The Trump administration placed the transcript of the call between the president and Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky on a secure server in order to hide it from government officials, according to former Obama adviser Susan Rice.
The administration “hid it on a very highly sensitive, highly compartmentalized server that very few people in the U.S. government have access to in order to bury it,” she claimed on Friday during an interview at the Texas Tribune Festival in Austin, Texas.
Rice addressed accusations by the “whistleblower,” who said President Trump wanted to hide the call because he allegedly told Zelensky he would give the Ukraine funds for its military if Kiev would investigate the Biden family’s relationship with the eastern European country.
“It’s rare that a presidential conversation would be classified to that highest level,” Rice said. “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.”
Fox News reports: “She was asked by the moderator if the Obama administration ever kept calls on a separate server. She responded by saying only if “they were legitimately in their contents classified.”
However, Breitbart News reported Thursday that the transcript did not contain any mention of “quid pro quo” that might justify the Democrat’s efforts to impeach President Trump.
The report stated:
The much-discussed phone call did not include an exchange where Trump said he would only release temporarily frozen military aid to Ukraine if Zelensky agreed to investigate the unusual and highly lucrative relationship between a Ukrainian firm and Hunter Biden, son of former vice president and current presidential candidate Joe Biden.
On Wednesday, Trump highlighted how Congressional Democrats communicated with Ukraine officials in the past when they asked them to investigate the president.
“The Democrats, they went down to see the president of Ukraine and they asked him for all sorts of things,” he commented, adding that the Democrats had urged the Ukraine officials not to work with Republicans and to remain in step with their party.
“U.S. Sens. Robert Menendez (D-NJ), Dick Durbin (D-IL), and Patrick Leahy (D-VT) wrote to the Ukrainian government in May 2018, urging them to cooperate with investigators in the Russia investigation and the investigation of President Donald Trump,” the report concluded.
On Saturday, the president defended himself on Twitter by stating that Zelensky said he never felt any kind of pressure during their phone conversation in July.
“The Whistleblower’s complaint is completely different and at odds from my actual conversation with the new President of Ukraine,” the president wrote in another tweet on Saturday.