White House officials prevented the dissemination of the contents of Donald Trump’s communications with Ukraine’s president, according to a whistle blower, as Democrats accused the White House of covering up his alleged efforts to extract dirt on Joe Biden.
White House officials were “deeply disturbed” by Mr Trump’s July telephone call with President Volodymyr Zelensky, in which he asked his counterpart to investigate Mr Biden and the Ukrainian business activities of his son Hunter, the whistleblower complaint said.
According to the whistleblower — an anonymous intelligence official whose concerns have sparked an impeachment inquiry into Mr Trump — White House officials said internal lawyers debated how to handle the details of the call due to the “likelihood . . . that they had witnessed the president abuse his office for political means”.
The report was released by the House intelligence committee ahead of testimony from Joseph Maguire, the acting head of the US intelligence community. The whistleblower recounted being told that White House officials restricted access to the details of the call by storing the information in a specially classified storage system.
“I learned from multiple US officials that senior White House officials had intervened to ‘lock down’ all records of the phone call, especially the word-for-word transcript of the call that was produced,” the whistleblower wrote. “This set of actions underscored to me that White House officials understood the gravity of what had transpired in the call.”
Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic speaker of the House of Representatives who announced the impeachment proceedings earlier this week, said the White House had engaged in a “cover up”, reading out loud details about the classified electronic storage system from the complaint.
Explaining concerns about how White House officials handled the transcript, the whistleblower said it was removed from the normal electronic storage system for transcripts and put in a separate electronic system used for very sensitive information.
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“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,” wrote the whistleblower, who noted he was “not a direct witness to most of the events described” in the complaint.
The whistleblower said information from more than 12 government officials appeared to show that Mr Trump put pressure on a foreign leader for political gain by soliciting interference in the 2020 US election.
Rudy Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, was a “central figure” and that US attorney-general William Barr “appears to be involved as well”, it said.
The White House said the complaint was “nothing more than a collection of third-hand accounts of events and cobbled-together press clippings” that showed nothing improper.
“The president took the extraordinary and transparent steps of releasing the full, unredacted, and declassified transcript of his call with President Zelensky, which forms the heart of the complaint, as well as the complaint itself. That is because he has nothing to hide,” Stephanie Grisham, White House press secretary, said.
