Trump White House changed top-secret system to heighten secrecy

Trump White House changed security on the National Security Council's top-secret codeword system in early 2018, two former administration officials tell Politico, in an apparent effort to increase secrecy around Trump calls with foreign leaders.

Politico today reports that the system upgrades put into effect in Spring of last year "included a new log of who accessed specific documents in the NSC's system... and was designed in part to prevent leaks of records of the president's phone calls with foreign leaders and to find out the suspected leaker if transcripts did get disclosed."

We now know that more than one of those calls between Trump and a foreign leader (first Ukraine, now Australia) has become the subject of a whistleblower probe that now threatens to topple the presidency through an impeachment inquiry.

Excerpt:

While only a certain number of NSC staffers have the codeword system installed on their workstations, only a subset of those staffers, in turn, has access to specific documents on that system. The former official with knowledge of the system added that he had never seen transcripts put on that codeword system during his time in the Obama administration.

The changes came months after entire transcripts of President Trumps calls with the leaders of Australia and Mexico were leaked to the Washington Post, setting off a furious internal search for the source of the unauthorized disclosures and widening the mistrust between the president and his own staff.

Before the upgrade, the White House began restricting the distribution of the transcripts of the presidents calls with foreign leaders to a narrower group of officials.