“In the course of my official duties, I have received information from multiple U.S. government officials that the President of the United States is using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S. election,” the whistleblower wrote in the complaint dated Aug. 12. “This interference includes, among other things, pressuring a foreign country to investigate one of the President’s main domestic political rivals. The President’s personal lawyer, Mr. Rudolph W. Giuliani, is a central figure in this effort. Attorney General (William P.) Barr appears to be involved as well.”
In that phone call, Trump pressed President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate Joe Biden, one of his chief political rivals, offering to enlist Barr’s help in that effort while dangling a possible visit to the White House, according to a rough transcript of the call released by the White House on Wednesday.
A spokeswoman for Barr has said that he did not know about the phone call until the whistleblower issue was raised, and that he had not spoken with Trump about assisting Ukraine with an investigation of Biden or his son.
The unidentified intelligence official was so alarmed by the conversation, and related interactions between Trump’s lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani and Ukrainian officials, that they filed a whistleblower complaint to the inspector general for the U.S. intelligence agencies.
The complaint alleges not just that the president abused his office, but that White House officials were so alarmed by his conduct that they sought to limit access to the written record of the phone call.
“In the days following the phone call, I learned from multiple U.S. officials that senior White House officials had intervened to ‘lock down’ all records of the phone call, especially the word-for-word transcript of the call that was produced — as is customary — by the White House Situation Room,” the complaint states. “This set of actions underscored to me that White House officials understood the gravity of what had transpired in the call.”
The whistleblower goes on to say that they were told by unidentified White House officials that they had been directed by White House lawyers “to remove the electronic transcript from the computer system in which such transcripts are typically stored.”
Some members of Congress were allowed to view a classified version of the whistleblower complaint on Wednesday, while the White House made a redacted version available to a larger group of lawmakers.
That complaint, filed in August, became the subject of a high stakes back-and-forth among government agencies about how it should be handled. While the inspector general sought to alert Congress to the concern, lawyers at the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel concluded it should not be shared with Congress. The Justice Department decided it was not a proper whistleblower complaint, because it involved the conduct of the president, who is not an employee of the intelligence agencies.
Instead, the complaint was relayed to the Justice Department’s Criminal Division in late August as a possible violation of campaign finance laws. After reviewing the matter for several weeks, Justice Department officials concluded the law had not been broken and closed the matter without ever opening a formal investigation.