MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 15th November, 2019) Foreign intelligence agencies, particularly those of Russia, could have intercepted a cell phone call between US President Donald Trump and Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland about Ukraine, the CNN broadcaster said, citing former officials.
At the first public impeachment hearing on Wednesday, acting US Ambassador to Ukraine William Taylor alleged that his aide, who accompanied Sondland during a trip to Kiev, had overheard a cell phone call the diplomat was having with Trump on July 26. Trump reportedly pressed Sondland on whether Ukraine would open an investigation against former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter, as requested by the US leader a day earlier in a phone conversation with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy � it was the latter call that triggered the impeachment inquiry.
According to the broadcaster, the case has once again proven that top US officials overlook security rules related to handling of sensitive information. Current and former government officials confirmed to CNN that ambassadors' cell phones typically have no encryption protection.
The Trump-Sondland call therefore presents an "egregious violation of traditional counterintelligence practices," CNN noted, citing Marc Polymeropoulos, a retired CIA officer who used to oversee operations in Europe and Russia.
"There is little doubt that the Russians and perhaps multiple other foreign intelligence services would have intercepted this call. Moscow undoubtedly would have been pleased," Polymeropoulos said.
Moscow, he went on, could thereby have gotten "some important validation" that Trump had been "inserting a serious wedge into ongoing US security assistance programs that Ukraine so desperately needed in their ongoing battle with Russia."
Other officials cited by CNN echoed Polymeropoulos' concerns, with the broadcaster noting that Fiona Hill, a former Russia aide for Trump, similarly warned in October that Sondland's phone calls "could have been exfiltrated by the Russians very easily."
The freeze of hundreds of millions of Dollars in US military aid to Ukraine this summer has been at the heart of the impeachment inquiry against Trump. The Democrats believe that the president held back aid to Ukraine in order to pressure its leadership into opening an investigation into Biden, a Democratic front-runner in the primaries, whose son was once a board member at Ukrainian gas company Burisma.
Trump has categorically denied applying any pressure to the Ukrainian leadership when requesting it to probe possible instances of corruption, which he says is his duty as president.
