RUN OF THE MILL
Calls between a president and a foreign leader typically start with U.S. intelligence officers detailed to the White House gathering in the Situation Room, a process that has been in place for decades, according to two people familiar with the operation in the Trump White House and past administrations. They spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss how Trump’s calls with foreign heads of state are handled.
During the Ukraine call, several others listened in. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Keith Kellogg, national security adviser for Vice President Mike Pence, were on the call. It’s unclear if they were at the White House or listened in on “drop” lines, secure hookups top officials can use from outside the White House.
Others who typically would have listened in would have been the president’s national security adviser, John Bolton, or his deputy, Charles Kupperman, who have both left the White House; the NSC’s director of Russia and Europe, who currently is Tim Morrison; the NSC’s Ukraine expert; and possibly someone from White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney’s office.
Lawyers who handle NSC issues include John Eisenberg and his deputy, Michael Ellis. It’s unclear what, if any, role Ellis played, but the former counsel for the House Intelligence Committee has been in the spotlight before.
The New York Times reported in March 2017 that he allowed his former boss, the then-committee chairman, Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., to review classified material at the White House, seeking to bolster Trump’s claim that he was wiretapped during the 2016 campaign on the orders of the Obama administration. The intelligence reports consisted primarily of ambassadors and other foreign officials talking about trying to develop contacts in the inner circle of then President-elect Trump. The report was not confirmed by The Associated Press.
The NSC declined to confirm who was on the call.
Down in the Situation Room, several others would have been listening. One person monitors the call to make sure the line is not interrupted. Others are tasked with documenting what is said. No audio recordings are made. The memorandum of the call, the telcon, which the White House has released, is the closest thing to a word-for-word transcript that is produced and is the official presidential record of the conversation.
“When I got to the Situation Room and my predecessor explained this incredibly inefficient process that we use, I had a lot of questions,” said Larry Pfeiffer, a 30-year U.S. intelligence veteran who managed the Situation Room during the Obama years. “I said ‘Why don’t we just record the call and write a transcript based on that?’”
Pfeiffer said his predecessor told him that the White House stopped taping presidential calls in the 1970s when President Richard Nixon recorded 3,700 hours of conversations, transcripts of which were used by Watergate investigators and during impeachment hearings that followed.
Pfeiffer said White House lawyers finally approved the idea of having a duty officer, wearing a headset, sit in a separate room, and repeat what was said on the call into voice-to-text software
— again without creating any audio recording.
Individuals familiar with Trump White House procedure say one Situation Room staffer, using voice-to-text software, repeats each word the president says and another listens and repeats what the foreign leader says. The software turns the words they repeat into text and a rough draft of the telcon is produced.
That draft is given to subject matter specialists on the NSC, who edit the draft for accuracy. Each draft is separately preserved. After it’s finalized, it’s turned over to the national security adviser — Bolton, at the time
— or the deputy, who was Kupperman, for their approval. White House lawyers also play a role in approving NSC documents.
After that, the telcon is given back to staffers tasked with preserving the document as a presidential record.