Prior to the testimony later today by the Acting Director of National Intelligence in public and the Inspector General for the intelligence community before the House Intelligence Committee, the Office of the Acting DNI has released the complaint filed by the whistleblower and the corresponding report on that complaint sent by the Inspector General to the Acting DNI:
The whistleblower complaint at the heart of the burgeoning controversy over President Trump’s call with the Ukrainian president claims not only that the president misused his office for personal gain and endangered national security but that unidentified White House officials tried to hide that conduct.
“In the course of my official duties, I have received information from multiple U.S. government officials that the President of the United States is using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S. election,” the whistleblower wrote in the complaint dated Aug. 12. The House Intelligence Committee released the document Thursday morning.
“This interference includes, among other things, pressuring a foreign country to investigate one of the President’s main domestic political rivals. The President’s personal lawyer, Mr. Rudolph W. Giuliani, is a central figure in this effort. Attorney General (William P.) Barr appears to be involved as well,” the complaint states.
“In the course of my official duties, I have received information from multiple U.S. government officials that the President of the United States is using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S. election,” the whistleblower wrote in the complaint dated Aug. 12. The House Intelligence Committee released the document Thursday morning.
“This interference includes, among other things, pressuring a foreign country to investigate one of the President’s main domestic political rivals. The President’s personal lawyer, Mr. Rudolph W. Giuliani, is a central figure in this effort. Attorney General (William P.) Barr appears to be involved as well,” the complaint states.
In that phone call, Trump pressed President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate Joe Biden, one of his chief political rivals, and Biden’s son Hunter — offering to enlist Barr’s help in that effort while dangling a possible visit to the White House, according to a rough transcript of the call released by the White House on Wednesday.
A spokeswoman for Barr has said that he did not know about the phone call until the whistleblower issue was raised, and that he had not spoken with Trump about assisting Ukraine with an investigation of Biden or his son.
The unidentified intelligence official was so alarmed by the conversation, and related interactions between Giuliani and Ukrainian officials, that they filed a whistleblower complaint to the inspector general for the U.S. intelligence agencies.
“I am also concerned that these actions pose risks to U.S. national security and undermine the U.S. government’s efforts to deter and counter foreign interference in U.S. elections,” the person wrote in a seven-page letter to the chairmen of the Senate and House Intelligence committees.
The whistleblower goes on to say that they were told by unidentified White House officials that they had been directed by White House lawyers “to remove the electronic transcript from the computer system in which such transcripts are typically stored.”
The complaint also describes a series of alleged actions by Giuliani that seemed designed to pressure the Ukraine government to go after Joe Biden — a chief political rival to the president who is currently seeking the Democratic nomination to run against Trump in 2020.
The whistleblower said that they learned from other U.S. officials that Giuliani’s visit to Madrid on Aug. 2 to meet with a Zelensky aide was “a direct followup” to Trump’s July 25 call to the Ukrainian president and request for an investigation of the Bidens. Giuliani also reached out to “a variety of other Zelenskyy advisers, including Chief of Staff Andriy Bohdan and Acting Chairman of the Security Service of Ukraine Ivan Bakanov,” according to the complaint.
More from The New York Times:
WASHINGTON — President Trump used the power of his office to try to get Ukraine to interfere in the 2020 election to investigate a political rival “for personal gain,” according to an explosive whistle-blower complaint released on Thursday after days of damning revelations about Mr. Trump’s dealings with Ukraine.
Attorney General William P. Barr and the president’s personal attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani were central to the effort, the complaint said.
In addition, the complaint says that whistle-blower, an unidentified intelligence officer, learned from multiple American officials that “senior White House officials had intervened to ‘lock down’ all records of the phone call, especially the official word-for-word transcript of the call that was produced as is customary by the White House Situation Room.”
“This set of actions underscored to me that White House officials understood the gravity of what had transpired in the call,” the complaint said.
The whistle-blower’s complaint was based on accounts from multiple White House officials who were “deeply disturbed” by what they heard on the call, the complaint said.
“They told me that there was already a discussion ongoing with White House lawyers about how to treat the call because of the likelihood, in the officials’ retelling, that they had witnessed the President abuse his office for personal gain,” the whistle-blower wrote in the complaint.
The complainant asserted that multiple officials said a subsequent meeting or phone call between Mr. Trump and Mr. Zelensky would depend on whether the Ukrainian president was willing to “play ball” on investigating former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his son, Hunter Biden, and other matters.
The whistle-blower said the White House officials who relayed the details of the call to the whistle-blower were “deeply disturbed.”
To a large degree, the whistleblower’s complaint corroborates the information that was in the summary of the July 25th phone call between President Trump and President Volodymyr Zelensky. That summary, of course, showed the President of the United States presenting his counterpart in Kyiv with what is clearly an implicit quid pro quo connecting the provision of current and future aid to Ukraine to President Zelensky’s agreement to take steps to investigate a matter involving Hunter Biden, the son of the former Vice-President and current Presidential candidate Joe Biden, as well as allegations, which have been debunked, that Vice-President Biden used his alleged influence to have investigations of that company shut down. Those efforts primarily took place during the July 25th phone call at issue, but also appear to have begun as early as April shortly after Zelensky was elected and continued throughout the summer thanks in large part to visits to Ukraine by Rudy Giuliani, one of the President’s personal attorneys whose mission was apparently to put pressure on Ukrainian authorities regarding the Biden case.
Outside of the summary of the July 25th phone call the complaint is filled with detailed information that appears to indicate that this whistleblower is someone of fairly high rank within the Intelligence Community rather than some mid-level bureaucrat. One of the more telling things in this regard is the fact that the whistleblower basis his complaint both on that phone call and on contacts that Rudy Giuliani had with officials in Ukraine. Additionally, the complaint speaks to actings undertaken by some White House officials to hide the summary of this call from scrutiny by storing it on a high-security computer system unlike the summary of other similar calls with world leaders. This implies to me at least that the whistleblower is someone to whom some of these people would come to report what they considered unusual activity in connection with the summary. It is also worth noting that this action, assuming it actually happened, reveals some level of consciousness on the part of White House officials that what Trump had discussed with Zelensky was somehow improper.
In any case, the release of this complaint is another shoe dropping against this President that, if anything, makes him look even worse than the summary of the phone call did. Based on this complaint, it seems clear that the President of the United States engaged in an effort to essentially blackmail the newly-elected and politically inexperienced leader of a foreign country that is, thanks to a war waging in the eastern half of his country that was started by Russia, facing an existential crisis for his country that makes him particularly reliant on the United States for aid. That blackmail essentially was that aid would be withheld unless President Zelensky agreed to the “request” to reopen an investigation in the hope that it could benefit the President Trump’s re-election in 2020. The complaint also alleges that White House officials, including lawyers, have been routinely filing records of this and other Presidential calls on this high-security computer systems to hide them essentially from the beginning of Trump’s Presidency. Indeed, as one of our commentators below notes, the various classification marks on the summary of the call released yesterday corroborate the allegation in the complaint about the extent to which White House officials went to “hide” that summary and, perhaps, others. If this is true, then it is yet another piece of evidence in favor of this President’s impeachment. Congress needs to move forward on this matter expeditiously.
Embedded below are (1) the whistleblower complaint and (2) the report of the Inspector General to the Acting Director of National Intelligence regarding the complaint:
First, the complaint:
Whistleblower Complaint by Doug Mataconis on Scribd
And second, the report:
Whistleblower Report by Doug Mataconis on Scribd
