Donald Trump has given Congress the road to his own perdition, not that he believes in it. He said last year regarding the notes kept by his former lawyer, Michael Cohen, that good lawyers don’t keep notes. In essence, if you don’t write it down, there’s no evidence.
So, Trump, sly devil, doesn’t take notes; doesn’t put anything in writing; and prefers to conduct “personal diplomacy,” one to one calls or conferences in which no notes are taken or records kept. We recall he directed the translators at his meeting with Putin in Helsinki to destroy his notes.
There’s one thing he had to work around: when the president has a conversation with another head of state, many people are listening, in the Oval Office and in the Situation Room. Some of those people are charged with taking notes, transcribing the conversation. The notes taken are official records and cannot be destroyed. They are kept with similar records in an electronic filing system. They are discoverable to Congressional and FBI investigators. The Intelligence Committee has clearance over all classified materials, the kind of materials for which the lockdown was intended.
Records of his one-to-one conversations, such as the call with the Ukraine President in July, and most probably of the Oval Office meeting with Russian diplomats immediately following the Comey firing in 2018, were placed in a special electronic lockdown and removed from the standard database. The records thus disappeared. The whistleblower states in his complaint that White House officials were directed by White House lawyers to “remove the electronic transcript from the computer system in which such transcripts are typically stored for coordination, finalization, and distribution to cabinet-level officials.”
One of Trump’s Tells is that he accuses his enemies of doing what he himself has done or would do. Thus, Trump accused Hillary Clinton of maintaining a private email server to keep her nefarious dealings out of official State Department communications. It doesn’t matter if he believed that she did that. By accusing her, he signaled it as something he would do – and actually has.
Trump’s use of the lockdown in essence created for himself a private server into which his most scandalous communications were placed – away from prying government eyes. He might have gotten away with it, were it not for the whistleblower, one person – maybe the only person standing watch over the administration, perhaps a solitary figure acting at maximum personal risk.
Evan Sarzin is the author of Hard Bop Piano and Bud Powell published by Gerard & Sarzin Music Publishing. He writes and publishes Revolted Colonies (http://revoltedcolonies.com).