A whistleblower complaint, declassified and released just minutes before the acting Director of National intelligence (DNI) Joseph Maguire is to testify before a congressional committee, alleged, among other things, that senior White House officials obfuscated communications between the president and the president of Ukraine by moving records of the call to a separate computer network intended to house classified information.

The whistleblower learned that “senior White House officials had intervened to ‘lockdown’ all records of the phone call, especially the official word-for-word transcript of the call that was produced -as is customary – by the White House Situation Room.”

The direction to remove the transcript from the system where transcripts are typically stored came from White House lawyers, the complaint said. “Instead the transcript was loaded into a separate electronic system that is otherwise used to store and handle classified information of an especially sensitive nature,” the whistleblower wrote, claiming that the administration understood the impropriety of what was being done. “One White House official described this act as an abuse of this electronic system because the call did not contain anything remotely sensitive from a national security perspective.”

An appendix to the complaint said it was not the first time a record was placed in that system, not because of its security sensitivity but rather because of its political sensitivity.

Maguire faces questions from the House Intelligence Committee over the complaint and his refusal to pass it on to Congress as required by law.