Positions held in the administration:
- Senior Associate Counsel to the President and Deputy Legal Advisor to the National Security Council June 2018- March 2020
- Senior Director for Intelligence on the National Security Council March 2020-Nov 2020
- NSA General Counsel Nov 2020 – Present
Main Offenses
Tried to hide the infamous, impeachment-triggering Trump call with Ukraine
According to Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman’s Congressional testimony, Ellis was the person who came up with the idea of hiding Trump’s quid-pro-quo call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky onto a top-secret server normally used to limit access to highly classified materials.
This ultimately led to the House Intelligence Committee subpoenaing Ellis – but he refused to appear for his deposition. Ellis was then named in the House’s Articles of Impeachment against Trump, as one of nine administration officials who defied a House subpoena for testimony at Trump’s direction.
For partisan reasons, tried to quash a tell-all book after it was cleared by intelligence services.
Reporting indicates that Ellis was tasked with conducting an additional clearance review of an unflattering tell-all book, even though he was not officially trained for this purpose until the day after he completed the manuscript review. Additionally, the government acknowledged that this type of intervention in classification reviews had no precedent.
