Official says complaint based on conversations with ‘more than half a dozen U.S. officials’ who had direct knowledge
An intelligence community whistleblower raised alarms that President Donald Trump used his office to pressure a foreign government to influence the 2020 U.S. election and his staff orchestrated a cover-up to keep details of a phone call with Ukraine’s president off normal channels.
The whistleblower’s nine-page complaint, released by the House Intelligence Committee on Thursday, describes White House officials intervening to “lock down” all records of the president’s July 25 telephone conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy. In a sign of aides’ potential concerns — concerns Trump tried to brush aside by describing the call as “beautiful” and “perfect” — the records were moved to a system used for classified materials even though they “did not contain anything remotely sensitive,” the complaint says.
The intelligence official wrote to a top government inspector general about being “deeply concerned” that the president’s conversation with Zelenskiy amounted to “a serious or flagrant problem, abuse, or violation of law or executive order.” The official used wording directly from the United States criminal code to raise concerns about the commander in chief’s conduct.
View the complete September 26 article by John T. Bennett on The Roll Call website here.