Vice President Mike Pence may have stated that he doesn't object to the public release of his phone calls with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, but the White House obviously doesn't agree. The issue is "still being reviewed by White House lawyers," according to NBC News.
The Pence-Zelensky call that appears to have taken center stage took place in September, about a week after the $400 million in military aid had finally been released to Ukraine. It turns out the White House and Donald Trump's allies have a lot of concerns about releasing a rough transcript of the call, and they can all be boiled down to just one hyphenated word: cover-up.
Some worry that Pence's call may actually make Trump's call with Zelensky look criminal by comparison. Some say inviting any more scrutiny at all of Trump administration communications with Ukraine could be problematic. Some are supposedly concerned about setting new precedents around the release of high-level calls altogether. And then there's the question of whether the call notes would prove exculpatory or not, since the White House already screwed the pooch pretty badly on releasing Trump's call.
The internal debate may also come down to a tale of two camps: Trump vs. Pence. NBC reports that some Pence allies are arguing for releasing anything that might "clear Pence's name." Again, not a given since Pence is up to his eyebrows in this scandal. But even if clearing Pence's name was possible so that he could, for instance, take over in the event of Trump's removal, that's not exactly a big selling point for Team Trump.
Whatever the delay in releasing those rough transcripts, it's not a debate over transparency, folks. Rather, it's a calculation over whether the call notes will sink the Trump administration even further into the hole they have managed to dig for themselves.