October 3rd 2019

By Mark Sumner

Daily Kos

A primary concern of the intelligence community whistleblower was not just the conversation that Donald Trump held with the president of Ukraine, but the way in which that conversation was handled. Trump madly overclassified the transcripts and other documents related to the conversation, blocking access from the departments that usually have access to such conversations and locking it away in a server meant for the most secret of national security issues. Such overclassification is nothing short of a form of obstruction. 

But this wasn’t the first time that Trump buried his dirty laundry deep in a secret server. It now seems clear that other such transcripts, including conversations with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin and Saudi murderer Mohammed bin Salman, were also slapped with beyond-top-secret stamps.

So it’s no surprise that Trump had ordered a significant upgrade of the vault where he was locking information away, placing even more locks and shields between the public and the truth. As Politico reports, the White House ordered an upgrade of the National Security Council’s Intelligence Collaboration Environment (NICE) in the spring of 2018—around the same time that Trump ended the practice of automatically releasing readouts of calls between the White House and foreign leaders.

The purpose of these upgrades was apparently to “ferret out and deter leaks.” It requires not only that every file in NICE be protected by an individual password, but that there now be a log of who accessed those files. By placing his calls on this server, Trump expected that they would be beyond the reach of all but a handful of members of his inner circle, and that if anyone released information from his calls, Trump would be able to look in the log and see who was the rat. Or spy. Or ratspy.  

Only that’s now how it turned out.

What Trump didn’t count on was members of his inner circle going to someone else and providing them with a strikingly accurate account of his discussion with the Ukrainian leader. So despite all his efforts to clamp down on those leakers, there still seem to be people who consider his actions so concerning, they’re not going to keep his secrets.

Posted with permission