Turns out Donald Trump’s Ukraine phone call was even worse than we were led to believe
Between the whistleblower complaint and the summary that have been publicly released, it’s already clear that Donald Trump’s phone to the President of Ukraine was one of the most egregious crimes ever committed against the United States. Extortion, conspiracy against the United States, election tampering – you name it, Trump did it. Now it turns out the whole thing is even worse than we were led to believe.
Just how ugly was it? The whistleblower didn’t just file the formal complaint that we’ve all seen. He also wrote a memo immediately after the incident, which is a commonplace way for U.S. intel personnel to contemporaneously document improper things they’ve witnessed (James Comey famously did this after Donald Trump asked him to break the law). Now the details of the whistleblower’s memo are surfacing.
Trump keeps insisting that the whistleblower’s testimony is worthless because it’s not first-hand. But the whistleblower did hear directly from the people who did have first-hand information. One of the whistleblower’s sources said that Donald Trump’s Ukraine phone call was “crazy” and “frightening” according to ABC News – which suggests that the call was far worse than the (likely sanitized) summary that the White House released.
Interestingly, this same ABC News report reveals that the whistleblower did in fact provide some first-hand information of his own, in addition to what he got from others. Of course this all comes even as a second whistleblower has come forward with entirely first-hand information. This is all unfolding quickly now.
