President Donald Trump launched a furious attack on U.S. government officials who a whistle-blower alleges told of an ‘abuse of power’ inside the White House – comparing them to spies and hinting at their execution.
The president made the explosive comments to UN workers Thursday, hours after the declassification of a whistle-blower’s complaint sent political tremors through the Capitol.
Trump, who has made comments in public remarks and online attacking the integrity of the whistle-blower, turned his fire on the sources. He said the ‘person’ was ‘close to a spy’ – although the complaint mentions about a dozen sources.
Said Trump: ‘I want to know who’s the person who gave the whistle-blower the information because that’s close to a spy,’ the New York Times reported about the closed-door meeting.
‘I want to know who’s the person who gave the whistle-blower the information because that’s close to a spy,’ President Trump said Thursday, attacking sources of information for the whistle-blower
He added: ‘You know what we used to do in the old days when we were smart with spies and treason, right? We used to handle it a little differently than we do now.’
Trump’s comments came as the man he nominated to serve as Director of National Intelligence, Joseph Maguire, told the House Intelligence Committee the whistle-blower acted in good faith and ‘did the right thing.’
Trump ran down the whistle-blower’s credibility, even as substantial claims from the person’s complaint match elements of his phone call – including asking the Ukrainian leader to investigate Joe Biden’s son Hunter, and even mentioning the Bidens by name. Trump also brought up a server related to the 2016 elections and asked the Ukrainian leader to do a ‘favor’ by pursuing an investigation.
‘Basically, that person never saw the report, never saw the call, he never saw the call — something and decided that he or she, or whoever the hell they saw — they’re almost a spy,” Trump said, according to the LA Times, which obtained a recording to the speech.
Trump spoke at the swank Intercontinental Hotel in New York, thanking UN ambassador Kelly Kraft and staff who were in attendance during his hectic trip to the United Nations General Assembly amid a new impeachment push.
Trump since the whistle-blower emerged has attacked the person as a ‘partisan’ and being guilty of ‘political bias.’ He even retweeted press reports that said the person’s attorney interned for Hillary Clinton and Sen. Charles Schumer 18 years ago.
At a Wednesday conference at the UN, Trump used a different approach, attacking the whistle-blower’s access to information.
He called the whistle-blower ‘the one that didn’t have ay first-class or first-rate or second-tier information, from what I understand … You’ll have to figure that out for yourself,’ he told the press.
Trump’s eruption Thursday came after Maguire, under intense questioning from House Intelligence chair Rep. Adam Schiff, admitted that the report of allegations contained in the report were credible and urgent in nature – although he also allowed he did not probe their veracity.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Thursday the whistle-blower’s claim that White House officials intervened to ‘lock down’ notes on a politically explosive phone call President Trump had with the leader of Ukraine constituted a cover-up.
‘This is a cover-up,’ Pelosi told reporters during a Capitol press conference, just days after coming out to say the House was engaged in a formal impeachment inquiry of the president.
Pelosi said the president ‘betrayed his oath of office, our national security and the integrity’ of U.S. elections.’
She pointed to a key new revelation within a whistle-blower’s complaint that was declassified Thursday morning. The complaint references the president’s July 25 call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky where Trump sought an investigation of a company tied to rival Joe Biden’s son.
‘This is a cover-up,’ Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi said at a press conference Thursday
House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff characterized the call as a mob-style ‘shakedown.’
The whistle-blower also points to how the contents of that call were stored – saying senior White House officials intervened to ‘lock down’ all records related to the call, including the bombshell transcript the White House released Wednesday.
Transcripts were removed from a typical system and placed inside a separate system normally used for ‘especially sensitive’ information. A White House official described it as an ‘abuse,’ according to the complaint.
The House Intelligence Committee Thursday published the bombshell complaint at the center of the growing scandal facing Trump over his dealings with Ukraine.
The seven-page document was declassified overnight after lawmakers had viewed it, hours after the transcript of the call between Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky was published was published by the Department of Justice.
