Immediately after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky asked President Donald Trump in a July 25 phone call for more Javelin anti-tank missiles to defend his country against Russia, Trump asked him “to do us a favor” by looking into his political opponents, according to a memorandum of the call declassified and released by The White House on Wednesday.
- The memo, which notes it is “not a verbatim transcript,” memorialized the roughly 30-minute call between the two world leaders. This call and other events prompted a whistleblower complaint of “urgent concern” to be filed with the intelligence community inspector general in August.
- The White House released the MEMCON one day after Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced she was opening a formal impeachment inquiry.
- The call begins with Trump congratulating Zelensky on his election victory, to which he responds by complimenting Trump. They eventually get down to business and discuss how the U.S. can further support Ukraine.
- “I would also like to thank you for your great support in the area of defense,” Zelensky said, according to the memo. “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.”
- “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,” Trump says in response.
- “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,” Trump adds, seeming to suggest that Ukraine possesses Hillary Clinton’s private email server (Crowdstrike, a cybersecurity company, was hired to investigate the Russian hack of the Democratic National Committee in 2016).
- Trump added: “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.”
- Later in the call, Trump also mentioned a Ukrainian prosecutor who “was shut down and that’s really unfair.”
- “A lot of people are talking about that, the way they shut your very good prosecutor down and you had some very bad people involved. 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.”
Will the Democrats apologize after seeing what was said on the call with the Ukrainian President? They should, a perfect call – got them by surprise!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 25, 2019
You can read the entire memo below: