The White House-released “transcript” of Donald Trump’s phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is not a transcript in the sense the word is usually understood, or actually defined in the English language. We know that a true transcript must exist, based on general White House procedures and the whistleblower complaint’s reference to an “official word-for-word transcript” (which was “locked down” by officials who knew it was problematic), but this is not it. Yes, even despite Trump’s claim, “This is an exact word-for-word transcript of the conversation, taken by very talented stenographers.” So … what exactly is this "transcript"?
It’s marked “MEMORANDUM OF TELEPHONE CONVERSATION,” which is also not a transcript. And at the bottom of the first page, it says “Caution: A Memorandum of a Telephone Conversation is not a verbatim transcript of a discussion.” But even for that, The Washington Post notes, the document leaves questions. It’s missing a tracking number one would expect to see on an official document that had been treated in the normal way for a record of such a call.
Then there’s the question of what content is missing. A Post comparison to actual transcripts of two other calls between Trump and world leaders finds that this memorandum “includes about half the number of words that would be expected if the call had proceeded at the same or similar pace as the previous calls.” Interpreters might have slowed things down, but it’s awfully interesting.
Questions are also raised about the length of the memorandum versus the length of the call by the repeated use of ellipses, which are often used to show that something has been omitted. Last week, a White House official insisted that the ellipses in this document show not omissions but “a trailing off of a voice or pause.” While that’s another legitimate use of ellipses, the Post reports that the punctuation has not been used that way in other such White House documents. There are no ellipses in either of the actual call transcripts used for comparison, and officials said that standard practice when voices trail off would be to use “[inaudible]” or dashes.
And these ellipses don’t come at random moments. There are three sets of ellipses in the document. Two come during Trump’s veer into conspiracy theories, looking to shift blame for interference in the 2016 elections away from Russia, when he said, “I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say Crowdstrike... I guess you have one of your wealthy people... The server, they say Ukraine has it.” The third comes when Trump is asking Zelensky to dig for dirt on former Vice President Joe Biden, and says, “Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution so if you can look into it... It sounds horrible to me.” In other words, at the two crucial moments in the call, the impeachable moments, when Trump is leaning on Zelensky, saying, “I would like you to do us a favor though” and outlining what that favor entails, there’s punctuation suggesting something has been omitted.
It’s no bombshell to point out that when Donald Trump, pathological liar, says something like, “This is an exact word-for-word transcript of the conversation, taken by very talented stenographers,” he’s lying. But since we’re quite sure that such an exact word-for-word transcript of the conversation does exist, and this is not it, it’s a very interesting question: What did the White House deem too explosive to include in a summary that already includes such an overt quid pro quo?