In his efforts to wave a big “nothing to see here” sign at his still-exploding Ukraine scandal, Donald Trump has promised a “full transcript” of his July call to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. And apparently that transcript already has the blessing of one Rudy Giuliani, though why he was allowed to get a sneak peek at it isn’t at all clear. In any case, despite its being certified good by Giuliani, there’s no reason to believe that the “transcript” is a transcript, and every reason to believe that Trump would alter what’s provided to Congress in order to cover up his own mistakes, exaggerations, lies, and outright crimes.
Trump ended the practice of preannouncing calls between the White House and foreign leaders in 2017. In 2018, he ended the tradition of producing readouts of these calls—a tradition he’d already been skipping on most occasions. Those readouts were never intended as full transcripts. In general, they were simply lists of topics discussed, with the occasional extended quote and some evidence of the tenor of the call. Some were more complete than others, but rarely were they anything that might be represented as a transcript.
In the case of Trump’s call to Zelensky, there is absolutely no reason to trust anything that Trump puts forward as a transcript. In fact, there are many reasons not to trust the document as offered. The biggest reason is that, as Reuters reports, no one made a transcript in the first place. No one is apparently pulling up a recording. No one was taking shorthand on the day. What’s being handed over is supposedly produced by stitching together “written notes by U.S. officials who listen in.”
How likely is it that those written notes include “Trump threatens Zelensky” even once, much less the roughly eight times noted by sources who have already spoken with the media? Trump is already out there tweeting, “Will the Democrats apologize after seeing what was said on the call with the Ukrainian President?” And he probably has a good reason to be confident about his “transcript.”
Trump has called this a “complete, fully declassified and unredacted transcript” of the conversation. But it’s not complete. It’s not unredacted. It’s not even a transcript—it’s the text version of a black sharpie, drawing a line right through the Constitution.
How incredibly nonfactual could this “transcript” be? In his Wednesday morning appearance on Fox, Rudy Giuliani actually claimed that it was Zelensky who wanted to investigate Biden. The SharpieScript may not support that position, but it’s a cinch it’s going to be written to tone down anything Trump said that’s the least bit off. It doesn’t even take looking at weather maps to find examples of Trump editing the truth to his liking. A better one comes from October of 2018, when the White House released an edited transcript in which Trump’s words were deliberately changed to paper over an insult he made to a reporter. Not even the transcripts being handed out by the White House in the last two days have proven to be accurate.
And if those instances seem minor, this one mentioned in The Atlantic was anything but. An exchange at the Helsinki meeting between Trump and Vladimir Putin in which the Russian leader confirmed that he wanted Trump to win—and possibly that he helped that occur—was not just missing from the Kremlin transcript of the event, but so mangled in the U.S. version as to obscure its meaning.
The White House is going to turn over something. It is going to call it a transcript. But what it will be is a Frankenstein-document, stitched together from the notes of those willing to hand over their notes, and glued together by Trump’s own “recollections” of the event. It will not condemn Trump, because that would require Trump to condemn Trump. In fact, it would be completely unsurprising to find that the call was filled with Zelensky praising Trump, talking about how super the U.S. economy has become, and insisting that he investigate that rascal Joe Biden.
Because it’s not a transcript. But it could be the next count in the obstruction charges against Donald Trump.