Donald Trump asks President Volodymr Zelensky to investigate Ukraine’s involvement in the Mueller investigation and Joe Biden’s business dealings in the country. The request comes after Zelensky asks about continuing the Ukraine-USA military relationship.
A week before, Trump put a hold on $400 million of military aid approved by Congress for Ukraine.
Zelensky: I would also like to thank you for your great support in the area of defense. We are ready to continue to cooperate for the next steps. Specifically, we are almost ready to buy more Javelins from the United States for defense purposes.
Trump: I would like you to do us a favor, though, because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it. 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 with 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… The other thing, 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.
After Zelensky agrees to try to find evidence of the events that Trump is asking about, Trump says “Your economy is going to get better and better I predict.” Trump tells Zelensky to expect a call from William Barr and Rudy Giuliani.
This portion of the phone call mentioning Mueller and CrowdStrike is in regards to the Trump conspiracy that Democrats colluded with Ukraine to fabricate the Russia scandal of 2016.
During the call, Trump also says that Ukraine’s U.S. ambassador, Marie Yovanovich, is “going to go through some things.”
White House lawyers instruct Trump’s team to move the transcript of the phone call to the most secure server available in an attempt to keep the conversation private.
The whistleblower said they heard from other White House officials that this was “not the first time” that the Trump administration used this storage system to hold politically sensitive documents. The codeword-level system is meant to hold files of national security importance.
CNN
Sources
https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/25/politics/donald-trump-ukraine-transcript-call/index.html
https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/26/politics/whistleblower-complaint-released/index.html
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/09/26/us/politics/trump-ukraine-impeachment-timeline.html?searchResultPosition=64
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/trump-ordered-hold-on-military-aid-days-before-calling-ukrainian-president-officials-say/2019/09/23/df93a6ca-de38-11e9-8dc8-498eabc129a0_story.html
Photo: Public Domain