The whistleblower complaint released Wednesday, which charges Trump with “using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S. election” provides both reasons for caution in taking all of its claims as gospel, but also reasons to take the claims seriously enough to warrant follow up.
The whistleblower states that he or she was “not a direct witness to most of the events described” and that the accounts involve information received from “more than a half dozen U.S. officials.” At the same time, the whistleblower describes the July 25 phone call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in a way that is largely, though not completely, consistent with the transcript of the call that was provided by the White House.
Over at the Federalist, Sean Davis dismisses the complaint as mere “gossip” and points to several details in the account of the call — a Trump request for servers and praise for Ukraine’s prosecutor general — that are undermined by the transcript.
As an example of how the complaint and the transcript diverge, the whistleblower wrote that Trump “pressured” Zelensky to “assist in purportedly uncovering that allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election originated in Ukraine, with a specific request that the Ukrainian leader locate and turn over servers used by the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and examined by the U.S. cyber security firm Crowdstrike, which initially reported that Russian hackers had penetrated the DNC’s networks in 2016.”
Here is the relevant section of the call: “I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say Crowdstrike. I guess you have one of your wealthy people … The server, they say Ukraine has it. There are a lot of things that went on, the whole situation. I think you’re surrounding yourself by some of the same people. 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. As you saw yesterday, that whole nonsense ended with a very poor performance by a man named Robert Mueller, an incompetent performance, but they say a lot of it started with Ukraine. Whatever you can do, it’s very important that you do it if that’s possible.”
So, the request was not as “specific” as the whistleblower complaint made it seem and did not involve more than one server. But the whistleblower clearly knew enough about the call to suggest his or her sources were close enough to have either been on the call or have had access to the transcript. It is true that Trump was asking about the server which he thought Ukraine might have and that he asked repeatedly for Zelensky to do whatever he could do to look into it.
Also, on substantial details, the whistleblower complaint was accurate. As the complaint reports and the transcript affirms, Trump asked Zelensky to investigate Joe Biden and Hunter Biden, to assist with the search into the origins of the Russia investigation, and mentioned Rudy Giuliani and Attorney General William Barr together as the point persons on these matters.
It would be reckless to accept everything printed in the complaint as 100% accurate. But if we treat it as a sort of tipsheet, there’s enough in it that checks out with what we now know of the call, that at a minimum, its other claims deserve further investigation.
Most importantly, Congress needs to look into whether the whistleblower’s account of the attempt by White House officials to initially restrict access to records of the call is an accurate summation of events and to speak with Giuliani, under oath, about his conversations with Ukrainian officials.
The extensive involvement of Trump’s personal lawyer in the effort to get Ukraine to investigate the Bidens, which goes outside the typical diplomatic process, significantly undermines the argument by Trump and his defenders that the president was merely concerned with making sure that Ukraine cracked down on corruption.
Democrats would be unwise to rush to impeach because the complaint opens up several areas of further inquiry that deserve adequate time to work through.
