Foreign Intel Tapped Phones of US Officials Involved in Ukraine Talks With Trump - Report

By Staff, Agencies

On Tuesday, the US House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence released a report stating that US President Donald Trump and his administration had carried out an "unprecedented campaign of obstruction" to prevent the release of evidence and testimonies related to an impeachment inquiry.

The Washington Post quoted unnamed US officials as saying that during Trump’s routine communication with his personal lawyer Rudolph Giuliani and other individuals involved in the campaign to “pressure” Ukraine, their mobile phone might have not been encrypted and protected from foreign surveillance, including that of Russia.

The officials added that all this raises “the possibility that Moscow was able to learn about aspects of Trump’s attempt to get Ukraine to investigate a political rival months before that effort was exposed by a whistleblower report and the impeachment inquiry”.

In phone logs released by the House Intelligence Committee earlier in the week, Trump is not identified by name but investigators suspect that he may be a person with a blocked number listed as “-1” in these records.

In this regard, one of the officials asserted that Trump regularly communicated with Giuliani on unsecured lines, saying that “it happened all the time”.

The officials also argued that “insight into Giuliani’s discussions with Trump could enable Moscow to adapt or amplify its propaganda promoting the baseless claim that Ukraine, rather than Russia, hacked the Democratic National Committee in the 2016 US election”.

The issue was a subject of a previous protracted investigation led by former US Special Counsel Robert Mueller, which finally shattered allegations that Trump and his election team had conspired with Russia in order to win the presidential election in 2016.