President Barack Obama is joined by members of his economic and national security teams during a telephone call with President Lee Myung-bak of South Korea in the Oval Office, Dec. 1, 2010.
It wasn’t only Donald Trump who moved transcripts of “conversations with foreign leaders onto the same top-secret server where the Trump administration stored his recent phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky,” reveals David Marcus in The Federalist. Basically it was business as usual.
Appearing at the Texas Tribune Festival, (Susan) Rice was asked how often this practice was engaged in during the Obama administration, but did not answer that question, saying instead, “We never moved them over unless they were legitimately, in the contents classified.” Rice did not explain what standard the Obama administration used to determine what was legitimately classified. She said it is rare, although not impossible, that a presidential conversation could be classified to that highest level.
So from Rice we now know the decision to store the conversation on the top-secret server was not unprecedented, but a decision that Obama’s administration made multiple times as well, using its own discretion, just as the Trump administration has. And from ABC News’ reporting we know that this has been a long-standing practice in the Trump White House to protect against a high level of leaks.
Standard Operating Procedure
Both of these revelations undermine the theory that in this specific case, some unique and bizarre method was used to hide the transcript and engage in a cover up. Rather, the Trump administration appears to have been engaging in business as usual.
Read more here.
.@AmbassadorRice: “Normally there is a full, verbatim transcript” of calls like Trump’s w/ the Ukraine president.
Says he tried to “bury” it on a more secure server, but acknowledges the Obama Admin. sometimes did the same. pic.twitter.com/B6zZNbZsTG
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) September 27, 2019