It levels a series of charges at Donald Trump and the White House including that:
- Trump ‘is using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S. election’;
- His personal attorney Rudolph Giuliani is accused of being ‘a central figure,’ and the attorney general Bill Barr ‘appears to be involved as well’;
- The call between Trump and Zelensky saw the president try to ‘advance his personal interests’;
- White House lawyers feared the officials who listened to the call ‘witnessed the President abuse his office for personal gain’;
- White House lawyers tried to ‘lock down’ the call by restricting the official transcript’s distribution and placing it in a classified computer system usually used for ‘covert action’ without justification;
- One White House official ‘described the act as abuse,’ the whistle-blower said;
- Other ‘politically sensitive – rather than national security sensitive’ calls between Trump and foreign leaders have been dealt with in the same way;
- There are more notes of the call – not just the transcript which was published Wednesday;
- That ‘multiple U.S. officials’ expressed concern about Rudy Giuliani being involved in Ukraine;
- That attorney-general William Barr ‘appears to be involved as well.’
The disclosure of the complaint, just a day after the release of a transcript of Trump’s phone call with Zelensky, set off immediate reverberations.
Giuliani told CNN from his room at the Trump International Hotel he had ‘no knowledge of any of that crap.’
The former New York mayor denied the whistle-blower’s claim that two State Department officials spoke to him to ‘contain the damage’ of his Ukraine dealings, and indicated his text messages with special U.S. envoy to Ukraine Kurt Volker would establish he wasn’t freelancing.
I spoke to the State Department during the course of this situation, I told you, at least 10 times, and I met with them,’ he said, adding he had a ‘nice little trail’ of texts to back up his claims.
The letter does not disclose the whistle-blower’s identity but makes clear that they are a senior figure – they disclose that they were provided a ‘readout’ of the call.
They say that they were not one of the officials who listened in to Trump’s call but says: ‘Multiple White House officials with direct knowledge of the call informed me that, after an initial exchange of pleasantries, the President used the remainder of the call to advance his personal interests.’
But the explosive core of the charge against Trump is less likely to be about Ukraine but about a wide-ranging cover-up.
Call: The conversation on July 25 between Volodymyr Zelensky and Donald Trump is now at the center of a metastasizing Washington D.C. scandal with fuel poured on it by the publication of the whistle-blower’s complaint
In the spotlight: The complaint alleges both Rudy Giuliani – the president’s private attorney – and Bill Barr, the attorney-general are both named as being part of the alleged abuse of power
The whistle-blower says after the call, they learned from ‘multiple U.S. officials that senior White House officials had intervened to ‘lock down’ all records of the phone call, especially the official word-for-word transcript.’
To the whistle-blower, this underscored ‘White House officials understood the gravity of what had transpired in the call.’
White House officials said they were ‘directed’ by lawyers to remove the transcript from the typical White House computer system for storage.
It was loaded on to a ‘separate electronic system’ – one the whistle-blower notes normally associated with ‘covert activity.’
The whistle-blower describes readouts of Special Ukraine Representative Kurt Volker’s trips to the country.
According to those readouts, Volker and the U.S. ambassador to the European Union counseled the Ukrainians how to ‘navigate’ the president’s directives.
The whistle-blower also describes hearing form U.S. officials what has been publicly reported, that Giuliani traveled to Madrid to meet with one of Zelensky’s advisors, Andrey Yermak.
Using what could be code for the Biden investigation Trump sought, officials said the meeting was ‘direct follow-up’ to the Trump Zelensky phone call and the ‘cases’ they discussed. The call contains only mention of one case, the company tied to Hunter Biden, as well as Trump’s reference to the hacked Democratic server from the 2016 election.
The whistle-blower names Zelensky advisors who Giuliani approached. Officials told the whistle-blower two of them were planning a trip to Washington in August.
