Trump administration probably wanted to cover up NSA secret service discovery

Signs of cover-up

Foreign intelligence contacts discovered by Trump administration

A person close to Trump apparently had contact with a foreign secret service. As a result, the information should probably not be made public.

The NSA apparently has evidence of a suspicious phone call from a person close to US President Donald Trump to a foreign secret service. However, the Trump administration tried to cover up this contact, reports the British newspaper “Guardian”.

Accordingly, the Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, appointed by Trump, was initially informed. However, this did not allow the officials to forward the information to the appropriate authorities. Instead, she apparently informed Trump’s chief of staff Susie Wiles, who is said to have banned the report from being published.

As a result, a whistleblower contacted the Office of the Inspector General of the Intelligence Community in April and informed them that Gabbard was hindering the routine disclosure of information. A month later he filed a complaint. This is how Andrew Bakaj, the whistleblower’s lawyer, describes it, who contacted the Guardian.

However, then-Inspector General Tamara A. Johnson dismissed the complaint, writing that “the Inspector General was unable to determine whether the allegations appeared credible.”

As a result, the whistleblower continued to press for details to be disclosed to the congressional intelligence committees, but these were not made public until eight months later. Attorney Bakaj says Gabbard’s office outlined various reasons for the delayed communication, including the top secret classification of the complaints, the government shutdown in the fall and the inspector general’s failure to inform Gabbard of her reporting requirements.

Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, now complained: “The law is clear: If a whistleblower files a complaint and wants to present it to Congress, the agency has 21 days to forward it.” However, the complaint was submitted in May and was only received in February. Warner stressed that the months-long delay reflected an attempt to “cover up” the complaint.

Gabbard’s office disputed the contents of the complaint. A spokesman told the Guardian: “This story is false. Gabbard’s every action was fully within her legal and statutory authority, and these politically motivated attempts to manipulate top-secret information undermine the essential national security work that great Americans in the intelligence community do every day.”

The whistleblower’s entire complaint is still not visible to the intelligence committees; they only received a heavily redacted version. The responsible politicians have now contacted the NSA to obtain further information.