Doubts about Trump’s Ukraine call transcript
Irregularities fuel concerns about White House provided documentation of call
US President Donald Trump said yesterday his controversial July call with his Ukrainian counterpart was transcribed “word-for-word, comma-for-comma”, an assertion that fuelled growing questions about the nature and completeness of an official memorandum about the call released by the White House last week.
“This is an exact word-for-word transcript of the conversation, taken by very talented stenographers,” Trump said.
White House officials previously had portrayed the document as not a verbatim transcription but a summary that closely tracked the words the president used in his July 25 call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. They said it was being released in a bid to bring transparency and clarity to a call at the heart of a political scandal that has sparked a House impeachment investigation.
But the whistleblower complaint that spurred the investigation described an “official word-for-word transcript” of the call — words closely matching those used by Trump yesterday — creating uncertainty about what was included in the document and what may have been left out.
Current and former US officials studying the document pointed to several elements they say indicate the document may have been handled in an unusual way.
Those include the use of ellipses — three-period punctuation indicating information has been deleted — that traditionally have not appeared in summaries of presidential calls with foreign leaders, according to the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
In two of the cases when ellipses were used, they accompanied Trump’s reference to cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, which is at the centre of a right-wing conspiracy theory about a computer server central to the company’s investigation of the Russian hack of Democratic Party computers that, according to those pushing the theory, is hidden away in Ukraine.
The five-page document reports Trump said: “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.”
In the third use of ellipses, Trump was asking Zelensky about a different theory — also aired in the extreme corners of the internet and on some right-wing news networks — that Democratic presidential candidate Joseph Biden had, while vice president, demanded the removal of a prosecutor looking to investigate Biden’s son Hunter.
“Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution so if you can look into it . . . It sounds horrible to me,” according to the call document.
Shortly after the document’s re
lease last week, a White House official said the ellipses did not indicate missing words but referred to “a trailing off of a voice or pause”, and called it standard practice for records of presidential phone calls.
Current and former officials said that was different from previous practice. They said when presidents trail off in a way note-takers can’t hear, that point traditionally has been marked “[inaudible]”. When fragments of sentences aren’t readily understood by note-takers, or when comments repeat a previous thought, they said, the transcripts had often been marked with dashes.
Others have noted the brevity of a document purporting to represent a call that lasted 30 minutes. Senator Angus King, I-Maine, had two of his office’s interns read the call summary aloud, measuring its length with a stopwatch app. The time: 10 minutes, 40 seconds, or roughly 20 minutes shorter than the White House’s assertion about the call’s length.
“Our motivating question was: How much don’t we know?” King said. “There has to be an inquiry to get to the facts.”
The record of the presidential call with Zelensky, which is labelled “MEMORANDUM OF TELEPHONE CONVERSATION,” was marked as having been produced by note-takers in the White House Situation Room, as is standard for calls with foreign leaders. The record, however, is unusual for lacking a tracking number that would normally indicate it had been circulated to senior subject experts and the national security adviser’s office for review and edits. Instead, the memo released by the White House carries a stamp saying: “PkgNumberShort”.
“I thought to myself, this didn’t go through the normal process,” said one former government official who was among several who handled the records and found the document released by the White House curious.
The whistleblower said in his complaint multiple US officials had alerted him 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”.
Such phone calls also typically create at least two types of documents: a verbatim transcript made by note-takers in the White House Situation Room and an edited summary that is more widely circulated.
“The one that was released is not the one the Situation Room created,” said one person familiar with the creation of records of foreign leader calls. “That’s just not possible.”