This is another case where Trump’s ignorance is going bite him in the butt. Any system that holds vital state secrets is not only going to be encrypted and hard to crack, it will be backed up. Trump may order his minions to delete the transcripts, but you can bet there will be permanent copies on a CIA/NSA server somewhere.

By trying to hide the transcripts, Trump has ensured they’ll live forever. First the House will try to get them, and Trump will shrug and say they don’t exist. Then they’ll subpoena whichever agency maintains the White House server for the backups, and add attempted destruction of evidence and obstruction to the charges.

Sweet.

White House efforts to limit access to President Donald Trump’s conversations with foreign leaders extended to phone calls with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Russian leader Vladimir Putin, according to people familiar with the matter.

Those calls — both with leaders who maintain controversial relationships with Trump — were among the presidential conversations that aides took remarkable steps to keep from becoming public.
In the case of Trump’s call with Prince Mohammed, officials who ordinarily would have been given access to a rough transcript of the conversation never saw one, according to one of the sources. Instead, a transcript was never circulated at all, which the source said was highly unusual, particularly after a high-profile conversation.
The call – which the person said contained no especially sensitive national security secrets — came as the White House was confronting the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, which US intelligence assessments said came at the hand of the Saudi government.
With Putin, access to the transcript of at least one of Trump’s conversations was also tightly restricted, according to a former Trump administration official.
It’s not clear if aides took the additional step of placing the Saudi Arabia and Russia phone calls in the same highly secured electronic system that held a now-infamous phone call with Ukraine’s president and which helped spark a whistleblower complaint made public this week, though officials confirmed calls aside from the Ukraine conversation were placed there.
But the attempts to conceal information about Trump’s discussions with Prince Mohammed and Putin further illustrate the extraordinary efforts taken by Trump’s aides to strictly limit the number of people with access to his conversations with foreign leaders.
The White House did not comment about the limiting of access to calls with the Russian and Saudi leaders.