The official also talks about the extraordinary decision to call back the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, for ‘consultations’
Trump’s July 25 call features the president calling the U.S. diplomat a ‘bad news,’ and Zelensky agreeing that he was the ‘first one who told me that she was a bad ambassador because I agree with you 100 per cent.’
The whistle-blower learned from U.S. officials that Yovanovitch was likely to be removed on April 29. The person learned that she was recalled due to ‘pressure stemming from Mr. Lutsenko’s allegations’ – a reference to claims by the Ukrainian prosecutor.
Ukraine links: Joe Biden made multiple trips there and demanded action on corruption; Hunter was on the board of a natural gas firm which faced money-laundering accusations
Prosecutor Yuriy Lutsenko, who Trump praised on the July call, had made a series of allegations about the 2016 election which were at odds with the intelligence community’s conclusion that Russia hacked Democratic servers.
Lutsenko also said Biden’s pressure on prior Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to fire an earlier prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, was done to stop an investigation of Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian energy firm where Hunter Biden served on the board.
Giuliani has pushed those twin claims – dealing with the 2016 elections and Biden’s actions – in his public efforts on behalf of Trump.
The whistle-blower also cited public comments by Lutsenko to communicate with Attorney General William Barr, who Trump mentioned repeatedly on his call with Zelensky.
Days after the State Department announced Ambassador Yovanovich’s removal, the New York Times reported that Giuliani had planned to travel to Ukraine in an effort he said could help his client and help the United States.
The whistle-blower reports hearing from ‘multiple’ U.S. officials ‘that they were deeply concerned by what they viewed as Mr. Giuliani’s circumvention of national security decision-making process to engage with Ukrainian officials and relay messages back and forth between Kyiv and the President.’
The whistle-blower said Volker and U.S. ambassador to the E.U. Gordon Sondland tried to help Ukrainians ‘understand and respond to the differing messages they were receiving from official U.S. channels on the one hand, and from Mr. Giuliani on the other,’ the person said.
Trump’s infamous July phone call with Zelensky was only set up after bargaining. The call would ‘depend’ on whether Zelnsky showed a willingness to ‘play ball’ on the issues raised by Giuliani and Lutsenko, according to the complaint.
The whistle-blower weaves together multiple public comments and accounts with inside information. The person cites Trump’s statement to ABC’s George Stephanopoulos that he would accept information on his political rivals.
It was in mid-July that the whistle-blower learned of a ‘sudden change in policy’ to withhold hundreds of millions of U.S. security aid to Ukraine.
An appendix provided by the whistle-blower provides more detail about the secret server where the transcript of Trump’s explosive Ukraine call was placed.
During the call, right after Zelensky thanks him for U.S. defense support and says his country is ‘almost ready’ to purchase U.S. anti-tank missiles, Trump responds: ‘I would like you to do us a favor though because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it,’ according to a transcript the White House released Wednesday.
Trump then brings up an investigation he wants regarding 2016 election hacking, then adds: ‘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, so whatever you can do with the Attorney General would be great.’
According to the whistle-blower, who Director of National of Inteligence Joseph Maguire says ‘did the right thing’ by coming forward, the contents of the call were put on a computer system managed directly by the National Security Council (NSC) Directorate for Intelligence Programs.’
It is a ‘standalone’ computer system ‘reserved for codeword-level intelligence information, such as cover action,’ according to the whistle-blower. Codeword intelligence is the highest classification level.
The whistle-blower claim officials ‘voiced concerns internally that this would be an abuse of the system, and was not consistent with the responsibilities of the Directorate for Intelligence Programs.’
The whistle-blower also reports learning around May 14 that President Trump ‘instructed’ Vice President Mike Pence to cancel a planned trip to Ukraine. Pence was to have attended Zelensky’s May 20 inauguration.
Energy Secretary Rick Perry went instead. U.S. officials ‘made it clear’ to the whistle-blower that Trump didn’t want to meet Zelenksy ‘until he saw how Zelensky “chose to act” in office.’
READ THE FULL COMPLAINT
