President Donald Trump said on Sunday that he would consider releasing a transcript of a July 25 phone call with his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky, which is allegedly the subject of a contested whistleblower complaint.
“We’ll make a determination about how to release it, releasing it, saying what we said,” Trump noted in Houston, saying his conversation with the Ukrainian president was “perfect.”
Trump’s comments followed only hours after he acknowledged the two discussed former Vice President Joe Biden during the phone call.
“The problem is, when you’re speaking to foreign leaders, you don’t want foreign leaders to feel that they shouldn’t be speaking openly,” Trump added. “And the same thing with an American president. You want them to be able to express themselves without knowing that every single word was going to be going out and going out all over the world.”
Meanwhile, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said that releasing a transcript of the call would only be appropriate “in the most extreme circumstances.”
Several news outlets reported Friday that President Trump had insisted that Zelensky investigate Biden’s son, as well as that he made a promise to the Ukrainian leader. That call eventually became the subject of the complaint, the outlets later reported, which Democrats have been trying to obtain ever since.
Trump and his allies have claimed the complaint was lodged by a partisan intelligence officer, although the identity of the whistleblower remains unknown.
The phone call came at a time when the U.S. was reviewing military aid to Ukraine, which has prompted Democrats to suspect that Trump may have withheld the aid as part of an effort to press for the Biden investigation. The President has denied the conversation with Zelensky involved any quid pro quo.
“The conversation I had was largely congratulatory, was largely corruption, all of the corruption taking place. It was largely the fact that we don’t want our people like Vice President Biden and his son creating to the corruption already in the Ukraine,” Trump told reporters at the White House before departing for Houston for a rally with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
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