White House tried to cover up Trump's Ukraine conversation, whistleblower alleges

Donald Trump’s actions on Ukraine “pose risks to US national security”, according to a whistleblower’s complaint released on Thursday which also appeared to reveal an attempt by the White House to cover up conversations with a foreign leader.

The whistleblower alleges in the explosive complaint that Trump used a phone call with Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, to “solicit interference” in the 2020 election, and that the White House then intervened to “lock down” the transcript of the call.

 “In the course of my official duties, I have received information from multiple US government officials that the president of the United States is using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 US election,” the whistleblower wrote.

Several major news organisations are reporting where the whistleblower worked but the whistleblower’s identity has not been publicly disclosed or independently verified by the Guardian.

The complaint was released as the acting director of national intelligence, Joseph Maguire, testified before the House intelligence committee. Maguire said he had initially been blocked from releasing the complaint to Congress.

In his opening remarks on Thursday Maguire said the situation was “totally unprecedented”.

The complaint details how the Trump administration sought to block access to the transcript of the call with Zelenskiy – in which Trump asked the Ukraine president to “do us a favor” and offered help in investigating Joe Biden, a potential 2020 presidential rival.

According to the whistleblower, in the days following the call, “senior White House officials had intervened to ‘lock down’ all records of the phone call, especially the official word-for-word transcript of the call that was produced as is customary by the White House Situation Room”.

The White House released a memo of the call, but not a verbatim transcript, on Wednesday.

Officials were directed by White House lawyers to remove the transcript from the computer system where “such transcripts are typically stored”, the whistleblower wrote. The transcript was instead stored in a separate system “that is otherwise used to store and handle classified information of an especially sensitive nature”.

“One White House official described this act as an abuse of this electronic system because the call did not contain anything remotely sensitive from a national security perspective,” the whistleblower wrote.

“This set of actions underscored to me that White House officials understood the gravity of what had transpired in the call.”

Later, at a private event in New York, the president lashed out at those who helped to inform the whistleblower and alluded to retaliation.

In audio obtained and released by the Los Angeles Times, Trump says: “Who’s the person that gave the whistleblower the information? Because that’s close to a spy. You know what we used to do in the old days, when we were smart, right? The spies and treason? We used to handle it a little differently than we do now.”

The House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, in a press conference in Washington, slammed the White House for allegedly trying to keep details of the Ukraine call from becoming public. “This is a cover-up,” she said.

The complaint suggests other details of other phone calls have been treated in a similar way, raising concerns about other conversations Trump may have had.

The complaint, submitted in August, is at the heart of the rolling Trump-Ukraine scandal.

The whistleblower said they were “not a direct witness to most of the events described”. However, they wrote: “I found my colleagues’ accounts of these events to be credible because, in almost all cases, multiple officials recounted fact patterns that were consistent with one another.”

In the 25 July call with Zelenskiy, Trump told the Ukrainian president he should work with Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, and the US attorney general, William Barr, to look into unsubstantiated allegations that Biden, the former vice-president, helped remove a Ukrainian prosecutor investigating his son, Hunter, who was on the board of a Ukrainian gas company.

Trump said: “There’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the attorney general would be great.”

He added: “It sounds horrible to me.”

There is no evidence of wrongdoing by Biden, the current frontrunner for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.

The publication of the complaint comes after Pelosi announced an official impeachment inquiry on Tuesday, setting the stage for a rancorous election fight.

Congressman Adam Schiff, the Democratic chairman of the intelligence committee, said the log of Trump’s call with Zelenskiy “reads like a classic organized crime shakedown”.

“It would be funny, if it weren’t such a graphic betrayal of the president’s oath of office … it forces us to confront the remedy the founders provided for such a flagrant abuse of office: impeachment.”

Devin Nunes, the committee’s top Republican and a fierce Trump ally, accused Democrats of leveling “the latest information warfare operation against the president” in line with the “Russia hoax”, referring to Robert Mueller’s Trump-Russia investigation. He accused Democrats of digging for “dirt” and even of pursuing “nude pictures of Trump”.

In his opening remarks, Maguire offered his rationale for not immediately forwarding the complaint to Congress as required under whistleblower laws. In her press conference, Pelosi accused him of breaking the law.

Maguire said his office consulted the White House office of legal counsel and was informed that “much of the information in the complaint was in fact subject to executive privilege – a privilege that I do not have the authority to waive”.

He added: “I believe everything here in this matter is totally unprecedented.” He faced sharp questioning from both sides, while trying to dodge partisan points.

He insisted: “I believe the whistleblower was acting in good faith … I think he did the right thing.”

Amid mostly fierce Republican attacks on the spy chief and Democrats’ efforts, the GOP congressman Mike Turner said: “I want to say to the president: ‘This is not OK. That conversation is not OK.’”

Maguire said he did not know the identity of the whistleblower.

He also contradicted a report in the Washington Post that he threatened to resign if the White House did not allow him to testify freely. The publication has stood by its story.