The White House is telling Republicans in Congress to emphasize that President Trump did not offer Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky a deal during a July phone call, noting that Trump never mentioned the pot of money Ukraine was hoping to receive from the United States.
The talking points, obtained by the Washington Examiner, were emailed to Republican offices on Capitol Hill on Wednesday along with a link to a rough transcript of Trump’s telephone call with Zelensky. The transcript reveals that Trump emphasized to Zelensky that the U.S. does, in general, provide critical aid to Ukraine and also asked him to have his government investigate a Democratic political rival, former Vice President Joe Biden.
But White House messaging underscores that the coupling of the two topics during the call does not amount to a quid pro quo tying military aid to Ukraine to Kyiv’s commitment to investigate Biden, who polls better against Trump in hypothetical 2020 matchups than the rest of the Democratic field. It notes that the pending aid package to Ukraine was not specifically mentioned.
In media interviews, most Republicans are agreeing and using items from the two-plus page messaging document to defend Trump.
“Press reports have given currency to flat-out falsehoods about the call,” the talking points say at the top. “What the president talked about was entirely appropriate.”
Knowledge of the call made its way into the public sphere after an unusual complaint by a whistleblower inside the intelligence community. The White House talking points say it has handled the complaint according to federal law and that the “real scandal” is that an unknown bureaucrat with second-hand knowledge of the Trump-Zelensky call “triggered a media feeding frenzy.”
