WASHINGTON, D.C. — President Donald Trump directly asked Ukraine’s president for a “favor” while discussing U.S. military aid to the besieged country, according to a White House memo of the July 25 phone call, suggesting a link that could be crucial to the Democrats’ fast-moving impeachment inquiry.
The details emerged as the Justice Department confirmed that the inspector general for the director of national intelligence had made a criminal referral about the call, questioning whether Trump had violated campaign finance law, but that department lawyers had determined he had not.
During the 30-minute call, Trump asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky both to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden, a leading Democratic candidate for the 2020 presidential race, and to look into CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity firm that did work for the Democrats in the 2016 election.
Trump asked Zelensky at least five separate times on the call to work with Attorney General William Barr, putting the nation’s highest lawman directly into the House inquiry into whether Trump abused his powers and jeopardized national security by pushing a foreign government to dig up dirt on a U.S. presidential candidate.
“Whatever you can do with the Attorney General would be great,” Trump told Zelensky after mentioning Biden several times. The Justice Department said Wednesday that Barr was unaware of Trump’s request at the time and that he did not have any contact with Ukrainian officials about the president’s request for an investigation into Biden.
Trump also urged Zelensky several times to speak to Rudolph W. Giuliani, Trump’s personal attorney. Although he is a private citizen, Giuliani has led the president’s efforts to get Ukraine to investigate Biden and his son, Hunter, who sat on the board of a Ukrainian natural gas company.
“I will have Mr. Giuliani give you a call and I am also going to have Attorney General Barr call and we will get to the bottom of it,” Trump said. “I’m sure you will figure it out.”
On Wednesday, a day after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced the start of a former House impeachment inquiry, the White House released what it called a non-verbatim transcript, five pages compiled by note-takers in the White House Situation Room, of the July 25 call between Trump and Zelensky.
“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,” Trump said on the call, according to the memo. “Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution — so if you can look into it … it sounds horrible to me.”
In 2016, Vice President Biden urged Ukraine’s government at the time to fire a prosecutor who the Obama administration and its European allies deemed soft on corruption. The prosecutor had investigated the energy company that had hired Biden’s son, but that probe had already ended by the time the vice president got involved.
No evidence has emerged to show Biden sought to help his son, and neither the former vice president nor his son have been accused of any wrongdoing.
Biden later spoke publicly about withholding U.S. financial support for Ukraine unless the prosecutor was fired, but he did not brag about stopping a prosecution of the company.
Trump argued on Wednesday that his conversation with Zelensky was portrayed as the “call from hell” but “it turned out to be a nothing call.”
“It’s the single greatest witch hunt in American history,” he said in New York, where he’s attending the U.N. General Assembly. “There was no pressure whatsoever.”
Trump and Zelensky were scheduled to meet Wednesday afternoon on the sidelines of the U.N. meetings. The two posed for a photo together with their wives at a diplomatic reception on Tuesday night, and appeared all smiles.
One Ukrainian official, who requested anonymity to discuss private conversations, said Trump wants Ukraine “to dig up some old stuff,” and “some conditions were set.”
“Right now Zelensky’s position is not to stick his head out in either direction because no one knows who will be in the White House” after the 2020 election, the official said. “I know that despite his ambitions Zelensky obviously is not comfortable with the idea that the outcome of the next U.S. presidential election may in some way depend on what he does or says now.”
But the call memo shows Trump urged a foreign government to intervene in the 2020 election against a potential rival, making the call only a day after special counsel Robert S. Mueller III testified in Congress on July 24 about Russian attempts to influence the 2016 election on Trump’s behalf.
Trump acknowledged this week that he held up delivery of nearly $400 million in military and State Department aid that had been approved by a bipartisan vote in Congress to help Ukraine counter aggression from Russia, which seized Crimea in 2014 and has backed armed separatists in eastern Ukraine. The aid was finally released this month.
Trump denied that the two-month delay in releasing the aid, which included anti-tank weapons and crucial communications systems for Ukraine’s embattled military, was meant to pressure Zelensky’s government to investigate Biden.
But the record of the call shows he tied the issues together. Zelensky brought up his desire for more U.S. military aid, saying “we are ready to continue to cooperate for the next steps,” including the purchase of the Javelin anti-tank missiles to help fight the Russian-backed separatists.
Trump did not reply to the request for military help, asking Zelensky for help instead with the investigations.
“I would like you to do us a favor though,” he began. He added, “Whatever you can do, it’s very important that you do it if that’s possible.”
The memo shows that in addition to his interest in the Bidens, Trump was eager to find evidence that could tarnish the special counsel investigation into his 2016 campaign’s interactions with Russia.
“I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine — they say Crowdstrike.”
Trump has long questioned the origins of the Russia investigation, particularly the original analysis that CrowdStrike made to determine that operatives backed by Moscow hacked Democratic National Committee computer networks.
Trump’s allies suspect some Ukrainian officials helped the investigation led by former FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III, who prosecuted Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, for bank fraud, tax evasion and other crimes related to his work as a political consultant for the former Russian-backed government in Kyiv. Manafort was convicted and sentenced to 7 1/2 years in prison.
Zelensky appeared eager to win Trump’s favor on the call, telling the president he has stayed at his New York hotel and that he has adopted his “drain the swamp” slogan as a guiding philosophy.
He assured Trump that an assistant has already spoken with Giuliani “and we are hoping very much that Mr. Giuliani will be able to travel to Ukraine and we will meet once he comes to Ukraine.”
“I just wanted to assure you once again, that you have nobody but friends around us,” Zelensky adds.
The impeachment inquiry has focused so far on Trump’s phone call, as well as a still-secret whistleblower’s complaint to the office of the director of national intelligence, and the criminal referral to the Justice Department that followed.
Barr’s office, which has supported the Trump administration’s efforts that complaint under wraps, said Wednesday no crime had been committed.
His spokeswoman, Kerri Kupec, said the intelligence community’s inspector general had cited the president’s phone call with Zelensky “as a potential violation of federal campaign finance law, while acknowledging that neither the Inspector General nor the complainant had firsthand knowledge of the conversation.”
Kupec said the criminal division “reviewed the official record of the call and determined, based on the facts and applicable law, that there was no campaign finance violation and that no further action was warranted.”
Kupec also said Wednesday that Barr has not spoken with Trump, Giuliani or Ukrainian officials about the request for an investigation into Biden.
House Democrats said the call memo bolsters their inquiry because it shows Trump sought to pressure a foreign leader to help his reelection campaign.
Rep. Adam Schiff, a California Democrat who heads the House Intelligence Committee, said the non-verbatim transcript portrays “a classic mafia-like shakedown of a foreign leader.”
Pelosi echoed that language, saying the president was using “taxpayer money to shake down other countries for the benefit of his campaign,” she said. “Either the president does not know the weight of his words or he does not care about ethics or his constitutional responsibilities.”
Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah is the only Republican in Congress who has expressed serious concern about the content of the phone memo, calling it “deeply troubling.”
“The president of the United States asks or presses the leader of a fearing country to carry out an investigation of a political nature, that’s troubling,” he said at the Atlantic Festival.
Romney — who faced Twitter backlash from the president after he went public with his concern — speculated that few Republicans are willing to speak out against the president because “there’s such enormous power associated with being the party in power.”
The whistleblower’s complaint is believed to go beyond the single phone call to include other actions undertaken by the president.
The Trump administration has promised to provide the complaint to Congress after it goes through the declassification process, which could happen by the end of the week.
The latest, and arguably most serious challenge to Trump’s presidency, has unfolded with remarkable speed. Details of the whistleblower’s complaint were revealed only last week.
