Two former CIA officers who were veterans of the Situation Room said that the system in place at the White House ensured that the transcript of President Trump’s conversation with the Ukraine president was “likely verbatim.”
The White House took the rare step of releasing a transcript of a president’s call with a foreign leader on Wednesday after a whistleblower complaint sparked an uproar over whether President Trump improperly pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate his potential 2020 election rival Joe Biden.
The five-page document detailed a July 25 call between the two leaders that lasted 30 minutes. The transcript’s release prompted more scrutiny, with some questioning whether the document was complete. A note at the bottom of the first page indicated the document was “not a verbatim transcript of a discussion” but a record of “the notes and recollections of Situation Room Duty Officers” and National Security Council policy staff who are assigned to listen to the call.
The director of the White House Situation Room typically manages such calls, said Larry Pfeiffer, who served in the position under President Barack Obama. The directors are usually a senior CIA officer or someone in a senior role in the military, Pfeiffer told the Washington Examiner.
During his time in the White House between 2011 and 2013, Pfeiffer said there were usually three people typing up the president’s calls at once. Their notes would then be formed into one document and passed on to a National Security Council directorate, who would “smooth the language out,” such as removing “um’s.”
“That very likely happened in this one, because it reads like human beings and human beings don’t talk quite like the transcripts reads, so my guess is some of that has been done, but I’d be very surprised if there was substantive comments missing or major deletions from the call because there would be people who could call [Trump] out on it,” he said.
Deleting parts of a transcript — beyond “um’s” — could also be in violation of the Presidential Records Act.
Pfeiffer and Joel Willett, a former CIA officer who was detailed to the Situation Room under Obama, both said it is longstanding practice to produce transcripts of the call based on notes and not a recording.
“The specter of Nixon looms large in the White House, even to this day,” Willett told the Washington Examiner. “Just practically speaking, it’s just not something we’re technically set up to do.”
Democrats immediately slammed the transcript as incomplete and questioned what the White House could be hiding.
Former Vice President Joe Biden, who could face off against Trump in the 2020 general election, referred to the transcript as a “summation” and an “abridged version that the White House was willing to issue to the public.”
“The 2,000-word summation of a 30-minute phone call released by the White House makes clear that days after the President ordered the delay of Congressionally-appropriated military assistance to Ukraine, he implored the President of Ukraine to work with his personal attorney to manufacture a smear against a domestic political opponent, using a malicious conspiracy theory that has been universally debunked by every independent outlet that has looked at it,” Biden said in a statement Wednesday.
Pfeiffer said the National Security Counsel directorate’s memorandum on the conversation could be a “largely verbatim transcript,” like Trump’s call with Zelensky, but that depends on the call’s sensitivity. In cases where information needed to be protected, a summary of the conversation could be disseminated instead.
“That directorate finalizes the memo. It goes to the national security adviser for his final review, and then it goes to the NSC’s executive secretary, who then disseminates it to whomever the national security adviser says it could go to. In most cases, that would include the director of National Intelligence, CIA, State Department secretary, secretary of Defense,” Pfeiffer said.
