Former President Donald Trump told an entirely fictional story on Saturday about how he had supposedly outwitted his Democratic opponents by releasing “the tape” of the 2019 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that was a key factor in Trump’s first impeachment.
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Facts First: Trump’s story is a complete fabrication. No tape of his call with Zelensky was ever released; Pelosi could not possibly have been angry with her allies after hearing a tape of the call because she has never heard a tape of the call. In fact, as of nearly five years after the July 2019 call, there is no known US recording of the conversation. What Trump’s White House actually released in September 2019 was a rough written transcript of the call — which corroborated, rather than contradicted, a government whistleblower’s central allegations about what Trump had said. Pelosi spokesperson Aaron Bennett said Sunday that Trump’s story is “fact-free nonsense.”
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Former President Donald Trump told an entirely fictional story on Saturday about how he had supposedly outwitted his Democratic opponents by releasing “the tape” of the 2019 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that was a key factor in Trump’s first impeachment.
Trump claimed that Pelosi was told, “Let’s just pretend he did and keep going forward.” He continued, “After they made up the story and then after that they heard the tape, they died.
Retired Army Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, who was one of the officials listening to Trump’s call with Zelensky in his role at the time as the top Ukraine expert for the White House’s National Security Council (and who later became an important witness in the impeachment inquiry), told CNN in a text message on Sunday that there is “no recording” of the call.
But that Trump claim never made any sense, either — because, in reality, he released the rough transcript before Schiff gave his exaggerated rendition of it at a congressional hearing.
In Trump’s 2019 versions of the story, he claimed that Pelosi had been dismayed with her allies after she read the rough transcript, not after she listened to “the tape.” But there was no basis even for that claim; after the rough transcript was released, Pelosi issued a scathing statement accusing Trump of “lawlessness” and attempting “to shake down other countries for the benefit of his campaign.” A Pelosi spokesperson told CNN in 2019 that Trump’s account of her supposed thoughts was “complete fiction.”
He told the “tape” version of the story while again bashing Schiff, who is now running for a US Senate seat in California.
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