national security council lawyers, there to ensure the president upholds the law, not break it. we heard from pamela the reporting they were complicit trying to cover up potential abuses of power. every nsc officer walks into the white house they are briefed eo to go to. who s on the list? nsc lawyers. trying to kwcover up a crime? nsc lawyers. no wonder the whistle-blower went through other channels and we see leaks. people showsed to be there were trying to cover them up. michael, precisely sam s point. what do you make of the fact national security lawyers were involved in hiding this transcript, hiding it specifically in that classified server and doesn t that open them up to legal liability? it opens them up to a lot of things. the first thing is it s suggestive of a cover-up. the duty of the lawyers is follow the law and support the
counter nart cynthpart in the u? this lawyer that lawyer, good et it in the vault, recognizing it is a transcript that is highly sensitive, yet not code word, national security sensitive. shouldn t be in i mean, all of this is precisely what this whistle-blower has been saying. correct? right. we have a situation where donald trump is trying to tell us the sky is red. right? that this is totally normal. that for a president to get on the phone and basically ask a foreign government to investigate his political opponents is perfect. but the sky is not red. and the people around trump were freaked out about this because of course they would be freaked out ak this. private republican, freaked out, too. we have this tussle. throughout the trump administration, about whether people will accept the reality in front of their faces or believe the president of the united states. but the lawyers at the white house were complicit with this. i wroshged every day with what we called the l
forth and provide this testimony. so we re kind of at this dead end trying to figure out in which direction the state department s going to go and the white house is going to go. are they going to allow him to go forth? keep digging, kylie. thank you for that. more is coming out, today, too, from that original ukraine call between president trump and the counter part in ukraine, the one he s been very busy downplaying. that call was a great call. it was a perfect call. a perfect call. that call was perfect. it couldn t have been nicer. impeachment for that? when you have a wonderful meeting or you have a wonderful phone conversation? absolutely perfect phone call. the conversation was perfect. it couldn t have been nicer. if you look at that call, perfect call. it s congenial. there was no pressure. no pressure, at least so says president trump. but cnn has learned some members of the president s own national
security council may have felt differently. their concerns sparked a series of actions to contain not just that july 25th phone conversation, but any potential backlash. with the scoop, cnn senior white house correspondent pamela brown there in washington. you along with a couple other members of the cardi b. white house te house cnn white house talked about the scramble. how worried were they about what president trump said? reporter: very worried according to sources to speak to our team with this story. we were told in the immediate aftermath, after the call with president trump and president zelensky of ukraine, in was a scramble behind the scenes that was pretty isolated in the nfc and the white house counsel s office and we re told through sources that at least one nsc staffer actually raised the concern upwards to the nsc lawyers about the call. the concern being that the president asked the ukraine
president to look into joe biden and his son. and after that concern was raised up the ladder, the lawyers put that transcript of the call into the code word server that we have reported on extensively. now, this only backs up what has been put out there in this whistle-blower complaint about nsc concerns, the lawyers putting it into the code word server. i m told by source there s were a couple reasons the lawyers did that. one, they wanted to make sure it didn t leak out because in the past, nsc people had raised concerns of leaks to the press. also an effort to preserve because they understood it could become an investigative matter. also interesting, brooke, we learned that shortly after the call officials began quizzing each other what should we do? y lert the department of justice here since bill barr, the attorney general was brought up repeatedly during the call? that also was part of the dynamic. now, doj had said that bill barr was not alerted early on.