President Donald Trump urged Ukraine’s president to work with Attorney General William Barr on a potential investigation into Joe Biden, according to a White House readout of a July call, adding a damaging new dimension to the scandal that is engulfing Trump’s presidency.
The release comes one day after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi formally threw her support behind an impeachment inquiry of Trump and accused him of committing a “betrayal of his oath of office.”
According to the five-page document, Trump pressed newly elected President Volodymyr Zelensky to work with Barr and Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal attorney, on a corruption investigation into the former vice president and his son Hunter.
The document, however, is not necessarily a verbatim transcript because it was put together from contemporaneous notes and recollections of those listening in on the call, which lasted half an hour, according to the readout.
“There is 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 told Zelensky, according to the White House document. “So whatever you can do with the attorney general would be great."
Trump added later that he would have Barr get in touch with Zelenksy and that "we will get to the bottom of it."
A senior administration official said that while it was Trump who made the call on declassifying material in the memo, the White House was split about whether the document should have been released.
Barr was a major proponent for putting out the transcript, according to the senior administration official and a former administration official. It was the attorney general who was the force behind the scenes agitating for it to come out, said the former official.
Others advocating for the memo to be released included White House counsel Pat Cipollone and White House Legislative Affairs Director Eric Ueland, according to the current official.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and officials on the National Security Council were far more hesitant about releasing the memo of the conversation, the official added. They worried about the precedent it would set for conversations with other foreign leaders as well as the appropriateness of releasing transcripts.
In a statement Wednesday, the Justice Department said Barr was unaware of Trump invoking the attorney general in the matter until "several weeks after the call took place," when it learned of the whistleblower complaint. DOJ said the intelligence community’s internal watchdog referred the matter to the department as a potential campaign finance violation.
"The President has not spoken with the Attorney General about having Ukraine investigate anything relating to former Vice President Biden or his son. The President has not asked the Attorney General to contact Ukraine – on this or any other matter," spokeswoman Kerri Kupec said in a statement. "The Attorney General has not communicated with Ukraine – on this or any other subject. Nor has the Attorney General discussed this matter, or anything relating to Ukraine, with Rudy Giuliani."
Kupec said the DOJ received a referral in August about the call between Trump and Zelensky, but decided not to open an investigation.
“Relying on established procedures set forth in the Justice Manual, the Department’s 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 said.
Trump’s decision to rope Barr into the conversation, which until Wednesday had not been known, provoked fury from Democrats. Rep. Jerry Nadler, who as chairman of the House Judiciary Committee will oversee the panel’s impeachment efforts, demanded on Twitter that “at a minimum, AG Barr must recuse himself until we get to the bottom of this matter.”
House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff called it “absurd” that DOJ declined to open an investigation into the intelligence watchdog’s referral of the whistleblower complaint, and said Barr’s potential involvement added "another layer of depravity" to the controversy. He claimed it was easy to see why the department was blocking it from being turned over to lawmakers.
“Well, that will come as news, or at least it should, to the director of national intelligence who is charged, among other things, with detecting foreign interference in our elections and reporting to Congress about foreign interference in our elections,” he said in a news conference.
The call readout does not include any reference, explicit or otherwise, to the aid money that Trump reportedly directed his acting chief of staff to withhold from the Ukraine about a week before the call took place. Trump does mention numerous times how the U.S. spends "a lot of effort and a lot of time" assisting Ukraine.
And after Zelensky brought up a potential purchase of missiles from the U.S., Trump asked Zelenksy "to do us a favor though" and look into an unsubstantiated theory that Ukraine played some role in a cache of emails being stolen from the Democratic National Committee leading up to the 2016 election, mentioning by name the cybersecurity firm the DNC retained to investigate the hack.
Trump appeared to be asking Zelensky to further examine the findings of special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation that dogged the first half of Trump’s term, telling Zelensky that the probe was “nonsense” and panning Mueller’s congressional testimony the day before as “very poor” and “incompetent."
“They say a lot of it started with Ukraine,” Trump said, alluding to a theory often pushed by Giuliani.
He added: “Whatever you can do, it’s very important that you do it if that’s possible.”
Barr has appointed a DOJ prosecutor to investigate the origins of the Russia investigation, which Trump and his supporters have repeatedly claim stemmed from political bias.
DOJ said Wednesday that team is looking into the role Ukraine played in any counterintelligence activities against Trump’s 2016 campaign, and that Barr had not reached out to Ukraine as part of that investigation but that “certain Ukrainians who are not members of the government have volunteered information” to the head of that probe.
The release comes after multiple days of wrangling by lawmakers to compel the administration to turn over a whistleblower complaint regarding the call. Its release also marks a change in the White House’s strategy of near-universal stonewalling of congressional Democrats.
