Aides to President Trump scrambled in the aftermath of his July 25 phone call with Ukraine’s leader — both to alert lawyers of their concerns and to contain the damage, new CNN reporting shows.

At least one National Security Council official alerted the White House's national security lawyers about the concerns, three sources familiar with the matter said. Those same lawyers would later order the transcript of the call moved to a highly classified server typically reserved for code-word classified material.

Those concerns were raised independently of the complaint brought forward by an intelligence community whistleblower. They reflect new evidence of the unease mounting within the administration at the President’s actions.

Unsettled aides also immediately began quizzing each other about whether they should alert senior officials who were not on the call — mainly those at the Justice Department, since Trump had invoked the agency’s boss, Attorney General Bill Barr, multiple times during the 30-minute talk.

White House lawyers, aware of the tumult, initially believed it could be contained within the walls of the White House. As more people became aware of the conversation — and began raising their internal concerns about it — a rough transcript of the call was stored away in a highly classified server that few could access. The order to move the transcript came from the White House's national security lawyers to prevent more people from seeing it, according to people familiar with the situation.

The scramble and fallout from the call, described by six people familiar with it, parallels and expands upon details described in the whistleblower complaint. The anxiety and internal concern reflect a phone conversation that deeply troubled national security professionals, even as Trump now insists there was nothing wrong with how he conducted himself. And it shows an ultimately unsuccessful effort to contain the tumult by the administration’s lawyers.