The Washington Post September 25 at 8:32 PM
President Trump repeatedly urged the Ukrainian
president to investigate Joe Biden, one of his chief political rivals,
and offered to enlist the U.S. attorney general in that effort while
dangling the possibility of inviting the foreign leader to the White
House, according to a rough transcript of the call released Wednesday.
The
July 25 phone call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr
Zelensky raised alarms among some intelligence officials, leading in
August to a secret whistleblower complaint and a Justice Department
referral to determine whether the president’s conduct amounted to a
violation of a campaign finance law that bars foreign contributions to
U.S. politicians.
Prosecutors
reviewed the rough transcript and last week declined to investigate,
concluding that the president had not violated campaign laws, senior
Justice Department officials said Wednesday.
The document touched off a wide spectrum of
reactions on Capitol Hill, where Democrats accused Trump of violating
his oath of office by soliciting political payback from a foreign
leader, having only a day earlier announced they have launched a formal
impeachment inquiry of the president. Republicans defended the president
and lobbed counteraccusations at Biden.
Trump
continued to insist he did nothing wrong, and Zelensky, seated beside
him during an awkward joint appearance at the United Nations in New
York, described their July phone call as “normal,” saying, “I’m sorry
but I don’t want to be involved to democratic open elections of U.S.A.”
The drumbeat of revelations about the Trump-Zelensky call is likely to
continue this week. After the White House allowed some lawmakers
Wednesday to review the whistleblower’s complaint, Democrats signaled
they were increasingly convinced that the president’s behavior justified
their drive for impeachment.
“He copped to asking a foreign power to help him in his election,” Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) said. “That’s impeachable.”
In
keeping with White House practice, the memo is not a verbatim account. A
cautionary note on the document warns that the text reflects the notes
and memories of officials in the Situation Room and that a number of
factors, including accents and translations, “can affect the accuracy of
the record.”
The phone call began with Trump
congratulating Zelensky on his election victory, and Zelensky effusively
praised Trump in return, according to the White House memo.
Trump
said the United States “has been very, very good to Ukraine,” and
Zelensky replied by agreeing “1,000 percent.” The Ukrainian president
went on to suggest his country may soon buy more antitank missiles from
the United States. “We are almost ready to buy more Javelins from the
United States for defense purposes,” Zelensky said.
Trump replied: “I would like you to do us a favor
because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about
it.” He then asked for help in finding the Democratic National
Committee computer server that U.S.
officials say was hacked by Russian
intelligence in the run-up to the 2016 election. Trump also called
special counsel Robert S. Mueller III “incompetent” for his performance a
day earlier while testifying to Congress about his investigation into
Russian interference in the U.S. presidential election.
“The
server, they say Ukraine has it,” Trump says according to the memo. “I
would like to have the Attorney General call you or your people and I
would like you to get to the bottom of it.”
Trump repeatedly said Zelensky should work with
Attorney General William P. Barr or Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudolph W.
Giuliani. Giuliani had separately pressed Ukrainian officials for a
Biden inquiry.
“I would like to have the
Attorney General call you or your people and I would like you to get to
the bottom of it,” Trump said, according to the White House memo.
As the half-hour conversation went on, Trump’s requests of Zelensky shifted to a different topic: investigating the Bidens.
“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,” Trump said, according to the
memo. “Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution so if
you can look into it. … It sounds horrible to me.”
Zelensky replied, according to the White House
memo, that “my candidate” for the prosecutor job “will look into the
situation.” After he noted he stayed at Trump Tower on his last visit to
New York City, Trump invited him for a White House meeting — something
the Ukrainian leader had wanted.
“Whenever you
would like to come to the White House, feel free to call,” Trump says,
according to the White House’s rough transcript.
Since
Zelensky’s election in April, Ukraine had urgently sought a meeting for
the new president at the White House, a sit-down to demonstrate
Washington’s backing as it fights a long-simmering war with
Russian-backed separatists. U.S. officials and members of the Trump
administration wanted the meeting to go ahead, but Trump personally
rejected efforts to set it up, The Washington Post reported last week.
The White House has not yet set a date for an Oval Office meeting.
Although
the Justice Department concluded the call did not violate campaign
finance law, Democrats said the president’s conduct endangered national
security. Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.), who chairs the House
Intelligence Committee, said the call “reads like a classic mob
shakedown.”
At a news conference later in New York, Trump savaged Schiff, Democrats and the media.
“It’s
all a hoax, folks. It’s all a big hoax,” the president said. “When you
look at the information, it’s a joke. Impeachment for that? When you
have a wonderful meeting or a wonderful phone conversation.”
Trump
denied any wrongdoing and suggested the Biden family deserved to be
investigated for possible corruption, making unsubstantiated allegations
they’ve taken millions of dollars out of China. He insisted his hands
were clean.
“I didn’t do it, I didn’t threaten anyone,” the president said. “No push, no pressure, no nothing.”
Not all Republicans agreed. Sen. Mitt Romney (Utah) said the matter “remains troubling in the extreme. It’s deeply troubling.”