Trump’s acting intelligence chief had appeared intent to continue to block lawmakers from seeing the complaint in what Democrats argue is a breach of the intel community’s whistleblower statute. It is still unclear if the White House intends to turn the complaint over, but Democrats have asserted that they require more than just a transcript of the call.
Also at the center of the controversy is the White House’s mysterious decision around the same time to slow-walk hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign aid meant for Ukraine. The Washington Post reported this week that the president asked his acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, to delay the funds. And Trump’s public explanations for withholding the aid — which was eventually released two weeks ago — have evolved over the last few days. While he first asserted that he wanted to ensure Zelensky would prioritize rooting out corruption, on Tuesday he cited other countries’ reluctance to provide what he sees as their fair share of aid for Ukraine.
The president has repeatedly insisted that there was no quid pro quo on the call, denying that he dangled hundreds of billions of dollars in aid in exchange for an investigation into the Bidens, which the call readout released Wednesday appears to back up.
Trump and his supporters have accused Biden of exerting his power as vice president to oust a Ukrainian prosecutor looking into an energy company with ties to Hunter Biden, though the prosecutor’s firing was widely cheered by the international community.
“I heard you had a prosecutor who was very good and he 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,” Trump told Zelensky during the call, according to the document. Trump told the president later that "Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution so if you can look into it … It sounds horrible to me.”
Trump appears to be referencing a 2018 statement by Biden in which he boasts of ousting the prosecutor in question.
Zelensky responded to Trump by assuring him that he would be appointing a new prosecutor who would be “100% my person, my candidate,” and that “he or she will look into the situation, specifically to the company that you mentioned in this issue.”
The president’s admission that he’d broached the subject of an investigation into a political opponent with a foreign leader was a tipping point for a slew of Democrats — including vulnerable incumbents — who’ve come out in support of an impeachment inquiry over the last week.
On Wednesday, Democratic lawmakers skewered the White House, asserting that the memo only bolstered their case for impeachment.
The memo and DOJ’s “acting in a rogue fashion in being complicit in the President’s lawlessness confirm the need for an impeachment inquiry,” Pelosi said in a statement. “Clearly, the Congress must act.”
She accused the president of attempting “to make lawlessness a virtue in America and now is exporting it abroad,” arguing that “either the President does not know the weight of his words or he does not care about ethics or his constitutional responsibilities.”
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer backed Pelosi up, telling reporters during a news conference that the White House memo "absolutely validates the wisdom of" Pelosi to initiate an impeachment inquiry. “This is about abuse of power of an overreaching executive,” he continued.
Schiff, whose subpoena for the whistleblower complaint first catapulted the issue into the public eye, called the White House document “more damning than I and others had imagined,” adding that he found it “shocking on one level that the White House would release these notes and felt that somehow this would help the president’s case or cause, because what those notes reflect is a classic mafia-like shakedown of a foreign leader.”
But Trump’s backers seized on the fact that there was no explicit demand of an investigation in exchange for aid money, and argued that there was merit in looking into Biden’s conflicts of interest.
“It’s okay to talk about an obvious conflict,” Sen. Lindsey Graham told reporters at the Capitol, arguing that it was irrelevant if the Ukrainian prosecutor in question was actually corrupt. “The person arguing for him to be fired had a conflict of interest. If you don’t see that conflict you are blind. If you don’t see that there is a double standard here when it comes to trump and everybody else, you are blind. You are willfully blind.”
Trump’s reelection campaign shrugged off the memo’s contents, deflecting blame and asserting that Trump’s only intent was his desire to “fight the corruption in Washington” by politicians who “have abused their power for personal gain for decades.”
“Because of their pure hatred for President Trump, desperate Democrats and the salivating media already had determined their mission: take out the President,” campaign manager Brad Parscale said in a statement, claiming that “the facts prove the President did nothing wrong. This is just another hoax from Democrats and the media, contributing to the landslide re-election of President Trump in 2020.”
A handful of House Republicans also took to the House floor to slam Democrats and the media, pointing out that the readout contained no offer of quid pro quo from the president.
“This isn’t a call about leverage. This isn’t a call about threats. This was a mutually appreciative and mutually laudatory call between two leaders who are trying to cleanup some of the garbage in their respective countries that has polluted politics,” Rep. Matt Gaetz said, proclaiming that the “favor” for which Trump asked was “on behalf of our nation.”
Sen. Mitt Romney, the chamber’s lone GOP voice of criticism, said Wednesday that the contents of the memo did not lessen his concern. While he declined to endorse Pelosi’s impeachment inquiry, he called the readout “deeply troubling” and said “we’ll see where it leads.”
Nancy Cook contributed to this report.