The long-awaited transcript of the phone call between President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was finally released by the Trump Administration and although it is not a verbatim transcript, it represents the notes and recollections of the call that National Security Council staff was “assigned to listen and memorialize the conversation in written form.”
The major concern over the phone call was whether or not President Trump had said something that could potentially be a violation of federal campaign finance law, which was to serve as reason for the House Democrats’ impeachment inquiry.
“In August, the Department of Justice was referred a matter relating to a letter the director national intelligence had received from the inspector general for the intelligence community regarding a purported whistleblower complaint. The inspector general’s letter cited a conversation between the president and Ukrainian President Zelensky as a potential violation of federal campaign finance law, while acknowledging that neither the inspector general nor the complainant had firsthand knowledge of the conversation,” Justice Department spokesperson Kerri Kupec said, adding that “no further action was warranted.”
It was suspected that President Trump had pressured Zelensky into investigating Joe Biden and his son to gain the upper hand in upcoming elections. The case goes all the way back to 2016, when Trump and his attorney Rudy Giuliani accused Biden of acting inappropriately – threatening to withhold U.S. funding from Ukraine unless then-prosecutor general Viktor Shokin was removed from duty.
“There’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that. So whatever you can do with the Attorney General would be great. Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution so if you can look into it… It sounds horrible to me,” Trump told Zelensky in their phone call, while referring to Shokin very positively - “I heard you had a prosecutor who was very good and he was shut down and that’s really unfair.”
In reality, it turns out that the main reason for President Trump’s call was asking Zelensky ‘to do us a favor’ by investigating whether Ukraine is in possession of computer data linked to hacking of a Democratic National Committee server in 2016.
When Zelensky was asked whether or not he was pushed into investigations, he denied any such claims, saying that “nobody pushed me.”
The full whistleblower complaint on which Democrats have bet an impeachment is yet to be turned over to the House Intelligence Committee as the phone call marks just one part. Testimony from the whistleblower is confirmed to happen eventually.
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