Trump's call to Ukraine's president broke with established protocol, including making it super secret

WASHINGTON – White House calls to heads of state have been powerful tools of foreign policy, privy to a select few but rarely deemed state secrets – and never before the cause of an impeachment inquiry.

Former top officials said President Donald Trump's call to Ukraine's president July 25 and its aftermath differed from established protocols, from how summaries of the conversation were stored to who listened in. They offered a primer on how presidential communication with world leaders has been handled in the past.

Under an executive order signed by President Barack Obama in 2009, federal officials are barred from classifying information that is deemed illegal or embarrassing. The order prohibits classifying information to "conceal violations of law, inefficiency, or administrative error; prevent embarrassment to a person, organization or agency."

Call details put in highly secure system

A whistleblower's complaint alleges that White House officials were "directed" to remove electronic records of Trump's phone conversation from a computer system where the material is generally stored. The rough transcript was placed in a highly secure system reserved for classified information pertaining to national security matters.

That move would have required information technology personnel to move it from one classified computer system to another, a process that would have meant more eyes on the document, according to Larry Pfeiffer, who directed the White House situation room in the Obama administration.

"The fact that they made an effort to isolate it is perhaps in itself a wrongdoing," said former CIA director Leon Panetta, who served as President Bill Clinton's chief of staff.

"I never had an instance where, after the fact – and this appears to be after the fact – where somebody stops everyone in their tracks and says, 'Whoops, put this in the sensitive one,' " Pfeiffer said. "It appears to me, somebody somewhere, once they read the transcript, found something that was outrageously embarrassing or potentially concerning."

Is such a transfer illegal?

"I don’t think there’s a law out there where you’d send anybody to jail," Pfeiffer said. "But it goes against standards, practices, regulations, executive orders. Putting it in that super-secret system was probably the wrong thing to do."

How calls to heads of state work

Senior staffers choreograph these calls to ensure the president has experts to brief him before he picks up the phone, Pfeiffer said. They're on hand with him in the Oval Office or nearby in his residence, if the call is taken there.

Just before the call, Pfeiffer said, the president would receive a last-minute briefing from staffers, and in Obama's day, Pfeiffer would then "tee up" the call for the president.

Pfeiffer, who leads the Hayden Center at George Mason University in Virginia, said about a dozen people usually would be on hand to advise, listen, transcribe and ensure that the phones work and calls are reconnected if they're dropped.

In the room when the president makes the call to a foreign leader are a select few; typically only National Security Council staff would be present in the Oval Office. The president's national security adviser would often be there, along with a deputy, and sometimes the National Security Council's director of the region where the foreign leader lives. Occasionally, the White House chief of staff would attend, Pfeiffer said.

In Pfeiffer's experience, officials from other Cabinet agencies were not on hand, nor did he recall any senior official who called in from a remote location.

Wednesday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo acknowledged he listened in on Trump's call with Volodymyr Zelensky, during which Trump asked the Ukrainian president to investigate Democratic rival Joe Biden and Biden's son Hunter's dealings with a Ukrainian energy firm.

"That would be very unusual," Pfeiffer said of the secretary of state listening in.

Three or four National Security Council experts on the country being called would "type furiously" to produce a rough transcript of the conversation, Pfeiffer said.

The experts would reconcile their summaries and produce a readable narrative of the conversation, not a verbatim transcript. That's the same way the transcript of the Trump call was produced.

Senior National Security Council staff would review and approve the summary for dissemination to Cabinet-level officials, Pfeiffer said. In all, about a dozen people would have copies of the summary, which would be classified below the level of the most sensitive information.

'Super secret enclave' rarely used in Obama administration

Pfeiffer recalled only a few instances in which sensitive matters, such as covert operations or the secret negotiations that led to the nuclear agreement with Iran, required what he referred to as the "super secure enclave."

The whistleblower's complaint alleges that White House staff "intervened to 'lock down' all records of the phone call" and put the records in the system meant for national security information. Some officials said that was an abuse of the system, according to the whistleblower.

"This was not the first time under this Administration that a Presidential transcript was placed into this codeword-level system solely for the purpose of protecting politically sensitive – rather than national security sensitive – information," the complaint says.

Tuesday, the government watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington asked a federal judge to order the Trump administration to preserve its records of "meetings, phone calls and other communications with foreign leaders."

The controversy about the call and the release of the rough transcript could have a chilling effect on the willingness of foreign leaders to take the president's calls or engage in frank discussions, Pfeiffer said.

"It’s an incredibly powerful tool of diplomacy, the presidential phone call," he said. "You use a presidential phone call to cajole a leader into a new position, to accelerate a program that perhaps got mired in that foreign leader’s mud. I would hate for world leaders to now be very skittish about presidential phone calls."

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Trump's Ukraine call: Established White House protocols not followed