President Trump has a new refrain that he seems to think proves his innocence on any questions about his interactions with Ukraine. “Read the transcript!” he says to reporters, to people at his rallies and to his Twitter followers. Look at what Trump himself said in that July 25 call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, and you’ll know that everything is on the up-and-up.
Setting aside the immediate problem with that request — namely, that the transcript is an incomplete approximation of the call — Trump’s suggestion suffers from another problem, too. Taking the rough transcript by itself removes all of the context that surrounds the call, what Zelensky knew coming into the conversation and what Trump and his team had been doing to force Zelensky to launch new investigations that could be politically useful to the president. Saying “read the transcript” is a bit like asking people to judge Watergate by reading the arrest report from the hotel break-in.
Particularly because there’s one little-noticed effort to pressure Zelensky sitting just outside the boundaries of that call, an effort that relates directly to what Zelensky offered and that occurred immediately before the call took place.
View the complete November 6 article by Philip Bump on The Washington Post website here.