The White House released the declassified and un-redacted transcript of President Donald Trump’s call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that became the center of a whistleblower complaint Wednesday.
Trump announced Tuesday while at the United Nations General Assembly that he would release the transcript in order to push back on claims he had threatened to withhold aid from Ukraine until they agreed to investigate his political opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden.
The transcript reveals that the president asked Zelensky to investigate Crowdstrike, the private security group the Democratic National Committee (DNC) hired to analyze the Russian hacks on their servers, as well as the firing of a prosecutor who was looking into Biden’s son’s business ties in Ukraine. Nowhere in the call does Trump tie military aid to his request for an investigation of Biden.
READ THE TRANSCRIPT:
White House Transcript Of POTUS Call With Ukrainian President Zelensky by The Daily Caller on Scribd
“I heard you had a prosecutor who was very good and he was shut down and that’s really unfair,” Trump said. “A lot of people are talking about that, the way they shut your very good prosecutor down.”
He continued, “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.”
Zelensky indicated that he intends to appoint a new prosecutor who will look into “the company that you mentioned,” referring to the Ukrainian oil company Burisma, of which Hunter Biden was a board member. Joe Biden bragged in January 2018 that he promised a $1 billion loan to Ukraine if the previous prosecutor investigating the company were removed from his post.
“I will tell Rudy [Giuliani] and Attorney General Barr to call. Thank you,” Trump confirmed later in the call.
The call confirms that the president had concerns that other European countries, particularly Germany, were not giving enough aid to Ukraine. Trump told reporters Tuesday that this was a large part of the reason he opted to freeze hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to Ukraine shortly before the call with Zelensky, and that the freeze had nothing to do with the investigation of Biden. (RELATED: Trump Ordered Freeze Of $400 Million To Ukraine Shortly Before The Call)
In the call, Trump tells Zelensky that the U.S. has given “much more than the European countries are doing and they should be helping you more than they are. Germany does almost nothing for you.”
