NEW/Exclusive: The White House upgraded NSC’s top-secret codeword system last year to include a log of who accessed specific documents in that system. That's likely to interest Dems, who want to know who was involved in putting Trump's call records there. politico.com/news/2019/10/0…
It also means that the White House can know who accessed each record within the codeword system and when. “It’s a way to further tighten controls on the information,” said a former WH official with direct knowledge of the highly classified system. politico.com/news/2019/10/0…
Officials in the NSC’s intel directorate had to take the matter up to the principals level because “it was a pretty fundamental change to the system" to include a log of each specific staffer who accessed particular documents. John Kelly and McMaster signed off on the change.
Only a small number of NSC staffers have access to the codeword system, which holds top secret compartmentalized information, and an even smaller subset have the ability to upload or download documents from it. More here with the great @dlippman: politico.com/news/2019/10/0…
