Trump says he's going to release the transcript of his call with the president of Ukraine
- President Donald Trump said he will release a full transcript of a July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
- "You will see it was a very friendly and totally appropriate call," Trump tweeted. "No pressure and, unlike Joe Biden and his son, NO quid pro quo! This is nothing more than a continuation of the Greatest and most Destructive Witch Hunt of all time!"
- Trump is currently facing heightened scrutiny for repeatedly pressuring Zelensky to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden during their conversation.
- The phone call is also at the center of an explosive and unprecedented whistleblower complaint that a US intelligence official filed against Trump in August.
- There's also been speculation over the past several days that he held up a roughly $400 million military-aid package to Ukraine in order to spur Zelensky's government to probe Biden ahead of the 2020 election.
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President Donald Trump authorized the release of the full transcript of a July 25 phone call he had with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky on Tuesday.
"I am currently at the United Nations representing our Country, but have authorized the release tomorrow of the complete, fully declassified and unredacted transcript of my phone conversation with President Zelensky of Ukraine," Trump tweeted.
He continued: "You will see it was a very friendly and totally appropriate call. No pressure and, unlike Joe Biden and his son, NO quid pro quo! This is nothing more than a continuation of the Greatest and most Destructive Witch Hunt of all time!"
The move comes as Trump faces heightened scrutiny for repeatedly pressuring Zelensky to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden during the call.
The Wall Street Journal reported last week that during the phone call, Trump pressed Zelensky at least eight times to work with his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, to investigate the Bidens over their dealings in Ukraine.
The younger Biden sat on the board of Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian gas-extraction company, from 2014 to early this year. Trump and Giuliani accused the elder Biden of trying to stymie a criminal investigation into Burisma in 2016 by pushing the Ukrainian government to fire Viktor Shokin, the prosecutor general leading the inquiry.
While Biden did seek the prosecutor's removal, those accusations are unsubstantiated, with government officials and Ukrainian anticorruption advocates in fact saying that Shokin had hampered the investigation into Burisma long before Biden had entered the picture, according to The Journal.