Trump's ‘transcript’ of Ukraine call unlikely to be verbatim

Authored by reuters.com and submitted by F_D_P
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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Details from a phone call made by Donald Trump that has led the U.S. House of Representatives to launch a formal impeachment inquiry against the president isn’t likely to come from a recording or be verbatim, former White House and national security officials say.

Instead, because of standard White House protocol for handling phone calls between the president and other world leaders, a transcript is likely to be put together from written notes by U.S. officials who listen in.

Trump said on Tuesday a “complete, fully declassified and unredacted transcript” of the July 25 call would be released on Wednesday. In it, the Republican president is alleged to have pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to investigate Joe Biden, the U.S. Democratic presidential front-runner.

The transcript would show the call was “totally appropriate,” Trump said on Twitter.

However, standard practice when a president is talking to a foreign leader is not to make a recording but to have at least two and sometimes more note-takers from the National Security Council (NSC) on the call, a former senior NSC official told Reuters.

Those note-takers are themselves usually Central Intelligence Agency officers on assignment to the NSC, he said.

Their notes serve as the principal record of such calls, the former official said. He was not aware of any electronic recordings made by the U.S. government on calls between Trump and other world leaders.

Evelyn Farkas, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense during the Obama presidency, said not only would any so-called transcript be based on notes, but it would also likely be incomplete because the note-takers usually do not include issues that could be controversial if they became public.

“Typically a note-taker will write notes about what the principal says in a fashion that does not embarrass their principal,” said Farkas.

A former White House senior official concurred there was unlikely to be a recording.

“There’s no physical recording but there are a lot of people listening and taking contemporaneous notes of these calls,” the official said. “When you read it, it looks almost like a transcript.”

The White House had no comment.

lunetick on September 25th, 2019 at 16:18 UTC »

Official transcript

EDIT: Thanks for the silver 🥈 stranger

EDIT2: And golds!

AALen on September 25th, 2019 at 15:39 UTC »

I love how the Ukrainian President casually interjects that the last time he visited New York he stayed at Trump Tower.

tryingforjennifer on September 25th, 2019 at 15:20 UTC »

Its like sending an envelope with some loose bills to the IRS with a note that reads:

"This is how much I owe this year. Just trust me, I was there."