Teresa Hanafin writes Fast Forward for the Boston Globe:
Today’s witnesses giving depositions to the three House committees conducting the impeachment inquiry are two State Department diplomats who are experts on Ukraine: Catherine Croft and Christopher Anderson. They both worked as deputies to Kurt Volker, the former special envoy to Ukraine.
Both were considered stars in the department, deeply familiar with Ukraine and “steeped in the policy issues,” as one department official put it. Both have served under Republican and Democratic administrations.
In her opening statement, Croft says that when she was the Ukraine director on the National Security Council, she got several calls from a lobbyist, Robert Livingston,pushing for the firing of Marie Yovanovitch, the US ambassador to Ukraine at the time. Croft says she wasn’t sure on whose behalf Livingston was advocating: A Ukraine politician he used to represent, or Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer with whom Livingston also had contacts. (Remember, Giuliani was trying to get rid of Yovanovitch because she wouldn’t go along with his off-the-books, rogue operation to dirty up the Bidens.)
Croft also says that she was on the July 18 video conference call in which a budget official announced that acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney had put an “informal hold” on critical Ukraine military assistance at Trump’s direction — a statement that astonished William Taylor, another Ukraine envoy who also was on that call.
Anderson will tell lawmakers of another astonishing episode: That Trump blocked a State Department statement last November condemning Russian aggression against Ukraine after Russia had seized three Ukrainian navy ships in the Sea of Azov and detained 24 Ukrainian sailors. We don’t want to upset Putie!
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Tragic in all of this is that the president’s base couldn’t find Ukraine on a map if they had to. And, they couldn’t care less about it. If the president did whatever he did, it must be ok. If Obama did the same thing….
It’s out of sight and out of mind. They believe the president that this is a lot political hocus pocus. If lying, cheating, and being a tough guy with some never-heard-of foreign country is what the president thinks is worthwhile, then it’s worthwhile. If violating the Constitution and being above the law is good for there good old boy, then so be it.
If their local mayor cheated them out of money or used tax dollars to repair his / her roof or hired his / her kid to work for them, they’d be screaming. President cheats, rakes up the debt to a trillion and his family is making millions and that’s ok.
A local charter school director resigned recently after being caught tampering with attendance records to collect more state dollars. It’s front page news and because it’s in an urban area, the out state boys and president’s base go crazy. But the president does the same thing on the world stage with war and millions of dollars at stake and they’re ok with that.
Ok – so the base is one more reason for raising the quality of public education – – but how do you explain GOP senators and representative thinking this is ok?
We scream and protest. The editorials about the silence of the GOP are run daily. Noise. The only people who have a chance at doing something about this are legislators and they’re scared of a tweet.
Complicit. No conscience. And hiding from their constituents and reporters.
This action proves that Trump was hiding a conversation that he knew was ‘legally and politically problematic’. He is guilty. How many other conversations are hidden in this server…Putin, Kim Jong Un, Mohammed bin Salem, Erdogan and any number of Trump’s wealthy criminal buddies?
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VICE
Sep 26 2019
What’s in Trump’s Super Classified Server and Why Is He Hiding Things There
Putting a politically-damaging phone call with Ukraine on the “codeword-classified” system is highly inappropriate and would give Trump “maximum control over who sees it.”
A detail in the whistleblower report released Thursday morning by the House Intelligence Committee suggests a White House coverup intended to hide details of Donald Trump’s call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, in which Trump asked Zelensky to investigate Democratic presidential frontrunner Joe Biden.
The report notes that officials within the White House moved all official records of the call from a standard electronic document storage system to one intended to store only the most classified U.S. national security secrets.
“The transcript [of the call] was loaded into a separate electronic system that is otherwise used to store and handle classified information of an especially sensitive nature,” the complaint notes. Steven Aftergood, director of the Project Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, told Motherboard that putting these records on this system “signifies an awareness in the White House that this was not a ‘normal’ conversation.””What was the nature of that sensitivity? The clear implication is that the White House understood that the president’s remarks could be legally and politically problematic,” he said. “There was no other classified ‘factual’ material in the transcript that would justify a move to a more secure server.”
Specifically, the transcript was placed into a computer system managed directly by the National Security Council (NSC) Directorate for Intelligence Programs, which is reserved for so-called “codeword-level” intelligence. Motherboard spoke to four former members of the NSC for previous presidential administrations to learn more about what the system is, what it’s used for, and who can access it. Each of them was shocked that the Trump administration used the codeword system for a presidential phone call.
This system is used for the highest-level of classified intelligence, a level beyond “top secret” that is accessible only on a need-to-know basis to specific members of the NSC and intelligence community. And that fact has raised questions as to why the Trump administration would use such a highly-secure, secretive server to store what Trump has called an entirely appropriate conversation.
To be clear, the existence of this sensitive server in and of itself is not unusual. The sensitive server is typically used to store details on covert action and other highly sensitive information with a high degree of access limitation. But multiple experts who have used the system in previous presidential administrations said that it’s troubling for the administration to use a highly-classified server to store embarrassing information.
“You don’t have hundreds of people getting access to presidential calls. They’re tightly controlled, so, it’s not as if this would have been floating around with lots of people getting access to the first place. To take the added step of telling the White House lawyers to put this on that system is beyond bizarre to me,” Kelly Magsamen, vice president of national security and international policy at thinktank Center for American Progress, and who served in the NSC for two presidents, told Motherboard. “It suggests they know it was extremely damaging.”
Motherboard spoke to four former members of the NSC who had direct knowledge of the system in question under previous presidential administrations. Three of them—two of whom were granted anonymity to discuss the specifics of highly sensitive and potentially classified filing systems—said that they are unaware of even a single instance in which details of a presidential call with a foreign head of state was stored in the codeword-level system…