Presidential call memcons are the internal records of telephone conversations between the president and foreign leaders. John Kiriakou described their handling in October 2019, when the disposition of one such record was the central fact of an impeachment inquiry.
Who is actually on the line
Kiriakou dismissed the reported figure of twenty participants on the Trump–Zelensky call. “Usually there are four; on rare occasions there are five people on that phone call.”[1] The standing cast is the secretary of state, the national security adviser, the chief of staff, and the NSC expert for whatever the issue happens to be. For a counterpart of the rank of Vladimir Putin, the CIA director might be added.[2]
The reason is volume rather than secrecy: “these routine calls, they take place every day, all day. You can’t have twenty people wasting their time on a call with a prime minister of XYZ country.”[2]
The document
“These memos, they’re called memcons — memoranda of conversation. They’re write-ups of the call: the president said this, the prime minister said that.”[3] They are “usually very tightly held and they do not leave the NSC.”[3]
That handling rule is what made the Ukraine complaint anomalous to him. As a CIA analyst, “we never ever had access to write-ups of the president’s conversations with anybody — those were internal NSC documents, not to leave NSC.”[3] The fact that an analyst had read one told him the document had been passed to him by somebody at the White House, and that the underlying knowledge was second-hand — a status he treats as perfectly acceptable in a complaint, but as a fact worth establishing.[4][5]