What We’ve Learned From Impeachment Inquiry
While the House has been conducting an impeachment inquiry, President Donald Trump and others in his administration have kept their focus on the White House-released memo on Trump’s July 25 phone call with the Ukrainian president, claiming that simply reading the “transcript” is all that’s needed to evaluate the impeachment probe. But congressional testimony has revealed key pieces of information beyond that conversation.
Trump questioned the need for any more testimony in an Oct. 29 tweet, saying, “How many more Never Trumpers will be allowed to testify about a perfectly appropriate phone call when all anyone has to do is READ THE TRANSCRIPT!”
Vice President Mike Pence similarly twice said in an Oct. 28 “PBS NewsHour” interview that if the American people “read the transcript,” they “will see the president did nothing wrong. There was no quid pro quo.”
Earlier this month, on Oct. 2, Trump said, “The whistleblower was wrong. The only thing that matters is the transcript of the actual conversation that I had with the president of Ukraine. It was perfect.” (The transcript actually backed up the three main points the whistleblower made about the July phone call, as we’ve written before.)
The House Democrats’ inquiry concerns Trump’s decision to withhold appropriated security aid to Ukraine and whether he did so to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate Democrats and former Vice President Joe Biden, a potential 2020 political rival.
Trump’s July 25 phone call was one of the events described in an Aug. 12 whistleblower complaint. Trump, according to the White House memo on the call, told Zelensky the U.S. “has been very very good to Ukraine” and asked for “a favor,” that Zelensky look into CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity firm hired by the Democratic National Committee after its computer network was hacked by Russian intelligence officers. That’s an apparent reference to a debunked conspiracy theory.
In his phone call, Trump also asked Zelensky to investigate Biden and his son, Hunter. As we’ve written, Trump has that Joe Biden, as
