President-elect Trump’s contact with foreign leaders is not alarming the State Department, despite his potential use of non-secure phone lines to conduct the calls.
“We don’t have visibility into the method of transmission here in terms of how the calls are being set up and facilitated,” said State Department spokesman John Kirby.
“It is possible and it’s fairly routine — not in every case, but in many cases — for the phone calls, even, that we have with our counterparts are sometimes done over unclassified telephone systems. Not every one, but I would say a majority of them are done that way.”
Non-secure conversations between U.S. officials and foreign leaders were a flashpoint during the presidential campaign, in light of Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server during her tenure as secretary of state.
Initially, Clinton defended the practice by maintaining that she never put classified information on the server. That claim was proven incorrect in the midst of the Democratic presidential primaries, in part due to the presence of information about conversations with foreign leaders.
“It’s born classified,” J. William Leonard, a former director of the U.S. government’s Information Security Oversight Office, told Reuters. “If a foreign minister just told the secretary of state something in confidence, by U.S. rules that is classified at the moment it’s in U.S. channels and U.S. possession.”
But Kirby avoided criticizing Trump’s team. “I would have to assume that the transition team understands the limits of unclassified discussions, but that’s really for them to speak to,” he said. “It depends on what’s being conveyed over an unclassified network. I mean, it’s hard for me to say is it a problem or not when we don’t have visibility into what’s being discussed.”
