Perspective: ClassificationI Helped Classify Calls for Two Presidents. The White House Abuse of the System Is Alarming

The whistleblower at the heart of the Ukraine controversy said White House officials ordered information about President Trump’s phone call with President Volodymyr Zelensky to be removed from the classified server typically used to store such information and placed on a hyper-secure “code word” server. Such special protections are typically reserved for material of the gravest sensitivity: detailed information about covert operations, for example, where exposure can get people killed.

The move was highly suspicious, the whistleblower said several White House officials told him, because “the call did not contain anything remotely sensitive from a national security perspective.” On Friday, the White House confirmed that National Security Council lawyers directed that the call records be placed on that server.

“I served under presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama and worked for four advisers on the National Security Council’s staff,”Kelly Magsamen writes in the Washington Post. “I have staffed presidential meetings and phone calls with foreign leaders and spent hundreds, if not thousands, of hours in the White House Situation Room. It is difficult to overstate just how abnormal and suspicious treating the call in that manner would be. It strongly suggests White House staff knew of serious wrongdoing by the president and attempted to bury it — a profound abuse of classified systems for political, and possibly criminal, purposes.”

Magsamen notes that the records of Trump’s conversations with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Saudi officials also were restricted to an unusually small group of officials, it now appears, though it’s unclear whether the memos were placed on the special server, adding:

In my almost six years on the NSC staff, I never personally saw or heard of the records of a presidential call being moved to the “code word” system. Such a move would be justified only if a president and foreign leader were discussing material so sensitive that intelligence officials with top-secret clearance had to be “read into” to access to it — an unlikely prospect, even with our closest allies. Presidents tend to discuss general foreign policy issues, not the fine details of covert actions.

Moving the memo to the code word server suggests Trump officials really did know the call was as bad as the president’s critics say it is. The argument some Trump officials are making — that they protected Trump’s conversations to avoid leaks — is scarcely less damning, if the point was to avoid leaks of conversations in which the president leveraged U.S. power for his own political advantage (or endorsed foreign interference in U.S. elections).

If the code word server was used to prevent leaks as a general matter — the most charitable interpretation — does that mean all of the president’s phone calls with foreign leaders are stored there? That, in itself, would represent a remarkable departure from the intended use of the classification system.