A whistleblower’s complaint about President Donald Trump, made public on Thursday, says White House officials were so concerned about what the president said in a July call with Ukraine’s new leader that they intervened to “lock down” the transcript of the conversation.
The whistleblower, whose name and gender has not been released, says they lodged the formal complaint out of a belief that Trump was “using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country” in the 2020 election.
In the call, Trump discussed having Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy help investigate the Biden family’s business dealings. The matter is now the subject of a formal impeachment inquiry that was launched by the House this week.
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“The interference includes, among other things, pressuring a foreign country to investigate one of the president’s main domestic political rivals,” the whistleblower wrote. “The president’s personal lawyer, Mr. Rudolph Giuliani, is a central figure in this effort. Attorney General (William) Barr appears to be involved as well.”
The complaint, which was made public with minimal redactions, makes clear there are witnesses who can back up the account, and it indicates concern over the internal handling of the White House record of the phone call.
The whistleblower says White House officials told them the conversation on July 25 between Trump and Zelenskiy was removed from the computer system that is typically used for such records of calls with foreign leaders.
Instead, the whistleblower writes, the transcript was loaded into a separate electronic system that is used only for information that is of an “especially sensitive nature.” One White House official described that as an abuse of the secure system because there was nothing “remotely sensitive” on the phone call from a national security perspective, the whistleblower said.
The nine-page complaint includes inside information from a number of White House and administration officials, in addition to accounts from previously published stories in the media.
The whistleblower said the actions described in the complaint posed “risks” to national security and undermined efforts to counter foreign interference.
The whistleblower wrote that “over the past four months, more than half a dozen U.S. officials have informed me of various facts related to this effort,” referring to soliciting foreign interference in the American election.
“I was not a direct witness to most of the events described,” the whistleblower continued. “However, I found my colleagues’ accounts of these events to be credible because, in almost all cases, multiple officials recounted fact patterns that were consistent with one another.”
The whistleblower said Trump’s actions constituted a “serious or flagrant problem, abuse, or violation of law or Executive Order.”
Trump sought to pressure Zelenskiy, the whistleblower wrote, to take actions that would boost the president’s 2020 election bid, which included probing the Bidens and communicating with Giuliani and Barr.
White House officials told the whistleblower they were “deeply disturbed” with the president’s actions.
Concerning Giuliani’s actions, the whistleblower said that beginning in mid-May, “I heard from multiple U.S. officials that they were deeply concerned by what they viewed as Mr. Giuliani’s circumvention of national security decision making processes to engage with Ukrainian officials and relay messages back and forth between” Ukrainian leaders and Trump.
The officials told the whistleblower that State Department officials spoke with Giuliani “in an attempt to ‘contain the damage’ to U.S. national security.”
Multiple U.S. officials told the whistleblower that Ukrainian leadership believed that a phone call or meeting between Zelenskiy and Trump was contingent on the Ukrainian president’s willingness to “play ball” on the issues that could prove politically beneficial to Trump.
The whistleblower’s complaint was supposed to have been turned over to Congress within a week, but acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire refused to do so on the advice of the Justice Department. Maguire is testifying publicly before the House Intelligence Committee Thursday morning.
Meanwhile, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., who had for months resisted the growing number in her caucus who advocated for impeachment, told top Democrats in a closed-door meeting Wednesday morning she wants to narrow the scope of the impeachment inquiry into Trump by focusing on his interaction with his Ukrainian counterpart, multiple sources told NBC News. Those sources cautioned that no firm decision has been made.
Two House leadership sources told NBC News Pelosi prefers to focus on the Ukraine issue, as she views the alleged underlying bad act to be simple and straightforward. Pelosi believes the Ukraine issue provides the strongest case to quickly build public support for impeachment, which is one of her chief goals, the sources said.
Geoff Bennett, Alex Moe and Leigh Ann Caldwell contributed.
