Evidence buttresses facts in complaint
Documents, Trump’s own words support whistleblower’s claims
Since the revelation of an explosive whistleblower complaint that sparked an impeachment crisis for President Donald Trump, he and his Republican allies have coalesced around a central defense: The document was based on secondhand information, mere hearsay riddled with inaccuracies.
But over the past two weeks, documents, firsthand witness accounts and even statements by Trump himself have emerged that bolster the facts outlined in the extraordinary abuse-of-power complaint.
The description of a July 25 phone call between Trump and the president of Ukraine, which formed the heart of the complaint and was still secret at the time the claim was filed in mid-August, matches a rough transcript of the call that the White House released a day before the complaint was made public.
The whistleblower’s assertion that records related to the phone call were transferred to a separate electronic system intended for highly classified material has since been confirmed by White House officials.
And the whistleblower’s narrative of the events that led up to the call — including a shadow campaign undertaken by Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani and the attempts of U.S. State Department officials to navigate his activities — have been largely confirmed by the text messages of three diplomats released Friday, as well as Giuliani himself in media interviews.
Independent evidence now supports the central elements laid out in the seven-page document. Even if they disregarded the complaint, legal experts said lawmakers have obtained dramatic testimony and documents that
provide ammunition for the whistleblower’s core assertion: that the president of the United States used “the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S. election.”
“Everything we’ve found to date validates the information. … It’s brilliantly effective. It really does function almost as a onestop shop, investigative road map,” said Harry Litman, a former U.S. attorney in Pennsylvania who has represented other government whistleblowers.
“It’s a success story, as whistleblower complaints go,” said Litman, also a contributing columnist for The Washington Post.
Trump and his supporters have denied that he abused his office and said there is no evidence that the president engaged in a quid pro quo in which U.S. support for Ukraine was withheld in exchange for Ukrainian officials investigating his political rivals.
Despite the growing body of evidence supporting the whistleblower’s factual narration, Trump has continued to maintain that the description in the complaint is false or unsubstantiated.
“The so-called Whistleblower’s account of my perfect phone call is ‘way off,’ not even close,” Trump tweeted Saturday morning.
In fact, specific details the whistleblower provided about Trump’s call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky can be found in the rough transcript of the conversation released by the White House.
Among them: that Trump pressured Zelensky to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, and that the only specific instance of alleged corruption that Trump referenced on the call was the one pertaining to Biden.
The whistleblower also said that Trump had explicitly asked the Ukrainians to meet or speak with Giuliani and Barr on these matters, referring to them “multiple times in tandem.”
“I will have Mr. Giuliani give you a call and I am also going to have Attorney General Barr call and we will get to the bottom of it,” Trump told Zelensky, according to the White House readout.
Mark Zaid, a lawyer for the whistleblower, said that the complaint itself noted that it was based both on the whistleblower’s personal knowledge and on information gathered from other officials.
Despite some Republican claims to the contrary, the law that protects government officials who step forward with knowledge of wrongdoing has never required their information be firsthand, he said.
Late Thursday night, House investigators released a batch of text messages that buttressed in stark detail the whistleblower’s allegation that the administration was pressuring Ukraine to pursue the political investigations to get a White House meeting and foreign aid.
One message sent from Kurt Volker, then the special U.S. envoy to Ukraine, to an aide to Zelensky on July 25, hours before Trump and the Ukrainian president spoke, made the terms crystal clear.
“Heard from White House — assuming President Z convinces trump he will investigate/ ‘get to the bottom of what happened’ in 2016, we will nail down date for visit to Washington,” Volker wrote.
Part of the strength of the whistleblower complaint is that the document carefully flags when its author was sharing information provided by others, as well as instances in which the whistleblower was sharing his suspicions rather than what he knew to be true, said David Colapinto, cofounder of the National Whistleblower Center.
“I think whoever the whistleblower is understood the seriousness of the allegations, understood that it involved the White House, understood that it would get a lot of attention and prepared it carefully with that in mind,” he said.
For instance, the whistleblower wrote that he learned all U.S. security assistance to Ukraine was suspended in July. The Washington Post reported last month that the unusual directive to hold back the $400 million in money appropriated by Congress came from Trump himself.
The whistle blow er wrote that the delay in the foreign aid “might have a connection with the overall effort to pressure the Ukrainian leadership.”
But, he added carefully, “I do not know definitively.”