Tag: Ukraine phone call

Here’s the scariest thing Trump said on the Ukraine call

AlterNet logoAfter I learned that there was a whistleblower report pertaining to the president, I naturally wanted to know more. I became especially curious when I realized that it centered around a phone call Trump had in July with the president of Ukraine. When I finally saw a partially redacted transcript of the call, there were many things that caught my attention but only one thing that genuinely surprised me.

President Trump’s words about Marie L. Yovanovitch, his former ambassador to Ukraine, were ominous. In a telephone conversation that has set off a political crisis for Mr. Trump, he told Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, that she was “bad news.”

“She’s going to go through some things,” he added.

Those words—”she’s going to go through some things”—were what I’d expect to hear on the surreptitiously recorded conversations of an old school mob boss. The brash John Gotti might have said he had someone “whacked,” but the more traditional godfathers would just say, “you won’t hear from him again.”

View the complete September 27 article by Martin Longman from The Washington Monthly on the AlterNet website here.

Whistleblower describes White House trying to cover up Ukraine phone call

Official says complaint based on conversations with ‘more than half a dozen U.S. officials’ who had direct knowledge

An intelligence community whistleblower raised alarms that President Donald Trump used his office to pressure a foreign government to influence the 2020 U.S. election and his staff orchestrated a cover-up to keep details of a phone call with Ukraine’s president off normal channels.

The whistleblower’s nine-page complaint, released by the House Intelligence Committee on Thursday, describes White House officials intervening to “lock down” all records of  the president’s July 25 telephone conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy. In a sign of aides’ potential concerns — concerns Trump tried to brush aside by describing the call as “beautiful” and “perfect” — the records were moved to a system used for classified materials even though they “did not contain anything remotely sensitive,” the complaint says.

The intelligence official wrote to a top government inspector general about being “deeply concerned” that the president’s conversation with Zelenskiy amounted to “a serious or flagrant problem, abuse, or violation of law or executive order.” The official used wording directly from the United States criminal code to raise concerns about the commander in chief’s conduct.

View the complete September 26 article by John T. Bennett on The Roll Call website here.