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The Trump-Zelensky Phone Call: Key Takeaways From Two New Documents

A reconstructed transcript showed President Trump pressing Ukraine to investigate the Bidens, and a Justice Department memo added new details about a whistle-blower’s concerns.

Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, addressing the United Nations General Assembly on Wednesday.Credit...Brittainy Newman/The New York Times

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration on Wednesday released a reconstructed transcript of President Trump’s 30-minute conversation with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine on July 25 that was at least in part the focus of a disputed whistle-blower complaint.

Separately, the Justice Department released a revised version of a memo by its Office of Legal Counsel that declared that it was lawful to withhold that complaint from Congress, notwithstanding an inspector general’s determination that the complaint was credible and raised an “urgent concern” of the sort that a statute says must be shown to lawmakers.

Both documents should be treated with caution. A footnote in the five-page reconstructed transcript says it is not verbatim, and its text contains ellipses.

Similarly, a footnote in the Office of Legal Counsel memo says it is a rewritten version and that “we have changed the prior version to avoid references to certain details that remain classified.” Notably, the revised memo talks only about a single phone call, but the inspector general told Congress the whistle-blower’s complaint concerned more than one action.

The President: “The other thing. There’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the Attorney General would be great. Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution so if you can look into it … It sounds horrible to me.”

In this passage of the reconstructed call transcript, Mr. Trump pushed the new Ukrainian president to get his country’s prosecutor to open an investigation into former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his younger son, Hunter Biden. In May, Ukraine’s top prosecutor had said there was no evidence of wrongdoing by the Bidens to investigate.

When he was vice president, Mr. Biden had pushed the Ukrainian government in 2015 to fire its top prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, who was widely seen as an obstacle to reform because he failed to bring corruption cases. At the time, Hunter Biden sat on the board of a Ukrainian energy company, Burisma Holdings, that was the subject of an investigation that Mr. Shokin’s office had long left dormant.

In 2018, the former vice president talked about his effort to get Mr. Shokin removed — carrying out the Obama administration’s policy — at a Council on Foreign Relations event, and Mr. Trump’s supporters have used a brief video clip from those remarks as part of their insinuations that Mr. Biden was trying to protect Burisma Holdings from prosecution. Mr. Biden did not portray his effort to get Mr. Shokin out as stopping any prosecution of Burisma Holdings.

The President: “I will say that we do a lot for Ukraine. We spend a lot of effort and a lot of time.”

At the time of this call, Mr. Trump was holding back hundreds of millions of dollars in military assistance to Ukraine that Congress had appropriated to help that country fend off Russian aggression. The reconstructed transcript does not directly refer to Mr. Trump’s freezing of the aid or whether he would unfreeze it. However, it says Mr. Trump referred to large-scale American assistance to Ukraine in the above passage, and several sentences later, Mr. Trump added:

The President: … “but the United States has been very, very good to Ukraine. I wouldn’t say that it’s reciprocal, necessarily, because things are happening that are not good. But the United States has been very very good to Ukraine.”

The next thing Mr. Trump did — after Mr. Zelensky responded to this statement by thanking Mr. Trump for his support “in the area of defense” and saying Ukraine was “ready to continue to cooperate for the next steps,” such as by buying American missiles — was to ask for investigations as a “favor.”

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President Trump asked Mr. Zelensky to investigate former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.Credit...Mark Makela for The New York Times

President Zelensky: “Since we have won the absolute majority in our Parliament the next prosecutor general will be 100% my person, my candidate who will be approved by the parliament and will start as a new prosecutor in September. He or she will look into the situation, specifically to the company that you mentioned in this issue. The issue of the investigation of the case is actually the issue of making sure to restore the honesty we will take care of that and will work on the investigation of the case. On top of that, I would kindly ask you if you have any additional information that you can provide to us, it would be very helpful for the investigation to make sure that we administer justice in our country.”

In May, Ukraine’s top prosecutor at the time had said there was no evidence of wrongdoing by the Bidens for him to investigate. In this passage, Mr. Zelensky promises to do what Mr. Trump is asking — launch an investigation into the Bidens — but also asks Mr. Trump if he can provide any information for Ukrainian investigators to look at.

The complainant alleged that unnamed “White House officials” had expressed concern about the content of a telephone call between the President and a foreign leader. According to the ICIG, statements made by the President during the call could be viewed as soliciting a foreign campaign contribution in violation of the campaign-finance laws.

This quote comes from the Office of Legal Counsel memo, written by the office’s head, Steven A. Engel, about the still-secret whistle-blower complaint. It shows that one aspect of the complaint is the allegation that Mr. Trump may have violated a law that prohibits the solicitation of an illegal foreign campaign contribution, which can be a “thing of value” as well as funds.

The Justice Department memo also said:

The ICIG further noted that alleged misconduct by a senior U.S. official to seek foreign assistance to interfere in or influence a federal election could potentially expose the official to serious national security and counterintelligence risks.

While the memo does not specify the details of the counterintelligence concern, the suggestion is that if a foreign leader knew that Mr. Trump had broken a law, he would have leverage over the American president because he could threaten to expose the misconduct.

Although the ICIG’s preliminary review found “some indicia of an arguable political bias on the part of the Complainant in favor of a rival political candidate,” the ICIG concluded that the complaint’s allegations nonetheless appeared credible.

Steven Engel’s memo stresses that the whistle-blower “received secondhand” the information about Mr. Trump’s “confidential diplomatic communication.” (As noted, the complaint apparently refers to more events than just this phone call.) It also notes that the inspector general — Michael Atkinson, an appointee of Mr. Trump’s — noted something that suggested that the whistle-blower did not support the re-election of Mr. Trump. Nevertheless, Mr. Atkinson found the allegations credible.

The President: “I would like you to do us a favor though because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it. I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation in Ukraine, they say Crowdstrike … I guess you have one of your wealthy people … The server, they say Ukraine has it. There are a lot of things that went on, the whole situation. I think you’re surrounding yourself with some of the same people. I would like to have the Attorney General call you or your people and I would like you to get to the bottom of it. As you saw yesterday, that whole nonsense ended with a very poor performance by a man named Robert Mueller, an incompetent performance, but they say a lot of it started with Ukraine. Whatever you can do it’s very important that you do it if that’s possible.”

In this portion of the reconstructed transcript, Mr. Trump appears to be referring to an unsubstantiated conspiracy theory pushed by Rudolph W. Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, that Ukraine had some involvement in the emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee.

Mr. Giuliani said in a previously unpublished portion of an interview with The New York Times in April that he was in touch with people “who said that the Ukrainians were the ones who did the hacking,” then participated in an effort to blame the Russian government and link it to the Trump campaign.

The special counsel’s report, which Mr. Trump disparages here, made clear that Russian military officers hacked the committee’s mail server. There is no evidence that the Ukrainians were involved. But in May, Attorney General William P. Barr began his own investigation into the Russia investigation and its origins.

Kenneth P. Vogel contributed reporting.

Charlie Savage is a Washington-based national security and legal policy correspondent. A recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, he previously worked at The Boston Globe and The Miami Herald. His most recent book is “Power Wars: The Relentless Rise of Presidential Authority and Secrecy.” More about Charlie Savage

Adam Goldman reports on the F.B.I. from Washington and is a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner. More about Adam Goldman

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