WH releases transcript
 

WASHINGTON: US President Donald Trump repeatedly prodded Ukraine’s president to look into Democratic rival Joe Biden, according to a rough transcript summarising a call between the two leaders.In the July 25 call, Trump raised unsubstantiated allegations that the former vice president sought to interfere with a Ukrainian prosecutor’s investigation of his son Hunter.“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,” Trump said to Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy. The conversation between the two leaders is one piece of a whistleblower’s complaint, which followed the July 25 call.The complaint is central to the formal impeachment inquiry launched on Tuesday by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. The release of the rough transcript set the parameters of the political debate to come, with Trump dismissing it as routine and Democrats saying it laid the ground for an impeachment inquiry.Trump aides believed that his oblique, message-by-suggestion style of speaking would not lend itself to the discovery of a “smoking gun” in the transcript.Trump has recently confirmed that he ordered the freezing of nearly 400 million dollars in aid to Ukraine a few days before the call. The president has insisted he did nothing wrong and has denied that any request for help in procuring damaging information about Biden was tied to the aid freeze.The president took the 30-minute call from the White House residence, while officials in the Situation Room listened in and worked to keep a record of the conversation, as is standard practice.The resulting memorandum was classified as “Secret’ and “ORCON, for “originator controlled”, to prevent its spread throughout the federal government or to American allies.It was declassified for release on Wednesday. The release came against the backdrop of the president presiding over a meeting of world leaders at the United Nations. “Just so you understand, it’s the single greatest witch hunt in American history, probably in history,” Trump said during a meeting with foreign leaders in New York.The inspector general for the intelligence community wrote to the Director of National Intelligence in August that he believed the conversation between Trump and Ukraine’s leader could have been a federal campaign finance violation because the president could have been soliciting a campaign contribution from a foreign government, a Justice Department official said.The whistleblower — a member of the intelligence community — said in their complaint that they had heard the information from “White House officials”, but did not have firsthand knowledge of the call, the Justice Department official said.Prosecutors from the department reviewed a transcript of the call and determined the president did not violate campaign finance law. The determination was made based on the elements of the allegation, and there was no consideration of the department’s policy that a sitting president cannot be indicted, the official said.http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/com/cwEr/~4/Fb3FDD4YWUU

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