wants it to be made public that s guaranteed under law, the privacy act, as well as the intelligence community whistleblower protection act. that said, firsthand knowledge really speaks to the fact that this person had direct access to the contents of the july 25th call in realtime. they didn t hear about it from somebody else. they were likely present when this call was taking place. having been on a lot of these head of state calls, that s a relatively small group, fredricka. there is white house situation room staff on that call monitoring the call and staff taking notes, as well as policy people at the white house. the nsc staff that are responsible for the country at hand, in this case ukraine. so it could be a group of those people, and we know from the whistleblower complaint itself that 12 or so white house staff, according to the complaint, were on that call. so it narrows the pool somewhat, and the question from my perspective, fredricka, is whether any of the other people
information. the move is unusual, but this was a statement given to us this morning. let me just read it. nfc lawyers directed that the highly classified document be handled appropriately. just to take a step back, the way this would work is you have a lawyer that normally handles national security issues that would reach out to the intelligence director and say, hey, i want you to move this to your system, because the intelligence director handles where the transcript went. this raises questions of what else was also placed in that system, what other head of state calls. what i was told was the practice actually changed last year after they were leaks of head of state transcripts between the president and others. so the practice changed to move the transcripts into a place where a lot of people couldn t access the transcript. all of them or just we don t know, and we re trying to get more clarity. the more transparent the white house could be, it would be helpful, obviously, to
this caught the attention of the whistleblower and it has come out, anyway, through this person. and so it is significant and it does raise the question of what other calls were put on that secure system that didn t contain classified conversation, and potentially what other white house documents are head of state calls? and part of the complaint is they were directed to do that. that s one of the very first questions, i m guessing. there are many important questions that the impeachment inquiry will try to get answered, but who directed it? and assuming it was someone pretty high up, if they directed this you would have to think they were directed by the lawyers, yeah. and the reason for that is because the director knew that it was bad.
so we re back now with our breaking news. washington post reporting that president trump s meeting with a foreign leader regarding a promise sparked a debate. good evening to both of you. so, sam, we can assume there was a transcript of this interaction given the president s every move is monitored and recorded. one would think so. i ve been on the head of state calls. typically someone in the situation room connects the call and someone monitors. after that happens, typically the situation room writes a transcript of that call, files it for the record and then a small group of officials gets to view what was said. members of the national security council, perhaps the state department and members of the intelligence community. so if this call followed standard operating procedure, we don t know if it did, there would have been other eyes on