From dealing with a North Korean missile test in the Mar-a-Lago dining room to blurting out classified intelligence to Russians in the Oval Office to loudly discussing a plot to extort Ukraine on a cell phone call with Gordon Sondland, Donald Trump has never been particularly careful in his handling of sensitive information. It’s unsurprising, then, that the president has apparently made a routine of speaking with Rudy Giuliani and others on unsecured cell phone lines, to the all-but-certain glee of Russian intelligence.
Phone logs released this week by House Democrats showed multiple calls from Giuliani to White House phone numbers at critical moments of the pressure campaign on Volodymyr Zelensky, underscoring the degree to which Trump and Giuliani seem to have coordinated their efforts. But, the Washington Post reported Thursday, those unsecured calls were only the tip of the iceberg; according to current and former officials, the president speaks with Giuliani and others “all the time” on cell phones vulnerable to monitoring by Russia and other foreign actors. “It’s absolutely a security issue,” a former aide to Trump told the Post. “It’s a bonanza for them.”
That Trump and his personal lawyer would regularly skirt security protocol in their private chats is, of course, incredibly hypocritical—you may recall that the president made a little bit of a stink about how Hillary Clinton handled sensitive information during the 2016 election. More than that, however, their carelessness constitutes a significant threat to national security. U.S. officials suggested to the Post that it was a virtual certainty that Russia had listened in on Trump’s phone calls with Giuliani, telling the paper that the Kremlin may have been able to “learn about aspects of Trump’s attempt to get Ukraine to investigate a political rival months before that effort was exposed,” and could have used those insights to “adapt or amplify its propaganda” about Ukraine. In fact, one former official told the paper, Russia likely knows more about Trump’s conversations with Giuliani than the investigators looking into their efforts as part of the House impeachment inquiry. “Congress and investigators have call records that suggest certain things but have no means whatsoever of getting the actual text” of what was said, according to John Sipher, former deputy chief of Russia operations at the CIA. “I guarantee the Russians have the actual information.”
Aides, of course, have long attempted to steer Trump toward the secure communications channels typically used by White House officials. But those efforts have largely proved futile, with Trump reportedly becoming “paranoid that everyone knew who he was talking to” and going back to using his cell phone. A former White House official told the Post that aides gave Trump a “tutorial on how foreign governments could listen to his calls,” after which his habits improved somewhat, though he still resists using secure landlines. Perhaps the “killer graphics” were insufficient.
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