to everyone else?”
An explosive letter from an unnamed intelligence official was released Thursday detailing attempts by the White House to cover up Trump’s wrongdoing.
On more than one occasion, White House officials put transcripts of Trump’s conversations into a “standalone computer system” that was meant for storing sensitive and classified intelligence information.
Officials were abusing that system, the letter says. They used it to protect politically sensitive conversations, rather than national security secrets. It’s the place they put the transcript of Trump’s conversation with the president of Ukraine when he asked for foreign help in going after former Vice President Joe Biden in the 2020 election.
Hiding this transcript was deliberate. According to the whistleblower’s letter, White House officials said they were “directed” by White House lawyers to move it there, away from the regular computer system that holds other call transcripts that are distributed to Cabinet-level officials.
The call at the center of this issue is Trump’s conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on July 25. According to both the whistleblower letter and a summary of the call released by the White House, Trump pressured Zelensky to have his government investigate Biden and his son, Hunter Biden, who had served on the board of a Ukrainian gas company during President Barack Obama’s administration.
In the Aug. 12 complaint, the whistleblower wrote that there were White House officials who were “deeply disturbed” by the call, adding, “They told me that there was already a ‘discussion ongoing’ with White House lawyers about how to treat the call because of the likelihood, in the officials’ retelling, that they had witnessed the President abuse his office for personal gain.”
And if there were any doubt that the White House knew it was bad, officials moved the transcript to the secret system so that few people would ever know about it.