WTF Just Happened Today

Friday, September 27, 2019

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1/ The White House and the Justice Department learned about the whistleblower complaint against Trump before the formal complaint was passed from the intelligence community. The whistleblower, reportedly a CIA officer, lodged the formal complaint with the inspector general for the intelligence community on Aug. 12th. The whistleblower also shared information about potential abuse of power and a White House cover-up with the CIA's top lawyer, Courtney Simmons Elwood, through an anonymous process. Elwood, following policy, told White House and Justice Department officials on Aug. 14th that she received anonymous information detailing concerns about a call between Trump and a foreign leader. The following day, John Demers, the head of the Justice Department's national security division, went to the White House to review a rough transcript of the call. Demers alerted the deputy attorney general, Jeffrey Rosen, and Brian Benczkowski, the head of the department's criminal division, to discuss how to handle the information. The Justice Department then blocked sending the whistleblower complaint to Congress. The inspector general presented the matter to the acting director of national intelligence on Aug. 26th. (New York Times / Wall Street Journal)

• More than 300 former U.S. national security and foreign policy officials signed a statement warning that Trump’s actions regarding Ukraine represent a "profound national security concern." The letter also calls for an impeachment inquiry by Congress to determine "the facts." Many of the signers are former Obama officials. But the list includes others who served as career officials in both Democratic and Republican administrations. Former officials from the intelligence community, the Defense Department, the National Security Council and the Department of Homeland Security also signed the statement. (Washington Post)

• A Kremlin spokesperson said Russia hopes the U.S. doesn't release the transcripts of Trump’s conversations with Vladimir Putin like it did with the Ukrainian president's calls. "We would like to hope that things won’t come to such situations in our bilateral relations, which already have plenty of quite serious problems," said Dmitry Peskov. He called the move to release the information "a rather unusual practice," and said that as a rule, "materials from conversations on the level of the head of state are considered secret or top secret." (Bloomberg / NBC News)

2/ National Security Council attorneys directed the White House to move the Ukraine transcript to a highly classified system. The whistleblower said that moving the record of the call was unusual, because it was "used to store and handle classified information of an especially sensitive level" and evidence that "White House officials understood the gravity of what had transpired" during the conversation. According to the whistleblower, "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 White House, meanwhile, claimed that because the transcript was already classified, there was nothing...

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