Oops - It Turns Out the Obama White House Stored Foreign Call Transcripts on a Highly Secure Server Just Like Trump

When you get right down to it, there was a lot of profoundly stupid and nonsensical stuff in the so-called whistleblower complaint. Let’s start with the assertion President Trump withheld military aid from Ukraine in order to pull a quid pro quo stunt to try to strong arm them into investigating corruption rather than follow Biden’s example and trying to force them to cover up corruption.

The stupidest thing was alleging an impropriety existed when the Trump administration elected to move transcripts of presidential conversations to a storage system used for sensitive information.

I.    Efforts to restrict access to records related to the call

In the days following the phone call, I learned from multiple U.S. officials that 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. This set of actions underscored to me that White House  officials understood the gravity of what had transpired in the call.

• White House officials told me that they were “directed” by White-House lawyers to remove the electronic transcript from the computer system in which such transcripts are typically stored for coordination, finalization, and distribution to Cabinet-level
•  
• Instead, the transcript was loaded into a separate electronic 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

I do not know whether similar measures were taken to restrict access to other records of the call, such as contemporaneous handwritten notes taken by those who listened in.

This is from Fusion Natasha

Storing a transcript on that system “would severely limit those personnel able to view it,” said one former NSC official. “The bottom line is that if the administration attempted to upload the transcript to that system it would have been to make it nearly impossible to share.”

— Natasha Bertrand (@NatashaBertrand) September 26, 2019

ADDITIONALLY: Experts say it would be squarely within whistleblower’s rights to sound the alarm over a potential violation of the 2009 exec order governing classification. That in turn could be why the IC IG considered it to be within the intelligence community’s purview.

— Natasha Bertrand (@NatashaBertrand) September 26, 2019

Just a few facts.

1. The President is the original classification authority for the transcripts. He has the authority to classify them and limit their distribution as he sees fit.

2. No mid-grade CIA toad gets a vote in how the president decides to secure documents.

3. Because transcripts of his calls had been leaked on at least two occasions in an effort to embarrass him so small wonder he chose to restrict access.

4. Exactly zero Obama executive orders apply to the Trump White House. Just like exactly zero Bush EOs applied to the Obama White House.

To put it bluntly, you may not like how the Trump White House does business but no one is asking you.

But, as it turns out, the very premise of this particular part of the complaint is just another tarted up lie.

“Former national security adviser Susan Rice acknowledged last night that the Obama administration moved transcripts of conversations with foreign leaders onto the same top-secret…”https://t.co/cq62pginuX

— Francis Brennan (@FrancisBrennan) September 28, 2019

.@AmbassadorRice: “Normally there is a full, verbatim transcript” of calls like Trump’s w/ the Ukraine president.

Says he tried to “bury” it on a more secure server, but acknowledges the Obama Admin. sometimes did the same. pic.twitter.com/B6zZNbZsTG

— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) September 27, 2019

This is how The Federalist’s David Marcus sums it up:

So from Rice we now know the decision to store the conversation on the top-secret server was not unprecedented, but a decision that Obama’s administration made multiple times as well, using its own discretion, just as the Trump administration has. And from ABC News’ reporting we know that this has been a long-standing practice in the Trump White House to protect against a high level of leaks.

Both of these revelations undermine the theory that in this specific case, some unique and bizarre method was used to hide the transcript and engage in a cover up. Rather, the Trump administration appears to have been engaging in business as usual.

This whole incident is simply an attempt to force the appointment of yet another special counsel, to force the recusal of Attorney General Bill Barr, and to be a shabby skeleton upon which to try to build an non-laughable case for impeachment. That’s it. All of it.

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