New testimony raises questions about the White House “transcript” of Trump’s phone call with Ukraine’s president

New testimony in the House of Representatives’ impeachment inquiry has raised further questions about the accuracy of a White House document summarizing the controversial July call between President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

During Tuesday’s closed-door testimony, NSC aide Alexander Vindman said that the call summary document left out important words and phrases — and that he tried internally to correct it, but some of his proposed changes were never made, according to the New York Times.

The document itself — released by the White House in September — is quite damning as it is. It reveals that, after a discussion of US military aid for Ukraine, Trump quickly asked Zelensky for “a favor.” Trump urged Zelensky to investigate both a conspiracy theory about the DNC email hacking of 2016 and the Biden family’s involvement in Ukraine. Trump told Zelensky to get in touch with Attorney General Bill Barr and his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani on these matters.

But Trump has falsely claimed this document provides an “exact word-for-word transcript” of his call. In fact, the first page contains a disclaimer that it “is not a verbatim transcript of a discussion.” Rather, it “records the notes and recollections” of officials listening to and memorializing the call.

There were some unusual features of the document. It included three incidents of ellipses that seemed to omit what was said, all while Trump was speaking about those investigations. (An anonymous White House official claimed they notated “a trailing off or a pause,” not “missing words or phrases.”) Additionally, the conversation seemed rather short for the length of the call (it lasted 30 minutes).

The anonymous whistleblower who kicked off this whole saga also claimed the White House handled the records of the phone call in an unusual way — that there was an effort to “lock” them “down” by moving them to a computer system used for highly sensitive national security information.

Now, the Times reports that Vindman testified there were at least two parts of the conversation that weren’t properly captured in the document.

1) In the below section marked with an ellipsis, Trump claimed there were recordings or tapes of Joe Biden discussing corruption in Ukraine. It is unclear what he meant by that.

2) President Zelensky mentioned the gas company that Hunter Biden sat on the board of — Burisma — by name. (The document says he referred just to “the company that you mentioned.”)

How important are these discrepancies? It’s not really clear, at this point. There are some indications that Vindman didn’t think they were all that important — for instance, he said in his opening statement that since the “transcript” of the call is “in the public record, we are all aware of what was said.” That would imply that he doesn’t think crucial information about what happened on the call remains unknown to the public.

Still, Vindman’s claim that Trump referred to recordings or tapes of Biden certainly raises an eyebrow. The Times interprets this as “an apparent reference” to video of a public event from 2018 at which Biden told the story of how he pressured Ukraine to fire a corrupt prosecutor general. Trump and Giuliani have publicly claimed this tape proves Biden pushed out the prosecutor to protect his son and Burisma from investigation, but in fact the tape proves nothing of the kind (Hunter and Burisma are never mentioned).

It is also possible, though, that Trump is referring to other tapes — perhaps some that are part of the information Giuliani has been gathering. If that’s the case, this would be some new and relevant information that was omitted from the call summary.

Overall, Vindman’s testimony adds to the questions of how, exactly, this document was handled — and whether the White House was improperly trying to cover up what happened between Trump and Zelensky.