The U.S. House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence on Thursday, September 26, released a declassified version of the whistleblower complaint containing allegations about U.S. President Donald Trump's conduct during a phone call with President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky on July 25, 2019.
"This complaint should never have been withheld from Congress. It exposed serious wrongdoing, and was found both urgent and credible by the Inspector General," Chairman Adam Schiff (D-CA) said, according to the Ukrainian-registered news outlet European Pravda. "This complaint is a roadmap for our investigation, and provides significant information for the Committee to follow up on with other witnesses and documents. And it is corroborated by the call record released yesterday [September 25]."
According to CNBC, the nine-page document details an "urgent concern" that the president is "using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S. election." It not only details Trump's July 25 call with Ukraine's president during which he asked his counterpart to investigate the Biden family, but also alleges administration efforts to "lock down" records of the conversation.
"There was already a 'discussion ongoing' with White House lawyers about how to treat the call because of the likelihood, in the officials' retelling, that they had witnessed the President abuse his office for personal gain," the whistleblower said in the complaint.
Read alsoWhite House publishes transcript of July 25 phone call between Trump and Zelensky (Text)
Prior to the release of the complaint, the White House published a redacted version of the memorandum of the July 25 telephone conversation between Trump and Zelensky, which became the cause behind a formal impeachment inquiry vis-à-vis Trump.
According to the memorandum, Trump repeatedly asked Zelensky to "look into" the situation regarding a probe into former U.S. Vice President Joe Biden's son, Hunter Biden, in Ukraine.
