'Dangerous territory': Trump's unsecured calls with world leaders concern foreign policy experts
WASHINGTON – Donald Trump had been the president-elect for just two days when he reportedly spoke by phone with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Nov. 7.
On the call, Trump advised the Russian president not to escalate the war with Ukraine and reminded him of the U.S.’s military presence in Europe, according to an account first published by The Washington Post, which cited multiple sources familiar with the conversation.
The Kremlin, however, denied that meeting had ever taken place. “Pure fiction,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov insisted.
Normally, the U.S. would be able to document that the call had happened. But not this time.
That's because the State Department, which traditionally helps coordinate phone calls between incoming presidents and world leaders, has been shut out of Trump’s calls with foreign dignitaries.
That means the conversations were not held over secure phone lines, no State Department staff were available to offer guidance on the nuances on foreign policy and no official interpreters were on hand to overcome language barriers that can sometimes lead to confusion or misunderstandings about exactly what was said.
For U.S. foreign policy analysts, Trump’s calls with Putin and other world leaders after his victory over Vice President Kamala Harris in the Nov. 5 election are cause for alarm.
“We’re entering a dangerous territory of telephone games, where Trump is going to have private chats with foreign leaders, and they're going to tell their teams one thing, and Trump is going to tell our national security team another,” said Brett Bruen, a former diplomat who worked in the White House under President Barack Obama.
Different interpretations of private conversations stemming from translation difficulties or misunderstandings could not only sow confusion, Bruen said, but could trigger an international crisis.
Trump’s transition team did not respond to questions about why he has not involved the State Department in his calls with foreign leaders.
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Mistrust of the 'Deep State'
After he won another term as president, Trump waited three weeks to sign some of the legal documents needed to formally begin the transition of power from President Joe Biden’s administration. The delay in submitting the documents – which typically are filed at least a month before presidential elections – meant the government couldn't provide security clearances, briefings and resources to Trump’s incoming team.
Trump's transition team announced Tuesday that it had finally signed one of the documents so that it could access non-public government information, receive government briefings and deploy personnel inside the federal agencies and departments it will soon take over. It's not immediately clear whether Trump will tap into the State Department’s resources on his future calls with foreign leaders.
Historically, the State Department has helped coordinate phone calls between incoming presidents and foreign leaders because it’s important to ensure during the transition that the government is always speaking with one voice, particularly on matters of national security and foreign policy, according to the nonpartisan Center for Presidential Transition.
But since his first term as president, Trump has openly expressed suspicion and resentment of what he derisively calls “the Deep State,” the government bureaucrats who he argues worked secretly behind the scenes to sabotage his agenda.
A phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in 2019 deepened Trump’s distrust of government employees. During the call, Trump threatened to withhold U.S. aid to Ukraine unless Zelenskyy investigated then-former Vice President Biden and his son, Hunter Biden. A summary of the conversation, made public by Trump's Justice Department and prepared by a government aide who had been permitted to listen to the call, helped lead to Trump’s first impeachment.
Trump has pledged to fire bureaucrats who would impede his agenda during his second term.
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'Sensitive discussions' with foreign leaders
All presidents field phone calls from world leaders after winning office – and not all of those calls have been handled in coordination with the State Department. Some of Biden’s phone conversations with foreign dignitaries after the 2020 election were done without State Department officials because Trump refused to concede he had lost, said Daniel Fried, a former diplomat who played a key role in carrying out U.S. policy in Europe after the fall of the Soviet Union.
Trump started receiving phone calls from foreign leaders within hours of his victory over Harris. The callers included Zelenskyy, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, French President Emmanuel Macron and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, all of whom publicly acknowledged reaching out to the president-elect. Two days after the election, Trump said he had already spoken to over 70 world leaders.
In most cases, calls between the president-elect and a foreign head of state usually involve just congratulatory remarks and pledges of cooperation with the incoming administration. But some of Trump’s calls with world leaders appear to go beyond the routine and delve into policy discussions.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wrote in a pair of messages on the social media platform X on Nov. 10 that he had spoken three times with Trump since the election. “We see eye-to-eye on the Iranian threat in all its aspects, and on the dangers they reflect,” Netanyahu said. “We also see the great opportunities facing Israel, in the area of peace and its expansion, and in other areas.”
Trump’s remarks to Putin that he should not escalate the war with Ukraine raised eyebrows because federal law makes it a crime for an unauthorized American citizen to negotiate a dispute between the United States and a foreign government.
“There can only be one foreign policy at a time,” Bruen said. “What Trump is doing is saying you need to do X or Y, even though he hasn’t been sworn in, even though he doesn’t control U.S. foreign policy right now.”
Russia’s denial that the call ever took place also shows why it’s problematic for Trump to hold private conversations with foreign leaders without the involvement of the State Department, its official interpreters or other support staff, said Fried, who worked under Democratic and Republican administrations and is now a fellow at the Atlantic Council.
“Somebody’s not telling the truth,” he said. “If the Trump people had used the State Department, the Kremlin wouldn’t be able to get away with denying that the call took place, or at least there’d be no doubt.”
Fried said private calls with foreign dignitaries are not always held over secure phone lines because some leaders may not have such lines at their disposal. Still, phone conversations over unsecured lines are risky.
“Most of our adversaries are able to tap into these calls, which in and of itself is concerning because it means that the Russians are spying on the calls he’s having with Europe and the Middle East, and the Chinese are accessing the same ones,” Bruen said. “These are sensitive discussions. They allow countries’ leaders to understand where there may be potential compromises or vulnerabilities.”
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When Zelenskyy called Trump at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida to congratulate him on his victory, Trump handed the phone over to Elon Musk, the billionaire business titan who has become one his advisers and a ubiquitous presence at his side. Musk, a government contractor, has provided communications services to Ukraine through his Starlink satellite network during its war with Russia.
Musk also met on Nov. 11 with Iran's ambassador to the United States in an effort to help diffuse tensions between the two countries, according to multiple reports. Iran later denied that the meeting had taken place.
Allowing Musk to participate in a private call with Zelenskyy is alarming, Bruen said, because “Musk does not have a government role. He doesn’t have a security clearance. He does have a whole of lot of interest in the outcome of what is happening in Ukraine” because of his business interests there.
Worries about Trump’s phone calls with foreign leaders are compounded by questions of how he has handled classified documents in the past, Bruen said.
Trump suggested his Democratic opponent in the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton, should be jailed and disqualified from holding office amid questions about how she handled classified information. Seven years later, after he left office, a federal grand jury in Florida indicted Trump on 40 counts of mishandling classified documents, some of which were stored in a bathroom in Mar-a-Lago. The special prosecutor, Jack Smith, effectively killed the case on Monday when he dropped his appeal of a judge’s ruling that had dismissed the chargesT.
Given Trump’s past, his unsupervised phone calls with foreign leaders should set off alarms, Bruen said.
“It’s a hot mess,” he said.
Contributing: Joey Garrison
Michael Collins covers the White House. Follow him on X @mcollinsNEWS.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Trump's phone calls with foreign leaders raise alarms