Department that essentially says the president is above the director, therefore the president is not subject to the jurisdiction of the director, therefore it doesnt meet the definition of urgent concern, therefore the Inspector General is done. The Inspector General cant investigate anymore. Thats the Inspector Generals reading of the Department Opinion, that he is no longer allowed to investigate this. Is that your reading as well . Chairman, not necessarily the president , but the allegation has to relate to the funding, administration, operation of an Intelligence Activity within the responsibility and the authority of the director of National Intelligence. Okay. Im just trying to get to whether the president is somehow beyond the reach of the law. No, sir. No person in this country is beyond the reach of the law. Well, thats the way it should be but im trying to figure out whether thats the way it is as a practical fact. The Inspector General believes that based on the opinion tha
calls a hotline. and he is providing an important tip and expecting that the police who are receiving the tip are going to do the right thing. and instead you see that the acting director of national intelligence, he receives this information, and the first person that he goes to are the white house lawyers who are trying to cover up for the president these transcripts. and so you just see what we re up against here. what was so concerning was the fact that there are other transcripts in this system which suggest to me, when you look at putin and the president s exchanges or mbs from saudi arabia or erdogan of turkey or kim jong-un, just imagine what is under lock and key right now and disguised from other white house employees because of shady dealings of this president. congressman, i was wondering those same kind of things. is your committee prepared to expand the inquiry to try to find out what else has been placed under it s a remarkable thing to read, having
records into a system that was not designed for that purpose in an effort to cover up, essentially, potential misconduct, that ought to be looked into, you would agree with that, wouldn t you? to the best of my knowledge, when this allegation came forward, this whistle-blower complaint on the 12th of august, i have no idea what the timeline was as far as whether or not the white house, the national security council, or anybody involved in that conversation, what they did with the transcripts, where they put them. i just have absolutely no knowledge nor the timeline of that, chairman. it is not something that would be under my authority or responsibility. the whistle-blower makes a series of allegations involving mr. giuliani, cites a report in the new york times about his planned trip to ukraine to press the ukrainian government to pursue investigations that would help the president in his 2020 reelection bid. you would agree if the president
information of an especially sensitive nature. one white house official described this act as an abuse of the electronic system. i do not know whether similar measures were taken to restrict other records of the call such as contemporaneous handwritten notes taken by those who listened in. we should find out, shouldn t we? umm, chairman schiff, when i received the letter from michael atkinson on the 26th of august he concurrently sent a letter to the office of white house counsel, asking the white house counsel to control and keep any information that pertained to that phone call on the 25th. it was a lengthy letter. michael would be able to address it better. i know the icig has sent a letter to the white house counsel requesting that they keep all of that information. but you would agree that if there is a credible allegation from this credible whistle-blower, that white house officials were moving these
officials that senior white house officials had intervened to lock down all records of the phone call especially the word for word official transcript of the call that is produced as is customer by the sit room. one white house official described this act as an abuse of the electronic system because the call didn t contain anything remotely sensitive from the national security perspective. this reminded me of the nutjob meeting that the president had with the russians in the oval office, that is an example of where trump, right after firing comey, basically said that doing so had relieved great pressure on him, and that leaked out, and that was very damaging to the president. what we see in this complaint is that there are apparently other conversations like that that the president has had that are so potentially embarrassing or problematic that they have been sort of stored away elsewhere.