Susan Rice, who served as President Barack Obama’s national security adviser, said the previous administration kept transcripts of calls with foreign leaders in a separate computer system — but only if the contents of the conversations were highly classified.
The Trump administration has been under fire for putting a transcript of the president’s call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on a separate system for highly classified information, leading to speculation that the White House was trying to hide Trump urging his Ukrainian counterpart to investigate Joe Biden and his son Hunter.
A whistleblower complaint released Thursday alleged Trump asked Ukraine to interfere in the 2020 election and the White House sought to “lock down” all records of the call.
The White House also reportedly kept transcripts of Trump’s calls with Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Saudi royal family on the highly classified system.
“What they did, instead of storing it in the normal system, which is protected and classified, even though there was no classified substance in that actual discussion, instead of putting it where it normally resides, they hid it on a very highly sensitive, highly compartmented server that very few people in the U.S. government have access to in order to bury it,” Rice said Friday at the Texas Tribune Festival.
When asked how often the Obama administration kept the contents of calls on the highly classified server, Rice said it would not have been done “unless they were legitimately in their contents classified.”
“It’s rare that a presidential conversation would be classified to that highest level. It’s not impossible. It’s very rare. Even when they are two leaders discussing classified information. Here’s a case where there was nothing classified and it was moved to the most secure, sensitive server,” she said.