On
Wednesday afternoon, select lawmakers were allowed to read classified
versions of the whistleblower’s complaint. Officials are preparing to
declassify a version of it and make it public later this week, according
to people familiar with the discussions.
White
House officials said the call memo does not show the president seeking
any quid pro quo to kneecap a political rival because the president did
not tie his requests to aid from the U.S. government.
While
political fights surrounding the phone call have raged for the last 10
days, government officials at a host of agencies have been privately
dealing with the matter for more than a month.
Senior Justice Department officials said the
director of national intelligence referred concerns about the call to
the Justice Department in late August, after the intelligence community
inspector general found that it was a possible violation of campaign
finance laws. Days later, the inspector general referred the matter to
the FBI.
Career prosecutors and officials in
the Justice Department’s criminal division reviewed the rough
transcript, which they obtained voluntarily from the White House, and
determined the facts “could not make” the appropriate basis for an
investigation, a senior Justice Department official said Wednesday. The
final decision was made by Brian Benczkowski, who leads the Justice
Department’s criminal division. As part of their reasoning, Justice
Department lawyers determined that help with a government investigation
could not be quantified as “a thing of value” under the law, officials
said.
Their primary source for reaching that
conclusion was the memo, according to the officials. While prosecutors
did gather information about how the White House memorializes
presidential calls with foreign heads of state, they did not interview
other White House officials because they had not formally opened an
investigation. Justice Department officials still do not know who the
whistleblower is, officials said Wednesday.
In a
statement, Justice Department spokeswoman Kerri Kupec said the Justice
Department’s criminal division “reviewed the official record of the call
and determined, based on the facts and applicable law, that there was
no campaign finance violation and that no further action was warranted.”
“All
relevant components of the Department agreed with this legal
conclusion, and the Department has concluded the matter,” Kupec said.
Kupec
also said Trump had never spoken with Barr “about having Ukraine
investigate anything related to former vice president Biden or his son,”
nor had Barr talked about “anything related to Ukraine” with Giuliani.
She
noted, though, that U.S. Attorney John Durham, who is exploring the
origins of the FBI’s probe into possible coordination between the Trump
campaign and Russia, was “exploring the extent to which a number of
countries, including Ukraine, played a role in the counterintelligence
investigation directed at the Trump campaign during the 2016 election.”
Trump
ordered the memo released following days of mounting pressure from
Congress, and a new surge of Democrats who favor impeachment. The
president’s decision followed reports that he pressed Zelensky to
investigate Biden, considered a leading candidate for the Democratic
nomination to challenge Trump in 2020, and his son, Hunter Biden.
White
House officials said there were discussions for several days about
releasing details of the call, with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo
objecting to its release on the grounds that doing so would make it
harder for Trump to speak frankly with foreign leaders, and senior
Justice Department officials urging it be made public to quell the
growing debate over Trump’s conduct.
Trump has
acknowledged publicly that he asked Zelensky to investigate Hunter
Biden, who served on the board of a Burisma, a Ukrainian gas company
that came under scrutiny by authorities there. Hunter Biden was not
accused of any wrongdoing in the investigation. As vice president, Joe
Biden pressured Ukraine to fire its top prosecutor, who Biden and other
Western officials said was not sufficiently pursuing corruption cases.
At the time, the Ukrainians’ investigation was dormant, according to
former Ukrainian and U.S. officials.
Initially,
the parameters of the whistleblower allegations were mysterious.
Although whistleblower complaints to the intelligence community
inspector general are often forwarded to the intelligence committees in
Congress, the Justice Department determined this one should not be
provided to lawmakers for their review.
Justice Department officials released their legal reasoning
for doing so Wednesday, asserting that because the matter did not
concern the “funding, administration, or operation of an intelligence
community” matter — but instead was an allegation of possible criminal
conduct by the commander in chief — it should be more properly handled
as a criminal referral.
The Justice
Department’s Office of Legal Counsel noted the inspector general had
found “some indicia of an arguable political bias on the part of the
Complainant in favor of a rival political candidate.”
Lawmakers have raised concerns about Trump’s directive to freeze nearly $400 million in military assistance for Ukraine in the days leading up the phone call with Zelensky.
On
Tuesday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) announced she was
launching a formal impeachment inquiry, saying “the actions of the Trump
presidency have revealed the dishonorable fact of the president’s
betrayal of his oath of office, betrayal of our national security and
betrayal of the integrity of our elections.”
The
rapidly escalating confrontation between the White House and Congress
comes just months after Trump freed himself from the cloud of the
investigation led by Mueller. Now, he is back in the crosshairs of a
resurgent impeachment effort over a fresh allegation of election season
misconduct.
One senior White House official
said that while the call summary was “not entirely helpful for our
side,” it also showed there was not an explicit quid pro quo — which
could be a crime. “Everyone is going to see in that transcript what they
want to see,” this person said, adding there were robust discussions
about whether it would help or hurt Trump.
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