A former CIA analyst offered a theory that a U.S. intelligence community whistleblower complaint relates to a phone call between President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Ned Price, who was a press spokesman during the Obama administration and quit the CIA in 2017 so he wouldn’t have to serve under the Trump administration, appeared Wednesday evening on MSNBC to comment on the complaint at the center of a fight between House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff and the nation’s acting spy chief which relates to a phone call President Trump had with a foreign leader in which a “promise” was made.
Further details of the conversation have yet to be reported, but the Washington Post notes the complaint was submitted to the Intelligence Community inspector general on Aug. 12. The president had interactions with at least five foreign leaders since the beginning of July, according to White House records.
After calling attention to previous controversies in which Trump revealed highly classified information, including to Russian diplomats in 2017, Price said one of the conversations Trump had with a foreign leader in those preceding weeks was with Putin.
“It’s always dangerous to speculate on the origins of potential wrongdoing during this administration, because there is so much of it to go around, but let me offer one theory that I think comports with the second line of thought that Ben put forward,” Price said. “I’ve always been curious about a July 31 phone call between President Trump and Vladimir Putin. This is a phone call that President Trump himself initiated.”
Price described how afterwards the White House and the Kremlin released readouts with different pieces of information.
“The White House, after the Kremlin did, put out a read out that said they discussed potential American assistance to ongoing Siberian wildfires. That raised my curiosity even more. President Trump was barely lifting a finger to fight ongoing wildfires in California,” Price said. “The Kremlin readout, however, added something quite different. It said, quote, ‘that the Russian president viewed Trump’s offer as a sign that fully-fledged bilateral relations could be restored in the future.'”
“The Russians seemed to have an indication that President Trump had pledged or promised a restoration of diplomatic relations, of bilateral relations in a way that the White House certainly didn’t allude to in its readout,” he added.
Schiff, a Democrat from California, has grappled with acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire in recent days for access to the complaint.
Although the Office of the Director of National Intelligence has refused to hand it over, arguing that the statute Schiff believes require that they do does not apply because it “involves confidential and potentially privileged matters relating to the interests of other stake holders within the Executive Branch,” Congress should be getting some answers in the coming days.
Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson, who deemed the complaint “credible and urgent,” agreed to testify before the House Intelligence Committee in a briefing about the complaint Thursday morning in a closed session. Maguire has agreed to testify in an open setting next Thursday on Sept. 26.
