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After blowup over calls with Mexican, Australian leaders, officials moved toward greater secrecy, now an issue in impeachment inquiry

WASHINGTON—The White House moved to clamp down on access to records of presidential phone calls after problematic leaks of sensitive discussions early in the Trump administration, according to people with knowledge of the actions, culminating in the use of a secret national security server which is now central to the impeachment probe.

Back-to-back leaks of controversial remarks by President Trump during calls with leaders of Mexico and Australia resulted from an unusually loose record-distribution policy in the first days of the Trump White House, one of these people said, leading to the secret server’s eventual use for records of calls involving leaders of Saudi Arabia, Russia and Ukraine.

White House officials also moved to significantly limit the number of individuals who could listen in on many of his calls, or who could access the records after those calls were concluded, the people said.

Both the Mexico and Australia calls early in 2017 were damaging for the new president. He warned Mexico’s then-President Enrique Peña Nieto that he might send U.S. troops to take on the “tough hombres” driving the Mexican drug trade. In his call to Australia’s then-Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, Mr. Trump lashed out at a “stupid,” “disgusting” and “horrible” Obama-era refugee deal with Australia under which the U.S. agreed to take up to 1,250 refugees housed in detention camps on the Pacific island nations of Nauru and Papua New Guinea.

Around the same time, it was revealed that in his first call as president with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Mr. Trump denounced the New START treaty that caps U.S. and Russian deployment of nuclear warheads as a bad deal for the U.S., according to a report by Reuters.

Then, in May 2017, a day after firing James Comey as Federal Bureau of Investigation director, Mr. Trump met in the White House Oval Office with Russian officials including Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and then-Ambassador to the U.S. Sergey Kislyak, and shared then-classified details of U.S. efforts to counter the Islamic State extremist group, U.S. officials said at the time. Those disclosures led to further restrictions, according to the people with knowledge of the actions.

The disclosure this week of a complaint by an unidentified whistleblower revealed concern among White House officials over alleged attempts by the administration to “lock down” access to internal information, including the president’s July 2019 discussion with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

That call has prompted allegations from lawmakers that Mr. Trump improperly asked Mr. Zelensky to investigate political rival Joe Biden, and that officials at the time hid records of it by using the national security computer server instead of systems where such records normally are maintained. An impeachment inquiry announced Tuesday by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is likely to delve into both issues.

The White House said Friday that the record of the Trump-Zelensky call was added to the highly secure server at the direction of National Security Council lawyers. Mr. Trump has denounced the impeachment inquiry as a “witch hunt.”

According to the whistleblower’s complaint, White House officials were “directed” to remove the electronic records from the computer system where such documents are normally stored “for coordination, finalization and distribution to Cabinet-level officials.”

The complaint added that the record of the president’s phone call with Ukraine was “loaded into a separate electronic system that is otherwise used to store and handle classified information of an especially sensitive nature.”

In some cases, including the president’s calls with Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, restrictions were agreed upon in advance, and the number of officials allowed to listen in on the call was greatly limited, one of the people with knowledge of the situation said.

Presidents generally make phone calls on one of several secure phone lines, including those in the White House Situation Room, the Oval Office or the presidential limousine. A number of national security officials, including NSC and Situation Room staffers, traditionally listen in to the calls.

The standard practice under former President Obama was to distribute records strictly to the relevant offices, according to people who served in the White House under both presidents.

But in the first few months of the Trump White House, the National Security Council, which had been in disarray during national security adviser Michael Flynn’s three weeks of service, utilized far more broad distribution lists, according to former White House officials.

The subsequent disclosures of details of Mr. Trump’s conversations with foreign leaders fueled conspiracy theories among some within the administration that “deep state” actors were involved in an effort to derail the Trump presidency.

Following the Mexico and Australia leaks, the National Security Council “severely cut back” on broad dissemination of records, instead sending them only to those who were directly involved in the issues discussed in the call, according to the people knowledgeable of the situation.

Mr. Flynn was asked to resign in mid-February 2017 for failing to disclose the true nature of his meetings with Russian officials to the president and Vice President Mike Pence. He didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

When H.R. McMaster took over as Mr. Trump’s second national security adviser, those distribution lists grew smaller, officials said, although certain individuals, on a need-to-know basis, still could access records from the NSC traditional computer portal, which handled everything except CIA operational information, one official explained.

It couldn’t immediately be determined whether the records of Mr. Trump’s conversations with Mexico’s president were stored in the highly secure computer system, but access to its content was virtually blocked, the officials said.

Two ranking officials who served in the Obama administration said transcripts then were limited to only the top people on the national security team and officials overseeing policy areas that came up during a phone call. The officials said they weren’t aware of an instance in which a record was put into a stand-alone computer system, such as the secure system used by the Trump White House. “That is for the highest secret assets,” said Rahm Emanuel, Mr. Obama’s former chief of staff. “I’d be shocked.”

Asked Friday about the publication of the record of the conversation between Mr. Trump and Mr. Zelensky, Mr. Lavrov said that those who pushed for it were undermining the confidentiality crucial for diplomacy.

“Diplomatic matters suppose a certain degree of diplomatic confidentiality,” he said following a United Nations speech.

Beyond the existence of official records from the president’s official calls, many senior officials have expressed concern over phone calls the president has had with foreign leaders on his cellphone.

Early in his presidency, the president handed his cellphone number out to several world leaders, including the heads of Mexico, Canada and France, and urged them to call him directly, an unusual invitation that breaks with diplomatic protocol and raised concerns about the security and secrecy of his communications, according to people with direct knowledge.

Even if the president conducted business on his government-issued cellphone, the calls are vulnerable to eavesdropping, particularly from foreign governments, officials said.

One former senior administration official said the president’s advisers tried the best they could to manage the president’s discussions with world leaders, “but once he’s up in the residence, we never know who he’s speaking to.”

At the start of his presidency, Mr. Trump’s freewheeling conversations with world leaders prompted consternation among the president’s senior aides, who took steps to keep him from making inappropriate comments or divulging sensitive information.

On more than one occasion, John Kelly, the White House’s then-chief of staff, who was often in the room during calls with world leaders, briefly muted the line so he could caution Mr. Trump against continuing to talk about sensitive subjects, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. The small group of advisers in the room for the calls would also often pass the president notes offering guidance, the person said.