Impeachment Is Governing

The Whistleblower complaint

Last week, we learned that a Whistleblower had made a complaint against President Trump that involved a call with a foreign leader. But although House Democrats continued to ask to see the complaint, the White House wouldn’t release a copy of it.
On Wednesday, the administration did provide a rough transcript of the phone call Trump had on July 25 with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, which only raised more questions and caused Speaker nancy Pelosito announce Tuesday that the House would launch an impeachment inquiry into Trump’s presidency.
Then on Thursday morning, an unclassified but partially redacted version of the whistleblower’s complaint was made public.
Andrew Prokop, Vox senior political correspondent, returned to Today, Explained for the fourth day in a row to explain what’s inside the complaint.
“In addition to describing what happened on the now-infamous July 25th phone call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, the Whistleblower also describes an alleged white house effort to cover up or hide documents related to what happened on that call,” Prokop told host Sean Rameswaram.
“The second big takeaway is that the whistleblower really makes clear that this is not just about what happened on one phone call. He or she chronicles a series of events that took place over months involving Trump that tell a story of a concerted, continuous pressure campaign on the Ukrainian government to start these investigations that would help Trump politically.”
The Whistleblower report alleges that multiple US officials said that “Ukrainian leadership was led to believe that a meeting or phone call between the president and President Zelensky would depend on whether Zelensky showed [a] willingness to play ball on those investigative issues,” Prokop added.
A main question at this point is whether or not Trump was using Ukraine’s $400 million in military aid — which he’d ordered Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney to suspend — as a bargaining chip when telling Zelensky “I would like you to do us a favor” during the July 25 call.
A second question is whether White House officials were specifically told to remove the electronic transcript of the call in question and, even more importantly, whether records of the president’s calls had been hidden other times in the past.
Prokop broke down the report, its allegations, and what it might mean for the Trump administration on this episode of Today, Explained. Below, we’ve shared a lightly edited transcript of his conversation with host Sean Rameswaram.