Donald Trump’s actions on Ukraine “pose risks to US national security”, according to a whistleblower’s complaint released on Thursday which also appeared to reveal an attempt by the White House to cover up conversations with a foreign leader.
The whistleblower alleges that Trump used a phone call with Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelenskiy to “solicit interference” in the 2020 election, and that the White House then intervened to “lock down” the transcript of the call.
“In the course of my official duties, I have received information from multiple US government officials that the president of the United States is using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 US election,” the whistleblower wrote. The identity of the whistleblower has not been publicly disclosed.
The complaint was released as acting director of national intelligence Joseph Maguire testified before the House intelligence committee. Maguire had initially been blocked from releasing the complaint to Congress.
In his opening remarks on Thursday Maguire said the situation was “totally unprecedented”.
The complaint details how the Trump administration sought to block access to the transcript of the call with Zelenskiy –where Trump asked the Ukraine president to “do us a favor” and offered help in investigating Joe Biden, a potential 2020 presidential rival.
According to the whistleblower, in the days following the call, “senior White House officials had intervened to ‘lock down’ all records of the phone call, especially the official word-for-word transcript of the call that was produced as is customary by the White House Situation Room”.
The White House released a memo of the call, but not a verbatim transcript, on Wednesday.
Officials were directed by White House lawyers to remove the transcript from the computer system where “such transcripts are typically stored”, the whistleblower wrote. The transcript was instead stored in a separate system “that is otherwise used to store and handle classified information of an especially sensitive nature”.
“One White House official described this act as an abuse of this electronic system because the call did not contain anything remotely sensitive from a national security perspective,” the whistleblower wrote.
“This set of actions underscored to me that White House officials understood the gravity of what had transpired in the call.”
Donald Trump appeared to address the rolling Ukraine controversy on Thursday morning, tweeting: “THE GREATEST SCAM IN THE HISTORY OF AMERICAN POLITICS!”
The complaint suggests other details of other phone calls have been treated in a similar way, raising concerns about other conversations Trump may have had.
“According to White House officials I spoke with, this was ‘not the first time’ under the administration that a presidential transcript was placed into this codeword-level system solely for the purpose of protecting politically sensitive – rather than national security sensitive – information.”
The complaint, submitted in August, is at the heart of the rolling Trump-Ukraine scandal. The acting director of national intelligence, Joseph Maguire, is testifying before the House on Thursday. Maguire initially blocked the release of the complaint to Congress, citing issues of presidential privilege and saying the complaint did not deal with an “urgent concern”.
The whistleblower said they were “not a direct witness to most of the events described”. However, they wrote: “I found my colleagues’ accounts of these events to be credible because, in almost all cases, multiple officials recounted fact patterns that were consistent with one another.”
In the 25 July call with Zelenskiy, Trump told the Ukraine president he should work with Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, and the US attorney general, William Barr, to look into unsubstantiated allegations that Biden, the former vice-president, helped remove a Ukrainian prosecutor investigating his son, Hunter, who was on the board of a Ukrainian gas company.
Trump said: “There’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the attorney general would be great. Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution so if you can look into it.”
He added: “It sounds horrible to me.”
There is no evidence of wrongdoing by Biden, the current frontrunner for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.
The publication of the complaint comes after Nancy Pelosi, the House speaker, announced an official impeachment inquiry on Tuesday following the whistleblower’s complaint regarding alleged violations by Trump, setting the stage for a long and rancorous fight in the run-up to next year’s presidential election.
