General Discussion

USALiberal

(10,877 posts) Sat Sep 28, 2019, 08:46 PM Sep 2019

I listened to dozens of Obama's calls. Trump knows that's perfectly normal.

It was my job to be on the line. It wasn’t a secret or a plot.

When news broke that a whistleblower in the U.S. intelligence community had filed a complaint about a phone call between President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Trump insisted he had done nothing wrong on the call, because he knew that “there may be many people listening from various U.S. agencies, not to mention those from the other country itself.”

But as reports came out alleging that Trump had used the call to pressure Ukraine to investigate former vice president Joe Biden and his son Hunter, Trump started suggesting, instead, that the complaint itself was the problem. “I want to know who’s the person, who’s the person who gave the whistleblower the information? Because that’s close to a spy,” he said at a private event in New York on Thursday. “You know what we used to do in the old days when we were smart? Right? The spies and treason, we used to handle it a little differently than we do now.”

Trump had it right the first time. I would know, because I used to be one of those “many people listening.” As a former intelligence officer who was detailed to the White House Situation Room, I listened to more of President Barack Obama’s calls with world leaders than I can remember. I would often joke with friends about trying to make small talk with German Chancellor Angela Merkel while she waited for Obama to come to the line. More somberly, I remember speaking with Zelensky’s predecessor, Petro Poroshenko, moments after he learned of the downing of the Malaysia Airlines passenger plane in Ukraine in the early days of his government. Sometimes, our foreign counterparts would put us on the line with their chief executives before Obama was ready; we’d greet them and explain why there was a delay. It was a nerve-racking part of the job and one that couldn’t be outsourced to hold music.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/09/25/cia-i-listened-dozens-obamas-calls-trump-knows-thats-normal/