/Trump asked Ukraine leader in phone call to look into why investigation of Bidens son ended, transcript shows

Trump asked Ukraine leader in phone call to look into why investigation of Bidens son ended, transcript shows

President Donald Trump, in a midsummer phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, asked him to look into why that country’s top prosecutor apparently had ended an investigation of the business dealings of Joe Biden’s son, who served on the board of a Ukrainian gas company.

“(Then-Vice President Joe) Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution, so if you can look into it. … It sounds horrible to me,” Trump told Zelenskiy during the 30-minute July 25 phone call.

A description of the call was made public Wednesday by the Trump administration under pressure from Democrats who have launched a formal impeachment inquiry to determine whether the president sought the help of a foreign leader to boost his campaign.

The White House noted that the summary of the call was not a verbatim transcript and that it represented a record of “the notes and recollections of Situation Room officers and National Security Council policy staff” who listen to official conversations.

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The president’s phone call — made from the White House residence to Zelenskiy — began with Trump congratulating Zelenskiy on his election victory.

Later, Trump veers into the Biden issue.

“I heard you had a prosecutor who was very good and he was shut down, which is really unfair,” Trump says on the call, according to the description.

Trump then says, “There’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, what 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.” He then asked Zelenskiy to look into it.

Zelenskiy replies that he’s appointing a new prosecutor who will “look into the situation.”

That is the only mention about Biden in the memo about the call. The call description is five pages long.

Trump said in the call that he wanted Rudy Giuliani — his personal lawyer — and Attorney General William Barr to talk to Zelenskiy.

The Department of Justice said Barr found out about the call several weeks after it was made, the . The matter was then referred to the DOJ.

The DOJ said Trump has not spoken with Barr about having Ukraine investigate anything relating to Biden or his son. And the department said the president has not asked Barr to contact Ukraine on this or any other matter; nor has Barr has communicated with Ukraine about this or any other subject, or has he discussed this matter, or anything related to Ukraine, with Giuliani.

Though it was not explicit, Trump also appears to tie the award of aid to Ukraine to Zelenskiy’s willingness to cooperating with Trump.

“I will say that we do a lot for Ukraine. We spend a lot of effort and a lot of time. Much more than the European countries are doing,” Trump says in the description.

He adds that “the United States has been very very good to Ukraine. I wouldn’t say that it’s reciprocal necessarily because things are happening that are not good but the United States has been very very good to Ukraine.”

At another point in the call, Trump appears to ask Zelenskiy whether someone in the Ukraine might possess a server that contained some of former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s emails.

“I would like to ask you to do us a favor, though, because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it. I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine. They say Crowdstrike … I guess you have one of your wealthy people … the server, they say Ukraine has it,” Trump said on the call, according to the transcript.

Though it wasn’t exactly clear what Trump was referring to, CrowdStrike is the name of the cybersecurity firm that was hired to investigate the hack of the Democratic National Committee in 2016. DOJ officials were not able to shed any light on the matter.

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