Former US Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power knocked White House officials for thinking that the released rough transcript of a July 25 phone call between President Donald Trump and Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky would work to their benefit.
The call summary released Wednesday showed that Trump asked the Ukrainian leader to investigate Joe Biden.
"The fact that people put that transcript out and thought it would be somehow helpful for the President, I think, just speaks to how accustomed the people around President Trump have become to this pattern of behavior," Power, a former Obama administration official, told CNN's Ana Cabrera on Saturday.
The White House acknowledged that it moved the Ukraine call transcript, at the direction of National Security Council attorneys, to a highly classified system, despite it not containing information like intelligence secrets or military plans.
Power slammed the White House's decision to move the transcript:
"Putting a transcript like this, which could reasonably be classified, because it's an exchange between the President and a foreign leader, but putting it in a special compartmented code-word system, which is something that the lawyers appear to have insisted upon, speaks to the fact that outside this little circle of people who are accustomed to this level of corruption and self-aggrandizement and even bullying and extortion, somebody who’s a little further away looks at it and says ‘Oh, whoops. This is not kosher. This is not allowed.’"