The day after a “perfect” phone call between Trump and Ukraine President Zelensky, Gordon Sondland was observed and overheard in a restaurant making a cell phone call to Trump to discuss “the investigations,” according to an aide to Bill Taylor, top aide to Ukraine.
According to several former officials, there is a high probability that such a security breach would have several foreign intelligence agencies, including Russia, listening in on the conversation.
“If true, the cell phone call between Ambassador Sondland and President Trump is an egregious violation of traditional counterintelligence practices that all national security officials — to include political appointee ambassadors such as Sondland — are repeatedly made aware of,” according to Marc Polymeropoulos, a former CIA officer who oversaw operations in Europe and Russia before retiring this summer.
It remains unclear if Sondland’s cell phone was encrypted but US ambassadors do not typically have that type of protection on their mobile devices, according to current and former US government officials.
Normally an ambassador would call the president from the embassy on a secure landline. To amplify the irregularity of the call, Sondland made the call in a public restaurant in a foreign country, where he could have been overheard where foreign adversaries are heavily targeting intelligence information.
The rest of this story is here at CNN.