On September 19th, a whistleblower complaint emerged from a member of the intelligence community involving President Trump. A whistleblower is someone from a company or government agency who shares their knowledge of any wrongdoing in the form of fraud, corruption, or illegal activity within an organization. This particular complaint involves a phone call between Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine.
A memorandum of the telephone conversation was released on September 25th. It was not the exact same words as used originally. The White House warned that it is not a verbatim account.
In the call, Trump encouraged Zelensky to investigate Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden for corruption. According to the memorandum of the call, Trump said, “There’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that 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.”
Trump’s personal lawyer Rudolph Giuliani was involved in persuading Kiev, Ukraine’s capital, to investigate matters that would help Trump politically. Government officials who handle foreign policy connected Trump’s willingness to support Zelensky with Zelensky and his government’s readiness to pursue investigations.
Trump’s personal lawyer believes that the president has a right to tell another country’s leader to investigate corruption. He said in an interview with the New York Times that this is true particularly if it “bleeds over into” the United States. He added that “If I were president, I would do that.”
However, in light of the fact that former Vice President Biden is running for president and according to the New York Times, intelligence officials remark they have had issues with Trump politicizing information in the past.
In an article from the Associated Press, Biden talked about Trump’s attempt to pull the Justice Department into investigating him. Biden called it a “direct attack on the core independence of that department, an independence essential to the rule of law.”
The law states that whistleblower complaints must be reported to Congress. For Congress to receive a complaint, it has to concern the existence of intelligence activity that violates the law, rules, or otherwise amounts to mismanagement waste, abuse, or a danger to public safety.
Joseph Macguire, Acting Director of National Intelligence, blocked the complaint from being reported.
Macguire consulted with both the Justice Department and the White House to confirm the complaint being withheld. According to the New York Times, he said his delay in sending the complaint to Congress was about “sorting through possible claims of executive privilege.”
Adam B. Schiff, Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said in a briefing that “once the determination is made, the Director of National Intelligence has a ministerial responsibility to share that with Congress.”
Congressional Democrats sided with him and brought back their argument that Trump is orchestrating a cover-up of an urgent and legitimate whistleblower complaint that could affect national security. They rallied together and told Macguire that he had until Thursday, September 26th to turn over the whistleblower complaint or he risked retaliation.
House Democrats initiated a formal impeachment inquiry on September 24th. Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced that the impeachment inquiry would be on the schedule. House Democrats want to keep it simple and make the point that Trump abused his political power, and that is why they are moving forward with the inquiry.
Pelosi said in the announcement that “The actions of the Trump presidency revealed the dishonorable fact of the president’s betrayal of his oath to office… The President must be held accountable. No one is above the law.”
President Trump is only the fourth president to be facing impeachment. His position in the Republican-controlled Senate could have him confident that even if the Democrats vote to impeach, the Senate would not convict him.
Several Republicans sided with Trump on the whistleblower complaint. Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican, said in the New York Times that “Democrats would be insane to proceed with the impeachment on the basis of the [Ukraine] call.”
In AP news Republican Senator Chuck Grassley said, “I wouldn’t want to make too quick of a conclusion when you’re reading something that somebody heard somebody else say second or third hand.”
The whistleblower complaint was released in full by the Intelligence Committee on Thursday, September 26th. It confirmed that Trump pushed Zelensky to investigate Biden, and said that a few days earlier Trump withheld over $391 million in aid money from Ukraine.
According to the whistleblower complaint, the White House took extraordinary measures to keep the phone call from going to the public. The transcript of the complaint said they moved records of the phone call to a secret computer system to lock them down. They told the whistleblower that this was not the first time under this administration that a presidential transcript was placed into a computer system to protect politically sensitive information.
In a New York Times article Macguire said, “My responsibility was to get you the whistleblower letter and get the other information released. I have done my duty. Whether to investigate further is on the shoulders of the legislative branch and this committee.”