July 25: The infamous call that started it all
WASHINGTON >> The forecast for July 25 was typical for Washington: sunny, mid-80s. President Donald Trump had good reason to be feeling bright and sunny himself.
It was the morning after Robert Mueller’s congressional testimony at the conclusion of the Russia investigation, and Trump and his allies were expressing relief, thinking the rumblings about impeachment would at last fade, even if the special counsel hadn’t offered the president the total exoneration Trump claimed.
By 7:06 a.m., Trump was tweeting positive reviews from his favorite TV show, “Fox & Friends,” where cohost Ainsley Earhardt declared, “Yesterday changed everything, it really did clear the president.”
An hour later, Trump moved on to a tweet talking up his approval ratings, the stock market, unemployment and more. “Country doing great!” he wrote.
But a reconstruction of what started as an unremarkable summer Thursday reveals that even before daybreak, anxiety was coursing through the White House about a coming phone call that didn’t appear on the president’s public schedule.
By nightfall, Trump had set in motion events that would trigger only the fourth impeachment inquiry in history, imperiling his presidency and further calcifying divisions in a polarized nation.
At the time, it seemed no one had a complete picture of what was afoot. But through weeks of congressional investigation and hearings, a timeline of the day’s events has emerged, offering a portrait of one of the most consequential days of Trump’s presidency.
‘Stray voltage’
Trump was scheduled to talk with Ukraine’s new president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy at 9 a.m. Zelenskiy, a former comedian fond of showing off his bulging biceps, was angling to lock in a visit to the White House, a valuable currency that he hoped would demonstrate to Russia that he had Trump’s backing.
Trump and Zelenskiy had gotten along just fine during their first chat in April, basically an exchange of pleasantries. National security officials were worried that this time would be different.
There were “some concerns that, you know, there could be some stray voltage,” Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, the National Security Council’s top Ukraine expert, testified later.
He was referring to growing indications that Trump was fixated on baseless conspiracy theories that Ukraine had tried to take down candidate Trump in the 2016 elections. There was talk that Zelenskiy would only get a White House visit if he agreed to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden, one of Trump’s top Democratic rivals, and the 2016 U.S. elections.
None of that was in the National Security Council’s “call package,” with its suggested talking points for Trump’s conversation. Nor was any of that in the prewritten “readout” of the call, laying out what was expected to happen.
Both of those turned out to be merely aspirational.
Shortly before the call, Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, got on the phone with Trump to offer his own advice.
Sondland, working with Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, had put together a plan under which Ukraine would get its White House meeting only in exchange for agreeing to investigations of Joe Biden and his son Hunter, who served on the board of a gas company in Ukraine, and the 2016 election, when Trump defeated Democrat Hillary Clinton.
Dour v. Obsequious
The half-hour call started with pleasantries but quickly took a sharp detour. Trump, his voice lower than normal, was “dour,” according to Vindman, who was among a dozen or more people listening in from the U.S. side.
Zelenskiy, overly eager to please, was “obsequious,” according to Tim Morrison, Vindman’s boss and one of the other sets of ears on the call.
Zelenskiy’s attempts at humor fell flat. They “just didn’t seem to carry with the president,” Vindman recalled.
Soon, Trump was stressing how much the U.S. had done for Ukraine and grousing about Europe’s failure to do more.